Content is the backbone of digital marketing. It’s one of the main ways to engage with your audience and is becoming a key focus with many businesses, especially following Google’s content update in 2022.
Businesses who are using quality content to market themselves are gaining the upper hand. So why has the importance of content marketing become so prevalent in the digital marketing sphere? Read on to find out more.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the creation of a unique and informative resource, which helps and inspires your customers. Content isn’t just about words. Great content can take many forms including high quality video, interactive media, informative infographics, blogs, and so much more. High quality content helps tell your brand story and more importantly, provides relevant information for your audience.
Why is content marketing becoming so important?
In August 2022, Google began the roll out of what it calls its ‘helpful content update’. This update saw users being provided with more original, helpful content that’s written by humans, for humans in search results. The aim of the update is to put a focus on people-first content, meaning content that serves a purpose, is relevant and gives users the information they want, will perform better in search engines.
This update has meant websites that have poor content (even on just one page) and don’t meet Google’s requirements, will more than likely not show up in search results, therefore impacting their overall organic traffic performance.
So creating content that’s useful, has a purpose and can provide expertise for your audience has never been so important for businesses.
What are the benefits of content marketing?
There are huge benefits to creating quality content marketing, but below are a few benefits almost all companies and users can expect.
Increased site traffic
Many organisations adopt a SEO strategy to increase the amount of visitors to their site, and content marketing is a very powerful tactic to generate traffic to your website. The more relevant and rich content you create, the more searches your site will appear for. Content provides targeted audiences with relevant information that can provide a solution to a particular need or problem. The more highly targeted content you surface, the higher the amount of traffic to your website.
Knowledge and expertise
Content marketing is a great way to promote your capability and unique selling proposition. You can do this through educating your audience on common practice and addressing common questions and issues that are relevant, and this will be particularly favoured by Google. Therefore, if your site is fully optimised with relevant information and calls to action, once a visitor comes to your site and engages with your content they will be more likely to turn into a highly qualified lead.
Increased leads and sales
This leads us nicely onto our next benefit. Adopting an effective content marketing strategy can generate more leads than those who do not have a content rich website and blog. The more the user understands the benefits of your product or service and the more you educate your audience, the more likely they are to become a paying customer.
Build brand awareness through engagement
Audience engagement with your content is what powers this strategy. Therefore, quality and significance are vital here. Any content you publish is a reflection of your business and its brand. Content is a great way to build upon your brand and get key messages across to your audience. Videos can be a powerful way to communicate and engage with a large audience.
Generate quality links
Generating high-quality, valuable backlinks to your website can improve your page and domain authority. So, when users link to your content, it can earn a certain degree of authority and is great for an SEO boost. Your content can be used as a link resource to aid you with your link building efforts, which will also help you to compete in online search results.
We can help with your content marketing strategy
With all of the above benefits, it’s easy to see why content marketing is so important. Creating a solid content strategy is imperative to the success of your website, because not only will it establish your company as a leading expert within the industry, it will also complement your existing marketing strategy.
If you need help devising your content marketing strategy, speak to us today and see how we can help. From copywriting to video creation, we can help.