Content Marketing… Everyone is talking about it, but many companies wonder what it is and whether it works. The answer is simple – content marketing is the strongest way to deliver targeted visitors to your site – and to increase sales.

Content Marketing…

1. Builds Trust and Thought Leadership

Updating your content resource center or a company blog is an ideal way to show off the skills and expertise your company has to offer. Through posting articles on your company blog, it is possible to address the issues and problems that clients deal with daily and suggest practical solutions and certain products and/or strategies that will help them deal with the problems efficiently.

Best, when they visit a search engine and ask questions, they’ll be sent to your answer, providing them with value and providing you with an opportunity to impress!

Worldwide, we conduct 131 billion searches per month on the web. (Comscore, January 2010)

When you can assist customers in a positive way, you start to build all-important trust, which leads to increased sales. Content marketing is most effective when it is helpful and provides relevant value.

2. Increases Traffic to Your Company Website

Content marketing delivers targeted website traffic. Using a strong keyword strategy, your blogs and articles should rank well for terms that matter to you, and when searchers look for content on these topics, they’ll be sent you your site. And, the more often you blog, the more volume you’ll see.

Blog frequency impacts customer acquisition. 92% of companies who blogged multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog. (HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing, 2012)

3. Fuels Social Media Engagement

You can use social media to boost traffic and visibility as well. Promoting useful content via social media leads to followers that re-share it to their followers, is a smart strategy and can help add both viewership and links back to your content.

Companies that acquired customers from Facebook: B2C is 77% and B2B is 43%. (State of Inbound Marketing, 2012)

4. Is an Investment in Growth

Blogs and content marketing are a long-term marketing investment that may take 3-6 months to begin to show returns. While the lead time is longer than simple pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine marketing (SEM) strategies, it’s long-lasting. When you stop paying for ads, the traffic stops – not so with content marketing. Each article or blog post is another opportunity to rank for a key word or phrase, and that content will live on your domain for as long as you want, building long term trust and authority for your website.

And, people don’t click ads as often. The average click through rate (CTR) for ads is a measly 2%!

70% of the links search users click on are organic, not paid. (Marketing Sherpa, February 2007)

Investing in material that is highly relevant and helpful to customers will pay off in spades! So transfer that money you’re spending on PPC to a content marketing agency.

5. Assists Your Sales Team

Helpful blogs that contain answers to questions your customers ask will save the sales team time. By the time they fill out the lead form, they’re already sold. Content marketing is like an online salesperson who talks through the purchase decision with your potential customer and gets them ready, answering questions and sharing research, until they are ready to buy.

Furthermore, content marketing can be a strong way to support the sales process even after the salesperson is involved. The salesperson can send a lead a link to an article that gives all the information the customer wants regarding his issue or question, delivering value and offering a no hassle way to follow up.

Get started with a content marketing strategy by downloading our Content Mapping Template.

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