As the old saying goes Content Is King! The content that your business puts out there whether it’s in the form of written, video, or audio represents your business in its entirety. If you have a good content strategy it’s likely to inform your audience about your business, answer their questions, offer solutions, provide advice, provide entertainment… we could go on. But that’s not it, not only does your content help someone through the process of Knowing, Liking and Trusting you it is also very useful from a marketing perspective, particularly when it comes to search rankings. Read on to explore why creating content is integral to your marketing strategy.
Building Trust
As we mentioned, the content you put there can be delivered in different formats. Let’s take social media for a moment, if you are publishing regular content across your social platforms you are going to begin to build an audience. The audience that the content appeals to will then connect with your business to ensure that they see more of your content. As they see more of this content, they will begin to trust your business, they’ll know that you’re real that you are experts at what you do and that you are committed to driving your business forward. They will be more likely to engage and purchase from your business than someone that they had not familiarised themselves with before.
Increasing Conversions
Now let’s take a look at someone that was searching for a product on google. Let’s say they narrow it down to two different websites selling exactly the same product. For this instance, let’s imagine that they had not heard of either of the businesses before. One website has a great product description including all the product information you could possibly want to know before deciding whether to make the purchase… the other has nothing other than a product title. Which one do you think the customer is going to purchase from?
Drive Traffic
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. This might be a phrase that as a business owner you have had to become familiar with. Search Engine Optimisation refers to the position that your business lists in on search engines like Google when someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase. There are some technical aspects of SEO that you should discuss with an SEO agency, however, your on-site content also plays a big part. Search engines like Google will take into consideration the quality of your content plus how regularly it’s updated. Google wants to provide its users with relevant content via their search so you should write your content with your users searches in mind. The higher you list in the search rankings the more traffic you will get to your website.
For more information on SEO check out this blog on our website.
Greater Customer Retention
Imagine doing all of that hard work of getting a purchase and then never contacting that customer again. As long as you provided your customer with a quality product or first-class experience when it came to their service, then they’re going to be much more likely to purchase from you again than someone that is yet to do so. Email marketing can be a great way to increase your customer retention as long as you are producing good email content. This content shouldn’t be all salesy, it should provide an insight into your business, offer useful advice and just generally make an interesting read.
Raising Brand Awareness
It used to be known that your business would need seven touch points before a prospective customer was likely to purchase from you. This has now risen to over twenty! As content can be created in so many different formats there really is no excuse for your business to be slacking with a content strategy. In fact, most customers will now expect to see high quality consistent content. Each time your business puts out content it is raising your business profile and awareness which increases the chances of your business securing the sale!
We covered some of the forms of content above but here are just some of the ways your business could be producing content:
- Blogging
- Social Media
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Web Pages
- Product Descriptions
- Emails
- Print Materials
- TV
- Radio
As you can probably tell, content is really important to your marketing, it’s actually one of the foundations you should get in place! So, if you’re business is falling behind in your content strategy it’s time to action.