Are you ready to lose 50% of your customers who use search engines to find more information, due to poor (or no) content marketing?

The internet has become the new battleground for client prospecting in both B2B and B2C. Developing a content marketing strategy is, therefore, mission-critical to attracting and retaining clients in this new market reality.

Here’s a closer look at seven turnkey benefits of marketing using content that your firm can tap into.

1. Helps You Build Credibility and Authority

The online space is packed with brands that run the gamut from experts to outright frauds. For users, looking up services and products isn’t the problem — finding legitimate and useful information is.

As such, no matter whether you are running stem cell marketing campaigns or pitching spoons, you need to avoid not looking credible.

Content marketing can help you show audiences that you know your stuff and that you’re trustworthy.

For example, blogging is an effective way for you to speak to leads about challenges you know they face. The beauty of blogging is that it’s an easily accessible means through which you can offer valuable and actionable information.

As your target audience finds solutions through posts you put up, they begin to trust you. When they want to purchase a service or product that you offer, you will be top of mind.

Thus, your demonstration of expertise and authority using content marketing can feed into your lead generation pipeline to grow your revenue.

Before you hop on your blog or email to post, you should realize that building authority and credibility take time. A rule of thumb in using content marketing here is to be consistent with how often you publish your material.

You only get to become an authority in the audience’s mind if you consistently offer value.

2. Increase Your Online Visibility

Your sales funnel online is partially a result of how visible your brand is to users. Content marketing can give you room to grow your brand’s visibility and awareness among your target audience.

To begin with, content bundling is an effective strategy for creating high-value material.

For example, you can invest in developing a long-form blog post, which you can repurpose into shorter form content. You get to attract more eyeballs with the same material, which, over time, can be a powerful visibility tool.

Guest posts are also another means of growing your visibility with content marketing. Through collaborating with other notable platforms and individuals, you can deploy unique and valuable content to their audience.

The advantage of this specific approach is that you will be using the social pull of the platform or individual hosting you to reach their audience.

3. Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is a material you develop and publish that never goes out of date. Evergreen material stays relevant by touching on topics that relate to the audience, no matter the current news cycle.

When you develop evergreen material, it’s like having a never-ending advertising campaign. New target audience members will come across your content, get value from it, and head to your site.

As more people come across your brand, the same cycle repeats, giving you a running pipeline of leads.

Don’t forget that the gold behind evergreen content marketing is that you tap into organic traffic, which has higher purchase intent.

4. You Can Keep People Around for Longer

One of the cascading benefits of content marketing is that you can reduce your bounce rates. Bounce rate is the percentage of users visiting single-pages on your site from when they first land on it.

In other words, how quick will a user who first lands on your site move on?

Using content marketing, you can develop high-quality material to draw visitors to your site. Once they are there, you can leverage internal links to get users to learn more by going to different pages on your website.

The more a user lingers on your site, the higher the odds of you converting them into a paying customer.

5. You Develop Sharable Content

Did you know that 82% of Americans still ask their friends and family for recommendations before they buy an item?

Human nature is such that people value you more when you give them something than when you only take. As such, the strategy for modern-day marketers is to sell without selling.

Content marketing aids you in developing a high-value digital asset that you can share with your audience. That can be a white paper, an eBook, a blog post, or even a video.

Bringing something valuable to the table instead of pushing a product will earn you recommendations that have high conversion value.

6. Support Client Relationships in Long Sale Cycles

Not every business will make a sale instantly or even within 30 days. In some industries making a sale can take as long as 12 months or more. Some examples of such businesses include insurance companies, loan officers, and real estate agents.

The tricky bit here is that just because your sales cycle is long doesn’t mean you disconnect from clients until then. Worse still, you can’t stop client prospecting till when you need to convert them.

In such scenarios, content marketing helps you stay in touch with your customers without annoying them. You get to deliver valuable insights and ideas they can leverage in between sales.

When such clients are next in the market, the positive relationship you’ve been nurturing will place you in a great position to close them.

7. Boost Your Conversions

There are various ways to drive traffic to your site, but content marketing is among the highest converting channels you can use.

Unlike paid advertising, people who respond to your content are those in the process of considering buying the product or service. As you publish valuable content to meet their needs, you speak to the current gap they need to fill.

Over time this can help boost your conversion rates by consistently attracting higher quality leads with greater purchase intention than other channels.

Are You Ready to Start Enjoying the Benefits of Marketing With Content?

As the quality and volume of information online increase exponentially, so does the desire by customers to start their buying journey there. In this new reality, you need a high performing strategy to help you harvest the benefits of marketing using content. Identify your objectives to help you select the best content marketing tools that can enable you to win.

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