Sales Driven Marketing Hub

If you own a small business or have dabbled at all in marketing, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about content marketing.

Not only is this form of marketing highly popular, it’s also highly effective.

While it may not make much sense at first, when you take a step back and look at how content marketing works throughout the buyer’s journey, you’ll begin to see how this type of marketing keeps people interested and engaged with your business. 

Here are four benefits of content marketing that may make you see it in a different light.

1. It Builds Trust

Think of the friend you go to when you have a question or need advice. When you first started interacting with this person, you began to realize that every time you needed something s/he was there for you. Over time, you began to trust that friend more and more.

Content marketing operates in much the same way. The whole point is to offer value to others—so much so that they start coming to you more and more frequently for more and more information.

You eventually become a trusted advisor that helps them solve their business problems; you’re someone they can come to in order to learn more about a specific industry best practice or to get the answer to a frequently asked question.

2. It Saves You Money

This type of marketing can also save you money because it increases your organic ranking and therefore organic traffic, meaning you’ll be able to decrease your paid advertising spend.

As we’ve covered before, you should have a mix of owned, earned and paid media. The more you increase traffic from owned and earned channels, the less you can spend on paid media.

3. It Weeds Out Uninterested Buyers (Which Your Sales Team Will Love!)

People will only take the time to read your content if they’re truly interested in what you have to say (i.e. you’re providing pertinent information about your industry and/or are sharing tips that can help them improve their business and/or life). 

Content will help you know who’s interested and who’s not. Those with an actual interest will keep coming back, consuming content and downloading your gated assets. This will help salespeople know what type of product and/or service a particular lead is most interested in, as well as what they already know about that product/service and your company.

4. It Will Help You Become an Industry Thought Leader

The more valuable pieces of content you put out there, the more people will be exposed to it. This will build your audience as well as your credibility in the industry.

Eventually you could amass a bigger and bigger following and have people coming to you for industry advice, tips for their own blog posts, and more! 

Conclusion

Content marketing has more benefits than just improving your SEO. It can help you reach people you hadn’t been able to before, build trust with your readers, save you money on paid advertising, weed out uninterested buyers, and allow you to become an industry thought leader.

Why wouldn’t you try your hand at it?