Content Marketing Digital Marketing Marketing & Sales

8 Reasons why Content is King

Written by Martin Niedenfuhr

Now, more than ever, content rules all. Here are 8 great reasons why.

1. Content helps you win the search war

These days you simply cannot conduct a successful SEO strategy without plenty of great, well targeted, keyword-rich content. It’s just that simple.

Right now, if your business is not working out how to get more, better quality content online fast, then you are falling behind. Rest-assured; your competitors are doing exactly that. The one with the best content wins, that is one thing you can be sure of.

So when someone is looking for your business and types keywords into a search engine, the way to make sure they find you is with great content.

2. Content is your most cost effective weapon

From the earliest days of the Internet, online marketing has proven itself to be far cheaper and more cost-effective than its predecessors. Instead of massive TV, radio and newspaper campaigns that wasted money by reaching people who would never be your target audience, online advertising was able to effectively target people with the right message in the right medium to the right market, with little or no wastage. It was true back then, it’s even more true today.

For the growing army of small to medium sized businesses plying their wares online, content is the most cost-effective weapon you have in your digital marketing toolbox. It helps you find and direct traffic to your offering in a way that the originators of the Internet could only have dreamed of.

When it costs so little to use content marketing, it’s a wonder anyone is still wasting money any other way.

3. Content is forever

They might say diamonds are forever. But in reality, content is.

Compared to content marketing, many other forms of marketing are ephemeral. Here this second, gone the next. All electronic media – TV, radio are designed to lasts just 30 seconds and be gone. The only thing left is the impression that they make. What do they say about today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s fish n’ chips wrappers?

But once you put a blog up on your website, it should, theoretically be there forever. So every cent you invested in it, will keep working for you for years and years to come. Every day it just keeps doing its job. Are there any other forms of marketing you know that can do that?

4. Great content makes you a leader and builds your brand

Let’s face it, people like leaders. They love to follow them. They are drawn to them. A strong leader with a powerful message can lead a nation, an army, and a market. Great content lets you become that leader;a thought leader.

By producing relevant and visionary content, you can position yourself, your business, its’ products and your brand as leaders your field. And with a leadership position comes all the trappings of success that leaders normally enjoy. Power, influence and money.

5. Content builds relationships

People don’t become loyal, regular customers of businesses they don’t have some sort of relationship with. You simply are not that committed to a business that’s a stranger to you.

But with the right content your business can build relationships with customers that then build real, long-term success. Those relationships are built by providing those customers with meaningful, relevant, useful content that makes them want to keep interacting with you as a business, and that means more sales.

The value of those relationships is proven by the old adage that a regular customer is worth six times what a new customer is worth to your business.

6. Content creates sales

When someone is really ready to buy, when they are actively looking online to buy and are just searching for the right business to buy from, it’s often content that ultimately proves secret to the sale. Whether it’s video, images or text, the content on your website is often what convinces the person to hand over their hard-earned dollars.

The video and images attract them, the text reassures them. It’s this content that is so often what gets the sale over the line. Great content is like a permanent online salesman, working for you day and night to make sales.

7. Content is your biggest converter

When it comes to turning leads into sales, nothing converts better than great content. Strong, well produced content that is very well targeted takes the person who is ‘just looking thanks’ and turns them into a customer. Why? Because great content proves that you have what they are looking for and provides the evidence, the proof, that they can get what they want from your business.

A great content strategy takes people on a journey from just dipping their toes in the water to getting more and more interested in your business and its products and services, and is key to converting leads from cold to warm, to red hot and ready to buy.

8. Content satisfies the smart searchers

With great content, you don’t just want to win the search war in terms of volumes of search results. You also win in terms of the quality of those searches. Great content satisfies the needs of the informed audience – the seeker, the searchers, the one who knows the answer is out there somewhere and is looking to be informed in order to believe, to be convinced to buy.

Great content satisfies the informed audience – the ones coming to your site who are not naive and ignorant. The ones who actually know something about the marketplace you operate in, who know a lot about the products or services you sell. These well-informed searchers won’t be convinced by slick, shallow sales ploy. They are too well informed for that. What they want is evidence that you actually know what you are talking about. Powerful, persuasive content proves to them that your product or service is what they have been seeking. Done well, it’s the ultimate converter for smart searchers.

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About the author

Martin Niedenfuhr

Martin Niedenfuhr is the founder of an Australian digital agency, Local Web Solutions. He has helped over 400 local businesses and several nationwide companies increase their sales and revenue by using digital channels such as Facebook advertising, SEO and direct response marketing.