You've probably heard about content marketing as it became more mainstream in the internet marketing and SEO marketing in recent years. Everyone is saying content is king, but you're still not really sure exactly what content marketing is and how it can help your business.
In SEO, every few years there seems to be a new trend or tactic to rank in Google. Don't get these trends confused with content marketing because content marketing is the future-proof way of doing search engine optimization right that will always work.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is creating and distributing non-promotional content on your site that is helpful to your industry. It generates more traffic to funnel through your website to retain customers and gain leads.
If you ask Google 'what is content marketing' it will return this rich snippet from Wikipedia to answer your question:
Why you need to do content marketing?
There are a lot of reasons to do content marketing, but there are a few that really stand out for most businesses. These are the organizational goals for content marketing, with brand awareness being the main goal.
Also, your competitors are doing it, so you have to. And if they aren't, then you need to get ahead before you get left behind.
Great content that helps others will be shared both socially and mentioned on other sites through backlinks. This is where the effects of SEO services comes in as these signals show Google that you have more authority, are an expert in your industry, and in return they should rank you higher for terms relevant to the content being shared. It has changed the concept of link building to link earning.
The more content your site has, the more keywords it will rank for in Google and other search engines. Google can only rank you for keywords that are on your site, so if you aren't blogging or only have a few pages on your website then you are missing out on acquiring a lot more traffic.
Also, when you create blog posts like how-to's or use titles that have long-tail keywords, then you can rank a lot easier for long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is taking your main keyword and then adding relevant phrases onto it that are more specific and get searched for. For example, if you were trying to rank for content marketing that may be difficult right off the bat. But if you write a post on how to do content marketing, or what is content marketing, then you may start to rank for those long-tail keywords.
When those blog posts start to rank for those long-tails and you start getting organic traffic from search engines, then you add internal links to your products or services that funnels that traffic into conversions for your business. That is really the end goal and what it's all about.
But content marketing can be expensive and time consuming
Have you ever heard the saying, "You have to spend money to make money"?
It's true. But you should also be smart about what you are spending so that you don't throw your money away.
Sure, creating high-quality infographics, writing guest posts on industry relevant sites, blogging regularly, and paying to promote your content through outreach and paid syndication tools like Outbrain, Taboola, and StumbleUpon can start to add up. But it's in the results, ROI and long-term effect of content marketing that deem it worthy of all the time and money spent.
When you see your traffic start to climb, rankings increase over time, phones ring more, and you gain more leads and sales then you will realize it's an effective strategy and worth the money.
Sometimes you can see these results almost instantly when campaigns go viral, and sometimes you just see a steady increase in traffic, rankings, and the depth of keywords that are gaining you traffic...which is a good thing.
So don't take our word for this. Let's let these statistics speak for themselves.
Content Marketing Statistics
- About 86% of B2B marketers use content marketing for their business. The other 14% were too busy filing for bankruptcy. This just shows that if you really want to make it online that content marketing is no longer an option...it's a must.
- The average marketer uses about 13 different content marketing types. with the top 6 being social media, eNewsletters, articles on your site, blogs, in-person events, case studies, and videos. The rest are as follows:
- When you gain trust from a customer through your content, they are 6 times more likely to buy from you than if they didn't find you through your content and start to trust your brand.
- B2B companies that blog regularly with resourceful and unique content generate about 67% more leads per month than those who don't blog at all. Blogging can also increase your website traffic by 55%.
- You shouldn't have one-and-done content marketing campaigns. Content should be a continuous strategy for your brand. About 60% of marketers publish at least one type of content every week.
- 82% of marketers that blog see a good return on their investment for inbound marketing.
- In terms of content marketing on social media platforms, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn the most often, followed by Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn is also rated to be the most effective by those marketers, followed by Twitter and Youtube.
- Lastly, 55% of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget in 2015. This is compared to 2% of respondents saying they plan to decrease their content marketing spend in 2015.
So it is pretty evident that content marketing is what you need to invest your time and money in moving forward. If you follow all the rules like producing unique and quality content and have a natural link portfolio, then you don't have to worry about getting penalized by any Google algorithm.
There's no better way than to just dive right into content marketing. Blogging is the simplest and one of the most effective ways to do content marketing, so get started today and you will learn as you go. Or look into hiring a an SEO company to do all the keyword research, content planning, blogging, infographic creations, guest blogging, outreach, paid promotions, so that you can spend more time on your business.
