15 Undeniable Benefits Of Content Marketing For Businesses Using It

What Is a B2B Content Marketing Funnel & How Do I Create One?

SEO Content Marketing (How To Use SEO & Content Marketing Together)

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Imagine this: you’re trying to catch a potential client's attention in the B2B space. You’ve got a great product, but so do your competitors. Standing out feels like trying to yell over a noisy crowd. This is where content marketing precisely guides potential clients through the B2B content marketing funnel. By leveraging the benefits of content marketing, you can engage and nurture leads, positioning your brand as the go-to solution. In this article, you'll uncover how content marketing can supercharge your efforts and help you achieve your business goals.

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What Exactly Does Content Marketing Entail?

Content marketing is about creating valuable and relevant digital assets like text, images, and video. The goal? To attract and retain a clearly defined audience. It's an inbound marketing strategy that builds trust with an audience through content that is:

Entertaining

Educational

Informative content

Content marketing takes many forms, including written, audio, video, and image. Most businesses use a mix of these to engage with audiences across platforms like social media, websites, and ads.

The Four Pillars of Content

Content marketing uses four main types of content: written, audio, video, and image. Written content includes blog posts, articles, and guides. Audio content can be podcasts or audiobooks. Video content is often short-form, like reels and TikToks, but can also be long-form, like:

Webinars

Video series

Image content includes graphics, infographics, and memes. Most businesses use a mix of these types of content to engage with their audience.

Content is King, But Context is Queen

Content marketing puts the customer at the heart of a brand’s messaging. Rather than spamming customers with advertising-laden messaging, it provides valuable content and engages them throughout the customer journey. It goes beyond pushing a product to a potential customer; instead, it puts relevant information out there and follows the customer from the awareness phase to the decision phase.

Why is Content Marketing Important?

Content marketing aligns with how we make decisions today. Before buying, we research, compare, and read reviews online. Businesses that once relied on TV ads or in-person sales now face a digital world where the buyer holds the power.

They crave information that's:

Helpful

Trustworthy

Relevant

Here's where content marketing excels. Businesses connect with potential customers by providing high-quality, valuable content during their decision-making journey. Picture a prospect searching for a solution. If your company offers an insightful blog post, video, or guide addressing their needs, you've made a meaningful connection without a word spoken. That content builds credibility and trust and positions your brand as a go-to expert.

Delivering Value Through Content

Content marketing isn't just about writing blogs or filming videos. It's about delivering value. This is crucial in B2B industries, where stakes are higher. B2B buyers face complex decisions and need assurance they're making the right choice. A well-researched whitepaper, case study, or helpful webinar can be the nudge they need to choose your company over a competitor.

The numbers back this up. Businesses with blogs see 67% more monthly leads than those without one. The average person spends about seven hours a day consuming content. Your audience is out there, waiting to engage. Content marketing generates 54% more leads than traditional methods, making it an innovative and cost-effective strategy for growth.

Building Trust and Relationships

Content marketing is about meeting your audience's needs while showcasing what makes your business unique. It's how you earn trust, build relationships, and guide prospects toward becoming loyal customers.

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15 Undeniable Benefits of Content Marketing for Businesses Using It

1. Content Directly Speaks to Your Target Audience

There’s a ton of digital noise out there, and consumers crave a deeper connection with the brands they patronize. Since no two customers are the same, you must determine precisely whom you speak to and why. If you’re doing content marketing right, your goal will be to know your target audiences, which will help you create content that speaks directly to their pain points.

To that point, consumers don’t want to search for content that resonates with them. Marketers will need to create high-quality, well-researched, and thought-provoking content. It is no longer enough to make short posts with clever copy.

Approximately 66% of decision-makers noticed an increase in thought leadership produced after the pandemic; 38% feel that the market for thought leadership content is oversaturated. Still, the right thought leadership content marketing strategies deliver value.

The Power of Engaging Content in a Post-Pandemic World

About 51% of decision-makers surveyed engage with more of this kind of content than before the pandemic. You’ll want to promote your content in the places where your consumers are, and position it so your audience feels connected to you. Humans thrive on emotion and connection, and if a consumer comes across content that answers their questions before they even have a chance to ask, they will feel like they’ve struck gold.

2. Content Establishes Customer Trust and Brand Loyalty

Excellent content marketing works best when it creates a positive experience for customers. Although this may sound obvious, a positive experience can be challenging. Without the proper insights into a customer’s pain points, making assumptions or creating content that is too company-focused is easy.

Content brings value in a way that a salesperson cannot, as you will provide information without immediately asking for anything.

By continuously creating trustworthy and educational content, readers will begin to recognize and trust your brand as a voice in the space and keep coming back for new information. Online content gives users an understanding of your business and what you are about, establishing:

Trust

Loyalty

Credibility

Credibility can be hard to come by and even harder to measure, mainly because there is a digital screen between you and your customers. So this means that when the consumer is in the market for your products and services, they’ll already be thinking of you, making them more likely to convert.

With this in mind, any business owner needs to hone in on creating informational content for their consumers, as this provides an intangible ROI that will last for years to come.

3. Content Drives Traffic and Engagement

When communicating your message to your audience, you can experiment with many types of content. Each target audience will need different content mediums, whether long-form blogs posted directly on your website or short and sweet social media videos.

You may need to figure out what content format to start with, but that is more than OK. Exploring different content mediums provides you with more touchpoints for your audience to interact with you, which ultimately drives leads and conversions.

Content allows a prospect to learn more about your organization. Since most of the sales cycle now happens before a prospect engages with a salesperson, having these touchpoints in place is essential.

4. Content Educates

Whether teaching you about a new product or discussing an industry event, content is the perfect vessel for communication between your brand and potential customers. The internet makes information easily accessible.

Most decision-makers research online before buying, and 83% of the purchasing decisions happen before a prospect directly engages with a company. An educational content strategy is necessary for brands to improve their content marketing ROI.

Tailoring Education to Your Audience’s Needs

The term “educational” can be subjective. It can be hard to adequately educate your audience if they come from different marketing funnel stages. So, to educate your customers effectively, it’s best to focus on common questions, objections, and challenges you face in your business.

Consider what problems a consumer would face and how your products and services can offer the proper solution. Personas can be a great tool to answer these questions. Each persona should have a name, title, and challenges associated with their role. The more in-depth these personas are, the easier it will be to create and promote content.

Educational content allows brands to teach their audience something new about the subject they are interested in. Think of content as an opportunity to show consumers how you can make their lives easier!

5. Content is the Backbone of Search Engine Optimization

Investing in search engine optimization (SEO) to promote your brand’s visibility within the search engine result pages is crucial. SEO is a marketing tactic that improves the quality and quantity of your website and its traffic. Without content, this would be impossible.

When a user heads to a search engine, they’ll start their online search by typing keywords into the search bar. Google ranks all websites by reading what keywords are prevalent on each page. You will want your pages to include and highlight these keywords your audience may be searching for.

Content is the best way to capture these keywords through marketing copy, a comprehensive blog strategy, and informational videos and graphics.

6. Content is Cost-Effective

Content marketing is more cost-effective than traditional advertising. You can easily create a blog post or white paper at a fraction of the cost of promoting a newspaper or radio advertisement. For many companies, this is also a more effective strategy for gathering leads and driving brand awareness.

While you may only sometimes see immediate results with your digital marketing content, consistency, and experimentation are key. Try different formats and types of content to understand what truly resonates. A comprehensive content strategy is a great way to nurture long-term relationships and bring in qualified leads.

7. Content Establishes Your Brand as a Thought Leader

Again, first impressions count in the world of content. High-quality content establishes credibility and expertise in your field and industry. There are many ways to demonstrate thought leadership, such as:

Outsourcing content

Content licensing solutions

Licensed content is created by someone else but promoted by you. It is a fantastic way to leverage content from renowned publications like The New York Times to speak to your target audience while meeting your content marketing goals. Licensed content allows brands to harness the power of world-class journalism without investing in additional content development resources.

8. It Helps Generate Leads

One of the primary goals of any digital marketing campaign is to generate leads for a business, and content marketing is at the heart of any digital marketing strategy.

Content marketing lets people find you and receive helpful information for free. Within that content, you can place calls to action (CTAs) that will be instrumental in getting people to give your business much-needed leads. Of course, they will be more likely to click on those CTAs and get to your landing page if they’re happy with the content you provide them.

9. It Can Boost Conversions

A business’s ultimate goal is making money, which only becomes possible when it generates conversions. As mentioned earlier, customers are so much brighter these days and fed up with all the ads businesses bombard them with every second. You will have difficulty getting their attention with commercials and the like.

Conversely, content marketing should provide audiences with useful information they will pay attention to and trust over time. Once that relationship between your customers and your brand is established, it will be easier for your audience to make a purchasing decision, the ultimate conversion, in your favor. After all, you did earn their trust through the quality content you provided them.

10. Drive Brand Awareness

High-quality content can introduce your brand to users who may not have heard of it but are in the market for related products and services. By frequently creating and sharing valuable and relevant content on channels your target market frequents, you can help them become familiar with your company and enter your content marketing funnel.

Content marketing can be a powerful tool for raising brand awareness for your products and services. According to McKinsey's research, consumers choose familiar brands when faced with too many options.

Leveraging SEO to Boost Brand Visibility

Brands in the initial consideration stage can be up to three times more likely to be purchased than brands that aren’t. Combining content marketing and SEO to create high-quality articles that rank for your target keyword can drive brand awareness via search engines. Including keywords and optimizing for search intent can improve your chances of being found on the first page of search results.

Capitalizing on trends in your content can also help you appear on discovery platforms like Google Discover.nZapier, for example uses content marketing to drive brand awareness for its tools. Its core offering, "automation platform," only has about 2400 monthly search visits, which isn’t enough to drive meaningful traffic.

11. Monitor the Competition

Analyzing your competitors' content marketing strategies is one step to creating quality content. By analyzing your competitors' content with audit tools, you can gain valuable insights into their tactics, messaging, and market positioning, enabling you to make more informed decisions about your content planning.

This includes the following:

Types of content they produce

Platforms they use

Topics they cover

Messaging they use to engage their audience

Audit tools can help you identify keywords missing in your article.n And then use them in your own content. Because a significant portion of their audience will overlap with yours, you can use this information to identify gaps in the market and develop a more effective content marketing strategy.

Staying Ahead with Competitive Content Analysis

Monitoring your competitors' content can also help you identify new opportunities. You can identify new industry trends and topics that resonate with your competitors' audiences and create content around those or related themes. Keeping tabs on your competitors can ensure your content stays relevant and innovative.

Content marketing is widely practiced because, unlike paid advertising, which rewards the highest bidder, creating quality content relies on providing value. As a result, smaller companies can compete alongside larger organizations by creating valuable content.

HubSpot is an excellent example of a company that has used content marketing to grow its market share. As a result of its SEO-driven content marketing efforts, HubSpot established itself as a leader in the inbound marketing industry. By providing valuable content to potential customers, they were able to attract a large audience and build a loyal following.

Content Marketing: A Cornerstone of HubSpot's Success

Today, HubSpot is a respected name in the marketing software industry. Compared to older incumbents like Salesforce, it has acquired over a third of the market share. When paired with a great product, content marketing's importance in building trust and brand loyalty can lead to a larger market share.

13. Audiences Prefer Content Over Ads

Consumers have banner blindness and ad fatigue. They’ve learned to ignore most ads. But audiences crave valuable, relevant content that helps them solve problems and achieve goals.

This is why Reddit's marketing works so well and why Reddit secured a $60M deal with Google this week. People want real, authentic, human-written content. This innate preference for content over ads makes content marketing a more effective marketing strategy. Audiences want to engage with content, which makes them more likely to convert down the line.

Social media marketing has become an invaluable part of any digital marketing strategy. With over 4.8 billion users globally, social media is a powerful platform for businesses to market themselves. High-quality content is necessary here as it is more likely to be shared. It can also generate engagement on social media platforms. This can increase brand exposure, increase reach, and lead to potential new customers.

Executed well, social media content can be an invaluable part of your marketing funnel. It can also drive profitable customer action, increasing subscribers or sales.

15. Content Marketing is the Future of Marketing

Content marketing has quickly become the present and future of digital marketing. All signs point to its growing importance over the next decade. A long-term, continual approach to providing value through content will fuel business growth for years.

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How To Start Content Marketing & Reap It's Business Benefits

Know Your Audience Inside and Out

To kick off your content marketing strategy, you must understand your audience. Customer segmentation is your friend here. By building detailed buyer personas, you can clearly understand who your customers are and what they want. Personas help you understand your audience's:

Needs

Preferences

Behaviors

They also guide you in creating content that resonates with different customer segments. By activating and acting on these personas, you can:

Engage with your audience

Build trust

Expand your customer base

Who are your customers? What do they care about? How can you connect with them? Answering these questions will set the foundation for your content marketing strategy.

Deliver What They Crave

Once you know your audience, determine what information they need to connect with your brand, product, or service. Your content should address their pain points, priorities, challenges, and preferences.

Solving their problems increases the chances that your audience will engage with you. Content marketing is about answering common questions and providing value. If your content solves a problem, your audience will appreciate it and be more likely to engage with your brand.

Reach Them Where They Are

Now that you know your audience and their needs, you must deliver content in the best medium for your target audience. For example, if your customer personas reveal that your ideal buyers spend a lot of time on Facebook, deliver content there. By going where your audience spends their time online, you can ensure they see your content and engage with your brand.

Keep an Eye on the Prize

Content marketing is effective, but it’s not always easy to measure. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you understand how your content is performing. Your KPIs will depend on your goals, but some businesses track content engagement, like views and comments, while others look for conversions. The key is to set measurable, realistic KPIs for your business.

Create Content That Hits Home

Your content should entertain and inform your audience. Create explicit, well-written content that doesn’t use jargon. Deliver value through actionable tips, discounts, or insider information. Create different pieces of content for customers at various stages of the funnel.

Ensure your content works with the channel you’re using. You can reuse the same ideas in a blog for social media, but you might have to adjust it to communicate better with users on a different platform.

Stick to a Schedule

Your business must consistently release content to attract traffic and search engine crawlers. Create a posting schedule to help you do this, but be realistic. It’s easy to be overly ambitious, so start with one blog post or video weekly. Remember, overnight success isn’t possible with content marketing. It will take time to gather enough data to see if your posting schedule is effective.

Mind the Money

While content marketing is one of the most affordable forms of marketing, it isn’t free. Set a budget for your content marketing initiatives so you can measure return on investment (ROI). Create a budget for hiring freelancers, buying content tools, and running paid ads to control your spending.

Learn and Adapt

Regularly review how your content marketing efforts stack up against your target KPIs. Analyzing and measuring your performance helps you understand which pieces perform better, which can help you create more robust content. It also allows marketers to shift their budget toward more successful types of content and away from underperforming projects.

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