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In today’s increasingly digital and competitive world, an established online presence is no longer just a nice-to-have feature for your business — it is an essential factor that can help you stay relevant and potentially thrive in your industry.

One of the critical elements in building your brand awareness, improving sales conversions, and ensuring the overall success of your digital marketing efforts is effective content marketing. There are various types of content that you can use for your strategy, including blogs, white papers, videos, podcasts, and social media posts.

Also Read: Content Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide

In this article, we list six reasons why you should start your content marketing and how it can add value to your business.

Boost Awareness

Typically, nobody knows who you are and what you stand for unless you tell them. By creating uniqueand insightful content regularly and sharing them on various platforms, you will be able to build brand awareness and trust with consumers in the online space. Importantly, content should be reliable and valuable to your clients. By distributing your content on your website, social media accounts, and other relevant platforms, you will be able to reach more people.

Improve Search Engine Ranking

Everyone wants to top the search engine results to get the most traffic and establish credibility. However, with constantly changing algorithms, this is easier said than done.

While various factors can make your website more SEO-friendly, content has always been a massive part of any SEO strategy. For instance, when blogging, you can craft your post such that keywords are integrated naturally throughout the article — in the headings, subheadings, body, and even image captions —to make it more credible to algorithms.

Websites that maintain a blog have an average of 434% more pages indexed by search engines compared to those who don’t have one. This means that these websites have more chances to land on the first page of the organic search results, provided the content is high quality, relevant, and follows SEO best practices.

Additionally, search engines generally love fresh and original content. So, by publishing a constant stream of new and valuable content, chances are, you will be able to push your website’s ranking higher in the search results.

Establish Your Brand Authority

With all the fake news and inaccurate content circulating on the internet, consistently informative and industry-relevant content that adds value to your target consumers can go a long way in winning their trust and confidence. When you show your expertise by sharing your knowledge and solutions for their common pain points, you will be regarded as a go-to source on which they can rely. The more they see you as an industry expert, the more likely they are to buy your product or services.

Reach New Consumers

A thought-through content strategy can help you reach potential customers and keep them on your site. Aside from creating useful content that focuses on addressing the needs and concerns of your target market and providing answers to their core questions, many brands also target new audiences by using a social media influencer.

This strategy is worth trying as 65% of consumers discover a new brand or product through a social media influencer at least once a week. You don’t necessarily have to hire expensive influencers with millions of followers — you can also go for micro-influencers with several thousand followers to witness the difference it can bring to your business.

Enhance Sales Conversions

When you provide consumers with content that is relevant and interesting, they will tend to stay longer on your website, and there will be a higher chance of converting them into actual sales. Also, they will most likely return to your website and continue their engagement with your brand.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of online consumers in the United States decide to purchase after reading recommendations from a blog. HubSpot also found that inbound marketers managed to double the average website conversion rate from 6% to 12% partly with the help of their content marketing efforts. In a separate survey conducted by Curata, 74% of companies have experienced an improvement in the quality and quantity of their leads by doing content marketing.

Affordable, Yet Effective

Compared to traditional marketing efforts, content marketing is cheaper by 62%. Despite this, it can generate three times more leads. There are several free platforms that you can use to post your content, as well as tools that you can use to design visual content such as Canva and Adobe Spark. Although the free services and apps have some limitations, they are a good start if you want to start with content marketing.

Content Marketing as A Long-Term Investment

Not because you started creating content, you will instantly see the improvements in your business. Even with an effective content strategy, it may take several months to see the effects. Nevertheless, the positive results will last for the long term, so it is essential to be patient and don’t be discouraged. If you need help establishing a plan that is suitable to your business, or simply to have a chat, feel free to get in touch.