10 Benefits of Content Marketing

Content marketing is a form of marketing aimed at creating online content, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media posts. 

As opposed to direct advertising, content marketing aims to provide value by answering questions and engaging an audience with educational content, which leads to people becoming customers in the future.

Content marketing is a very effective way to grow your business. This form of marketing is often misunderstood and underrated due to the time required to see results. But it’s well worth it in the long-term.

Here are 10 content marketing benefits.

1. Increases organic traffic

Content marketing helps increase your organic traffic. Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your website “organically” through search engines such as Google and Bing. For example, maybe you got to this article by typing in “content marketing benefits.”

Organic traffic is fantastic because you don’t pay for it (other than your initial investment into the content – such as blog posts – aimed at specific search queries).

Here’s an example of organic traffic results from one article we wrote for a client. While the initial investment was a few hundred dollars, the payoff of getting 500 + targeted organic views per month is far higher. 

2. Builds brand awareness

Brand awareness can is defined as the extent that customers recognize your brand. Brand awareness is important because people are more likely to buy from a brand they know. 

For example, if you take two hypothetical CBD companies, which do you think will have greater brand awareness?

• Company A: Consistently publishes high-quality content (i.e., blog posts, YouTube videos, Instagram) that provides value to their target audience 
• Company B: Posts on social media from time to time.

The brand that consistently provides helpful content will be more easily recognized.

People will know who you are if you consistently help make their life easier with the content you produce. Your brand will naturally gain more awareness and visibility from doing this. 

3. Increases domain authority

Domain authority (DA) or domain rating (DR) is a measure of a domain’s “authority” (generally on a scale of 0 to 100) based on the authoritativeness of websites (and quantity of them) that link to your website.

The more authoritative websites that provide “dofollow” links to a website, the more authoritative Google sees the website.

Google doesn’t specifically use these rating systems. Still, it is clear at this point that backlinks are an integral part of how well a site can rank for specific keywords.

The more valuable content you produce, the more websites will link to your content, which leads to more high-quality backlinks, and increased domain authority.

The higher your domain authority, the better this will be for your content marketing KPIs, such as organic traffic, conversions, and social shares.

4. Automates sales

Content marketing helps you automate your sales.

Let’s take Hubspot as an example. They sell software. Content marketing is a massive part of their marketing efforts, mainly their blog, found at blog.hubspot.com.

With thousands of blog posts producing, they’re getting millions of organic views and automating their sales and taking potential leads through their sales process with a predictable process.

Someone reads a blog post from Hubspot. 

1. The reader provides their email in exchange for a free lead magnet (e.g., a PDF checklist)
2. They find out about Hubspot’s CRM software after reading an email newsletter
3. They sign up for a free trial.
4. They become a paying customer on a monthly subscription 

5. Grows your revenue

As Bill Gates once said, “content is king.”

Content marketing, when done right, can help increase your revenue. Why? Because the benefits of content marketing, such as increased organic traffic, domain authority, and the automation of sales, are closely associated with a company’s size and revenue. 

What’s important to remember is that you can’t expect your company’s revenue to increase from content marketing within a short period. It generally takes at least a few months, ideally a year or two, to truly see a significant effect on your revenue from content marketing. 

6. Improves your reputation

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

– Warren Buffet

Reputation is critical if you’re trying to build a sustainable business long-term. 

You must guard your reputation, especially if your goal is to build a long-term and sustainable business. Content marketing is one way you help you establish a positive reputation. 

If you’re consistently producing valuable content for your customers and potential customers, helping solve their problems, saving them time, making life easier for them. Then you’re going to build an excellent reputation and build a loyal customer base that will help guard it for you.

7. Develops long-lasting relationships

Content marketing builds familiarity and trust.

People don’t necessarily want to have to find multiple sources of information all the time. It’s much easier for them to have a dedicated source of authoritative information they can trust.

Become that source for them.

Suppose you’re targeting US-based marketing directors of dental clinics. 

If you consistently provide these specific people valuable content, they are far more likely to want to become customers of the services you offer than someone else.

They will feel like they are more connected to you and prefer to work with you because of your familiarity and trust through your targeted content marketing. 

8. Establishes industry authority 

Who do you view as authorities on the web?

When it comes to health content, who comes to mind?

Probably a website like Healthline.com.

Why are they an authority? 

It’s because they are prolific content marketers. Their content dominates search results.

Because they are everywhere, they become the authority. 

It doesn’t matter whether experts disagree with their stance on specific topics (not saying they do). Still, regardless they are the authority due to their content marketing efforts. 

Content marketing allows you to establish yourself as an authority. The more high-quality content you produce, the more of a leader you’ll become in your industry. 

9. Provides insightful data 

Content marketing provides you with insightful data. 

Without content that’s actively interacting with your target audience, you’re making assumptions about what works and what doesn’t. 

It’s great to do a competitor analysis, study the market you’re targeting, and research your target audience in-depth. But nothing beats having cold, hard data about how your content performs.

The more content you create, the better you’ll understand what works, what doesn’t, why, and more importantly, how you can improve the content in the future.

Data is the secret sauce of content marketing. The more you gather, the better you’ll get at content development because you’re spending less time guessing what works and more time knowing what works. 

10. Helps your customers 

Everything we just talked about comes down to one thing and one thing only. You are providing value to your customers and potential customers. Companies that obsess with giving customers the best experience possible win.

Content marketing is your best opportunity, other than what you’re selling) to serve your customers. Helping your customers and engaging them with content enables you to differentiate yourself from the competition and focus more on giving rather than taking. 

The bottom line

Content marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing. It’s one of the best investments for the long term if your goal is to build a sustainable marketing model that continues to scale.

Best of all, the return on investment you can get from content marketing can be ridiculous. Just stay consistent, focus on providing value to your audience above everything else, keep your eye on the data, and be patient.