Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses primarily on delivering valuable and relevant information in order to educate and build relationships with potential leads and existing customers. Ultimately, it drives profitable customer action allowing businesses to attract and retain a clearly defined target audience.
Besides this, when done effectively, content marketing presents an abundance of other benefits, proving it to be vital for any kind of business! Keep reading for 10 ways that content marketing can benefit your business.
1. Educates potential leads and existing customers
Some of you may be well aware that there are skeptics out there - people who don’t believe in or know enough about what you do, or are just too afraid to try your products or services. Their skepticism is stopping them from becoming a consumer, so creating content that addresses these particular points will help them better understand what you do, alleviate their fears and shift their perspectives, allowing them to go from skeptic to potential customers!
2. Builds brand awareness
There’s an entire pool of people out there who are a perfect fit to be users of your products or services. If this is the case, then why aren’t they already a customer or at least on the road to becoming one? It’s most likely that they don’t already know about your brand or business. By creating useful content that adds value to your target audience, you’re not only giving them the opportunity to learn from your industry expertise, but you’re also building brand awareness and spreading the word about what you offer.
3. Brings more traffic to your site
Creating content that delivers valuable information, in turn, makes people actually want to read it. This means that you don’t have to put as much effort into creating marketing material that requires you to push the message you wish to send across to a particular audience. This works particularly well for wellness businesses who can share content about information that is being actively searched for by potential prospects online. Because you’re creating content that people are actually interested in reading and looking for answers to, it entices more click-throughs to your sites and platforms.
4. Builds up your credibility and authority
Especially when it comes to dealing with one's own health and wellness, people will naturally have a tendency to consult someone who is credible and has authority. A nutritionist, for instance, could share content about the best kinds of food to eat before a workout. While topics such as these organically attract interested readers, you’re also simultaneously showing them that you have the industry knowledge. By educating readers about content topics that support their pain points, you’re also building credibility and authority with your target audience.
5. Positions your business as an industry leader or expert
By building up your credibility and authority, you can also work to position yourself as an industry leader. When people are actively looking for information, products or services specific to an industry, they’ll look to the leader first!
6. Compounding and passive generator of traffic
Unlike paid advertisements that only lasts for a fixed amount of time, certain types of content marketing, such as blog articles, are perpetually online. That’s to say, once an article is published it creates a passive stream of traffic that also compounds in time as you progressively publish more content. To leverage on this, it’s key to create timeless content pieces that will remain relevant to your target audience in the long run.
7. Gives your visitors a reason to stay on your business’ site and platforms
Bringing in traffic into your site is only really half the battle. The other half is getting them to stay around long enough to get anything fruitful out of their visit. You only have a short amount of time to attract a customer enough for them to stay, but with high quality and engaging content, you’re giving visitors a reason to stick around and even revisit at a later point in time!
8. Improves your search engine optimisation (SEO) and online visibility
Put yourself in the shoes of someone experiencing an issue such as lower back pain. Most likely, the first thing this person would do is turn to our beloved Google to search something along the lines of “what causes lower back pain” or “how to relieve lower back pain” (these are the kind of people that all you physiotherapists or chiropractors can seek to target with your content marketing efforts). While the Internet is a wonderful tool, with so much content already up, unless you rank high on the search engine results page, chances are, people who search won’t even find your content. It’s key to take note however, that the more quality content you have up online, the better your chances are of optimizing your site to rank higher on the search engine page, meaning, people will be more likely to stumble upon your site and business!
9. More cost-effective with long-term returns
Content marketing is far more cost-effective than many other traditional marketing strategies. You can begin creating content with little to no extra costs incurred because all you need is your own knowledge, some time to write, and a platform to share it on. Remember that the return on investment (whether it be time or money) that you get from content marketing efforts are typically much greater and long-term than other forms of marketing!
10. Content is sharable
Getting people talking about your business and even recommending your products and services to family, friends and co-workers is a powerful way of spreading the word. The same goes for increasing your online presence and visibility. Luckily for you, quality content just happens to be very shareable and potentially even stands a chance of becoming viral. In just a click of a button, readers who see the value of your content and choose to share it with their friends and followers are doing you a huge favour (not to mention, for free) in maximizing your customer reach.
With how fast our digital landscape is changing these days, you may feel an urgency to yield quick results. Keep in mind that content marketing can take time and patience.
Trust the process and track your performance metrics. Take the time to learn what your target audience like or dislike to read and click on, and what type of article titles work and don't work. Using these statistics, fine-tune how you craft your subsequent articles accordingly.
If you enjoyed reading up on these 10 ways that content marketing can grow and transform your wellness business, be sure to stay tuned for next week's article where we'll share the different types of content marketing you can execute to generate more leads to your business.
You can also read more on how to flourish your business on our blog!
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