Why Content Marketing is Still the Most Powerful Tool to Market Your Business in 2017

Laura Ginn

From apps to infographics to podcasts, there are many competing channels for reaching and engaging users. Yet content marketing is used by 95% of enterprise marketers, a rate unexpected to change in the near future. Let’s look at the reasons why content marketing is still the most powerful way to market your business in 2017.

Search Engine Optimisation

One of the benefits of content marketing is the ability to apply search engine optimisation. Only content marketing lets you dominate key search terms and conversational queries while remaining natural. Deep content or shorter how-to articles with images or video are both easy to optimise to suit the user’s intent, as well. A benefit of content marketing over other formats is the ability to integrate calls for customer action, whether it is signing up for a newsletter or contacting your professionals to solve the problem if they lack the skills or tools to follow the article describing how to do it yourself.

Updating content to adjust its SEO is a simple matter and readily done based on data instead of detailed customer surveys that remain prone to bias.

Shareability

Your content doesn’t have to be viral clickbait to market your business. Content that answers a common question in a novel way, explains a complex issue in easy to understand terms, or answers a common question no one else is able to answer is all readily shared. When people want to help other people, they tend to share the links to the content that helped them. When your content is deep or rich in images, people have to share your link instead of quote the one line answer, and that improves your content’s ranking with search engines. And the time they spend on the page reading your content engages them with the brand while helping the content’s ranking with search engines due to the level of engagement.

You can improve social media sharing by putting social media sharing buttons on all of your pieces of content. Another tactic is to use the title of the content in the URL so that people know what the content is based on a pasted link alone. Don’t forget to share links to your quality content via your social media profiles to start the process of social sharing of the links.

Reputation

One of the best ways to engage in content marketing and manage your site’s reputation is to consistently publish high quality content. When your website becomes a go-to source of answers on a topic, your website sees increases in search engine results page rankings as a result. Furthermore, the domain authority goes up. This results in your site’s ranking improving relative to unknown or spammy sites. Integrating brand names and product names into the content also reinforces your brand recognition with both readers and search engines.

Long Term Marketing

One of the benefits of content marketing over other types of marketing is the fact that well written, relevant articles are evergreen. Whether it is a recipe that includes references to your food product or how-to articles that mention your product as one of the required tools, content can draw in traffic, engage readers and promote your product or service for years. This makes content marketing a relatively low cost marketing method relative to online ads, print ads and constant social media marketing. You can create it once and edit or alter it as necessary at relatively low cost forever.

Content marketing lets you engage customers to a degree few other types of marketing can while tactfully promoting the product or service. If you want to reap the benefits of it, get in touch with us today!