Understanding the benefits of content marketing

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Understanding the benefits of content marketing

- Understanding the benefits of content marketing is critical to creating a content marketing strategy that works for your business. A lot of the marketing activities that you partake in with your company, such as attending a trade show, doing a banner ad, paying for a pay-per-click ad, this is all essentially renting attention. You're paying a fixed fee to rent the audience of another vendor. For instance, if you're at a trade show, you're paying a certain amount of money to have a booth and to get the benefits of that audience for that trade show. In contrast, content marketing is like owning your own attention.

You're creating that thought leadership in-house, you're creating that content in-house. Even though, initially, there might be a spend to begin with, you are gaining your own attention over time. You're promoting your own content out, you're creating your own audience. So it's essentially like owning your own attention. You're not continuously spending money on renting other people's thought leadership and the audience that they have built. Brands today need to become their own publishers, and content marketing is how to do that and create your own thought leadership.

Because your audience is out there doing their own research, they're downloading information online, and why not be the place where your customers are finding that information? Why not be the creators of that research? That's how brands today become their own publishers. So what are some additional benefits for content marketing? Benefit number 1, brand awareness. Up to 93% of the buying journey starts with a search online. Content builds organic awareness through search and social. You wanna be available when your buyers are searching for you.

They're doing that research, so you wanna make sure that your content is front and center. By creating content, you build that brand awareness so that when your buyers do search, your content and your educational materials come up. Benefit number 2, create brand preference. Thought leadership builds trust in brand preference. People are more likely to purchase from companies who they trust. By creating that content and becoming that educational resource for your customers, you start to build that relationship and build that trust.

Therefore, if a customer is constantly searching out content on a certain subject, and your content is the content that's continuously coming up, when that customer is going to make that purchase, they will most likely find your content and think about you first. That's how you're building that trust when it comes to purchasing decisions. Benefit number 3, reach more buyers at a lower cost. Unlike renting attention, where you're paying to rent other people's audience, the return on content happens over a longer time.

Even though you have that initial spend, because your content is evergreen and built to last, and because you're building your own audience and owning your own audience, you can reach more buyers at a lower cost over time. So given the benefits that we've discussed, I hope that you can now apply this to your own content marketing and really start thinking about how content marketing can help your business over time. Take these benefits and approach your internal stakeholders so that you can really start creating that plan for content marketing.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-foundations/understanding-the-benefits-of-content-marketing