Author: Harsha Vardan Hariprasad

You’ve probably heard of content marketing by now, but if you haven’t used it yet, it could be because you have doubts about its long-term advantages and are hesitant to invest extensively in something that might just be a fad. The perceived complexity of the strategy may scare you, making you hesitant to start if you don’t know what you’re doing. Or you might have held off because you’re busy with other marketing strategies. 

If this is you, you should be aware that one of the most valuable, powerful, and practical marketing tactics available today is content marketing. Let these top ten advantages persuade you:

1. More content on the site:

It might seem like an obvious conclusion, but investing more effort in content marketing will result in more material for your website. This translates to more reasons for your customers to linger around, more chances for them to grow familiar with your brand, and more trust, all of which will increase conversion rates. Longer user engagement on your website is always a good thing, and great content encourages that. See The Top 10 Benefits of Blogging On Your Website for more information on the advantages of on-site content.

2. A greater presence in search results:

Your blog will add a new page to its index each time you publish a new post. Although having more quality pages indexed can provide you more possibilities to rank for more search queries, having more pages does not always equate to greater search traffic. You shouldn’t have any issue showing up for those searches if you target long-tail keywords and topics that your consumers commonly search for.

3. Increased domain authority:

Writing more material of a higher caliber will make your website appear more knowledgeable, authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy. The more inbound connections from outside sources that material receives, the higher the domain authority of your website will become. Since a greater domain authority is highly correlated with better search rankings, the more high-quality content you provide, the more visibility you’ll stand to gain from organic search across your entire website.

4. More referral traffic:

Your dedication to the guest posting aspect of your content strategy will determine how successful this one is. You can link back to your website when you make guest contributions to other media. One guest post on a popular, reputable website with a suitable audience could bring thousands of new visitors to your website.

5. More followers and traffic:

On social media. For greater exposure, syndicate your content across all of your social media networks. By doing this, you will increase the number of users who view and read your content. Additionally, users will have the chance to share it with their friends and followers, considerably expanding your audience. You’ll gradually gain more and more social media followers for your brand, which will increase social media traffic.

6. A higher chance of conversion:

Your main goals while creating content should be to engage, educate, assist, and add value for your audience. After you’ve taken care of it, you may use the area you still have to promote one of your goods or services. You can simply boost the amount of conversions you receive if you act diplomatically. Just keep in mind that “tactfully” is the crucial word here; avoid turning your material into an advertisement.

7. A better reputation for the brand:

People will form an opinion of your brand as they read your writing. If consumers find what they read to be useful, educational, or enlightening, they will have a positive opinion of your company. Additionally, if consumers see your work appearing on outside websites and in their social news feeds, they will view you as a more credible thought leader in your field.

8. Better connections with readers and customers:

The number and recognition of your audience may expand with a stronger brand reputation, but the loyalty and intimacy of your customer connections may also rise with excellent content. Your clients may form a more intimate bond with your business if you use the personal brands of individuals to generate and distribute content. Their loyalty will be practically assured for as long as they continue to purchase your products if they begin to rely on you as their main information source.

9. Usefulness to everybody:

A “terrible” industry for content marketing doesn’t exist. Content marketing is a major approach that can be used by any company in any industry. Manufacturing is a traditional, “un-sexy” industry, but it can nevertheless offer insights on market trends or just make its industry more approachable and relatable to consumers.

10. Reduced marketing expenses and value of compounding:

Only time is spent on content marketing. It delivers compounding returns, which makes it even more cost-effective. A content marketing plan may not produce many results in the first few months, but growth will start to be visible in the next few months. More increases will occur in the following several months. By the time you’ve invested a few years, your return may easily regularly treble your investment (or more).

Content marketing is accessible to everyone in any business, affordable, safe, and advantageous in a variety of ways. You’ll see results more quickly and more effectively if you invest in it sooner rather than later. There is no reason content marketing shouldn’t be a part of your marketing arsenal, whether you want more traffic, better conversion rates, or simply better relationships with your consumers.

Content marketing is the process of developing and distributing online content like podcasts, blogs, videos, ebooks, social media posts, and so on to attract a big audience. It is a long-term marketing approach that aids in attracting new clients and increasing online sales. Content marketing is one of the best alternatives to traditional marketing because it enables marketers to generate long-term revenue with less effort and expense.

In just a few years, the interactive marketing system Drift has carved out a massive market niche for itself.

ADVANTAGES –

1. Google loves content. Google values high-quality content. Google is preoccupied with providing its consumers with the results they seek. High-quality content is frequently the most effective approach to delivering that experience. According to a 2018 SparkToro analysis, Google sends 10x more traffic to the average website than Facebook.In other terms, content marketing significantly increases web traffic from your most efficient traffic source.
2. It Attracts Many Audiences: You can advertise your work on many social networking sites such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, and many others. Search engine optimization helps increase website visits to your blog or website. Publishing informative material, using good SEO, and sharing on social media all help to attract a huge number of targeted visitors.
   
3. SEO will help your business have more visibility in searches. The more consistent and high-quality material you create, the better your SEO efforts will be. For example, your writing or any content that you are creating should assist your company in becoming visible online while also establishing credibility and loyalty with your target audience. Furthermore, if you have a well-developed content marketing strategy, your material should help you improve search engine rankings.
   
4. More followers on social media: Increase your exposure by syndicating your work on your social networking sites. And when you do so, more customers will see and enjoy your work; additionally, users will be able to promote your work with their colleagues and followers, considerably expanding your network of followers. Over time, you’ll gain more social media followers for your brand and also get more visitors from social media.
5. Content marketing amplifies your brand awareness. Assume you own an online shoe store and write blogs on what kind of shoes can be worn in various scenarios. Your blog ranks first on Google searches for “What are the best shoes to wear during the spring season?” You might have more than 50,000 people searching this same phrase. Every year, your brand attracts around 580,000 potential clients. Consider the 50,000 people that search for that issue and your potential consumers; combined, you will have approximately 1 million customers each year.
   

DISADVANTAGES –

Don’t forget that a coin has two sides. We are not completely agreeing that content marketing will only bring you happiness and customers. These are some of the disadvantages of content marketing.

1. You won’t find the results soon, Creating valuable content is a difficult endeavour. Finding useful and important contents will require a lot of expertise and investigation. It requires time to build and market content on various social media networks. Because of this very reason, you won’t see the results immediately.
   
2. Coming up with ideas is going to be difficult. It can be challenging to come up with new content ideas if you are unfamiliar with building a content strategy. Do you know how to conduct keyword research to determine what sort of content consumers are looking for? If not, you should employ an expert marketing agency to keep coming up with great content for you.
   
3. Trends change rapidly. New trends, technology, and even modifications to Google’s algorithm are continuously altering content marketing best practices. You will strive to stay relevant and competitive for your audience if you devote enough time to keeping up with these advances.
   
4. It consumes a lot of time. This is one of the worst disadvantages of content marketing. It is not easy to please a crowd. You need to come up with something new every day, or else they will get bored. And for that, you need to spend a lot of time on the content you are going to present to your audience.
5. Content marketing has many steps. It is a time-consuming procedure that includes everything from competitor analysis to keyword research to generating and posting content to your website. It’s also not something to be rushed. A blog piece, for example, should contain useful, trustworthy, and well-researched material about a topic that targets the audience. When submitted to your site, it ought to be 800-1000 words long and tailored for a specific keyword. Your content should subsequently be distributed and analysed across your marketing platforms. This may appear to be a lot of effort for just one article. especially when it is recommended that you post new information frequently.

CONCLUSION 

I hope this essay has assisted you in weighing the benefits and drawbacks of content marketing. It is a great approach for generating leads for your organisation, but it can also be difficult, so you should be informed of the advantages and cons before diving in headfirst.

It has been a constant misconception that marketing with content is the same thing as content marketing, and while it may look the same to an amateur viewer, to a keen eye such as those working on it, the difference between the two is of key importance.

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on retaining and attracting a particular audience through the distribution of relevant, consistent, and valuable content with the ultimate goal of driving profitable customer action.”

The key difference between content marketing and advertising is the return on investment and business value it delivers over a period of time. In a time period summed up through technological advances and media outreach, businesses struggle to achieve growth, but content marketing is more likely to deliver results than other forms of advertisement.

Important factors of content marketing:

1) It is customer-focused, answering important customer questions focused on their needs and wants.

2) It allows businesses to engage with the audience they never would have seen by using the keywords customers use and creating the content they consume on their own website.

3) It builds relationships that build brand trust.

However, in order to see a positive result from content marketing, it must be well executed. The content needs to be aligned with customer needs, and recognising the topic, ideas, and questions that your content will answer makes the content highly engaging. The content, then, needs to be edited, audited, and understood again. After that, the production plan needs to be developed to identify subject matters, authors, and contributors to the content. It is crucial to identify the objective of each piece and the method of tracking its performance. Last but not least, the distribution plan, a.k.a. recognising the method of distributing your content, needs to be made.

When a piece of content is marketed through these five steps, the content ensures a valuable benefit to the company. However, it is important to know that most successful content marketers reveal the reason for their success to be a 12-month calendar, optimising and executing the plan’s idea on paper.

Why content marketing?

Content marketing, in the end, is a business opportunity. In a world where companies are trying their hardest to sell you “stuff” with irrelevant information (spam) constantly making your phone buzz beside your bedside table, content marketing is relevant to the customer’s current needs, challenges, and current requirements. There is one word that makes content marketing stand out from other strategies of exposure: sustainable.

There are four key benefits for big enterprises in content marketing:

1. increase in sales
2. Cost saving
3. better, loyal customers
4. Content acting as a profit centre

There is a reason prominent brands like P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and so on, use content marketing. It might seem stupid to invest in something that seems hypothetical, but remember, numbers do not lie.

1. Growth in web traffic: Companies with blogs have, on average, 434% more indexed pages than those who do not. More content equals more traffic for the website.
2. Less is more: It costs 62% less compared to any other form of campaign. Yes, that includes paid search advertising.
3. Higher conversion rates: Content marketing generates six times higher conversion rates.
4. Right in front of the viewers: It increases the likelihood that the general public will notice your brand.47 percent of Internet viewers read blogs daily.
5. Buyer’s choice: 80% of the buyers prefer to know about the company through blogs rather than through ads.

What is not content marketing?

When understanding what content marketing is, it is also of utmost importance to understand what it is not. Content marketing is not strewn-together bits of blogs, social media posts, and so on in the hope that one of them sticks.

In content marketing, it is necessary to get the strategy part correct. Most brands fail in this regard and, hence, fail to recognise their audience and lose focus on the reason behind content generation.

Blogging

Another mistake brands make is failing to understand that while blogging is an essential part of content marketing, it is not content marketing. The central theme of content marketing is providing information to its intended target, and that piece of information may not necessarily be transferred to the intended audience through the format of a text in a blog. Having a blog does not make a person a content marketer.

In order for blogs to be your only source of content marketing, it is important that they follow a key structure of being published regularly with clear information targeted at a particular audience.

Content, in short, can be delivered through videos, emails, pictures, live events, or apps, and as long as it has a specific audience and is generated for a specific purpose, the content is likely to generate profit.

Social media

Much like blogging, social media is a key contributor to content marketing, but it is not the thing that will generate profit. The main function of social media is to bring people to your website, keep them engaged, and generate awareness about your brand.

Unless paid, social media dictates to which audience it will show your content, and if not specific, there is no difference between your post and advertising. Social media is a crucial aspect in the distribution of your content, but it is not your content. In simpler terms, the main objective of social media is to get traffic for your website.

Conclusion

In conclusion, content marketing is basically delivering everything your audience is seeking in all the places they are looking for it. It is the best investment you can make for the growth of your business, and the reasoning behind content marketing’s success is backed up by thorough research, making it a reliable source for generating profit.

The only thing to remember in content writing is the key difference between it and other methods of traffic generation: it is audience-specific and less likely to waste the time, money, and efforts you put into your brand with no results.