Top 10 Benefits of Content Marketing [+ Why Content Marketing matters]

Content Marketing is a concept that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) around the world spend considerable time thinking about and making preparations for within their organization.

With a well-designed Content Marketing strategy, you can produce relevant pieces of content that engage, build authority, and reduce client acquisition costs.

But what exactly is Content Marketing and what are its practical benefits for businesses trying to find and consolidate a user base online?

In this blog post, we will answer those questions, and more!

Let’s dive deep into the main aspects of the strategy itself, learn more about its importance and what should be your starting point towards a new era of emotional interaction between you and your audience. 

Continue reading to see the following about the benefits of content marketing:

Why is Content Marketing so Important?

To talk about Content Marketing’s relevance to business these days is to talk mainly about engagement, brand personality, and deeper emotional connections with the public. 

Especially when we compare the approach with more traditional media.

When radio, TV, and press were the only ways to reach wider audiences, marketing your company was more of a passive experience.

You had limited space and time to create compelling, eye-catching messages and images to call the viewers’ attention. There weren’t many opportunities beyond this to show how a brand was different from others in the market.

But that approach changed forever with the birth of Digital Marketing. 

With the internet becoming part of our daily routines and social networks becoming our main way to interact and socialize, companies now have a direct, constant connection with their audience — one that can take the shape and the time they need.

That is the reason why Content Marketing shines today.

It is a strategy to plan, create, and distribute content that is accessible and useful for the reality of your buyer persona.

Instead of just showing your brand in the limited format of a 30 seconds TV ad, a CMO can create a unique, engaging narrative for the brand. 

You can use informative content to lay a path of specific interactions that brings your audience closer naturally, welcoming your brand as a part of their lives — like any friend on social media.

So we can say that Content Marketing is one of the most relevant strategies today for visibility online. 

It has the power to not only make your brand be seen, but connected with a deeper, unique personality that you forge with the right text, image, and video.

What are the 10 main Benefits of Content Marketing?

It is easy to perceive Content Marketing’s importance. 

You just see what successful companies are doing online and you’ll, for sure, find it being executed among other fronts.

In fact, a CMI study found that at least half of businesses are able to create an online community using content. Their main goals include:

• Create brand awareness.
• Educate audiences.
• Build trust and loyalty.

But how does that happen exactly? 

What are the practical benefits that Content Marketing brings to your journey towards a more well-known, trusting brand?

Let’s take a look at 10 points that will convince you to start or strengthen your strategy right now.

1. Creating a personality for your brand

Going back to the traditional marketing examples, it was common to see a kind of approximation between brands in the past. 

Just check old TV commercials to see how they all looked and talked similarly. That happened exactly because of the limits of the media. 

With a short time and no segmentation on who would watch an ad, companies used to bet on safer messages to secure their results.

In Content Marketing, you own your platform (website, blog, social profiles…), so you can experiment and measure. 

Instead of trying to emulate what other brands are doing, you can use content to create a singular personality based on what your leads want from a relationship with a business they care about.

You can even use this uniqueness to compete with bigger companies. 

In today’s market, having a connection with a niche and engaging your public is way more important than paying for more visibility. 

Efficiency and meaningful exchanges should be placed above volume.

2. Investing in storytelling

You can achieve this emotional connection with your public when using Content Marketing for storytelling.

It is not just about showing what a brand does, but what it is.

A longer storytelling strategy hooks the audience like any good tale. It can be used to share values, causes, and differentiate your brand’s perception from the competition. 

After all, stories are remembered more than numbers and facts.

When you associate your selling points with a good narrative, you stick out even more with your public.

3. Creating a path for your lead to follow

A content strategy is closely tied with what we call Inbound Marketing: a plan to lay out multimedia pieces and interactions that makes a lead travel from content to content until it is finally ready for conversion.

Only well-designed texts, photos, and videos are capable of making a person so engaged they want to take the next step deeper into what you have to offer. 

That is why we always reinforce the word plan. 

A successful Content Marketing plan always creates a logical path from one piece to the next.

4. Showing authority

Content Marketing is not only about personality. 

It can also make your audience perceive the brand as useful and a reference on a specific subject.

Creating authority is producing content that talks directly to a persona’s pains and expectations:

• Solving doubts.
• Teaching concepts.
• Educating about a category of products or services. 

Authority isn’t connected straight to conversion, but this perception becomes brand awareness. 

When your target audience needs answers in that subject, you are the company they trust for getting answers.

5. Improving SEO

A successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is a constant effort to provide content that is relevant to your audience and well-structured enough to please the search engines. 

You can only have that kind of consistency with time if you have a plan — from what to write to how and when to distribute. 

When done right, Content Marketing puts pages and posts on top of search engine result pages, expanding your visibility and organic traffic exponentially.

6. Owning social media

A lot of CMOs don’t think about it like that, but do you know that social media posts and interactions with users are content too? 

This strategy is not only for blog posts, ebooks, or interactive pieces. 

When you combine a unique voice for your brand with a deep understanding of your persona, you can create micro-interactions with these leads that become an experience in themselves — chances to captivate and engage every day, every time.

7. Cutting costs

With good use of social media and improving your SEO, a Digital Marketing strategy becomes cheaper and cheaper with time. 

That’s because you don’t need to rely as much on paid ads and artificially boosting your visibility. 

The idea behind the content is to change the current: instead of swimming upstream to find your audience, you make them naturally sail towards you.

8. Benefiting from the long term

A good thing about storytelling is that stories stick for a long time. 

Likewise, good content can be around for months, or even years, and still attract leads even without any major updates.

With the power of evergreen content, a company can accumulate interactions and experiences. 

And you don’t have to replace this type of content if it’s not obsolete.

Why is that so important?

Because the plan you’re elaborating right now can be reused and reframed in the future, using the already built visibility and SEO with fewer costs and effort.

9. Keeping your audience engaged

A constant stream of planned content is like feeding the audience with information and rich experiences. 

When a user engages with a piece, it can lead to a sale or some awareness, but it is not enough to make them loyal.

Loyalty is a relationship. It takes care and effort. 

Thinking about Content Marketing in that way helps you find the right frequency and channels to be used when deploying these interactions.

The result? 

Your brand becomes a habit for the persona. A place to go when they want meaningful experiences and the right content for them. 

And, with time, they share it by themselves too, boosting your reach among a relevant audience. 

The more they are engaged, the more they remember you.

10. Learning more about your niche and your audience

Let’s end this list with a different view about Content Marketing: not how it makes your audience know you but how can you use it to know them. 

Like any long, structured, and measurable marketing plan, it can be used as a test camp for what works and what doesn’t when engaging with the public. 

So you can take advantage of it by experimenting with different kinds of content, voices, and visual identities. 

See what sticks, what engages. 

How users interact with blog posts, social media pieces, and other channels can help you understand what they want, and how they want it. 

It is a self-nurturing strategy: the more data you have on them, the more effective your content is.

Wrap Up: Where do you Start your Content Marketing Strategy?

Now that you understand the importance of Content Marketing better, you might be thinking about how to strengthen your plan. 

After all, the better prepared you are, the more chances you have to improve your relationship with your audience and your SEO results.

The advice we have for you is to always start by taking some time and understanding where you stand right now:

• How is the quality of the pieces you produce? 
• How are they interconnected? 
• How efficiently do you distribute them? 
• And, how are they tied with your SEO strategy?

Content Marketing needs to be a tight, well-planed, invested effort. 

When you commit to it, the results start coming naturally and consistently with time. You just need to start it right now.

And how do you know if your Content Marketing strategy needs a revamp, or what to do to start this plan the best way possible?

You can find that answer by checking this exclusive Content Marketing maturity assessment!