A List of Reasons to Embrace Content in Your Marketing Mix, Illustrated in Charts

Undoubtedly, you’ve noticed a rise in people and pundits talking about content marketing in the past 12 months.

What was once a secret weapon to savvy brands is now a marketing staple. And if it isn’t yet for your organization, it probably should be.

Here are 5 practical reasons to support that claim with stats from a recent survey by Business Bolt. And to make it easier on the eyes, I attempted to illustrate these points with charts. (If you’re a design purist, you might want to look away or read a text-only version of this post).

1. Quality content improves rankings in search engines

It’s no secret that Google wants to be known for delivering the best possible results to it’s customers when they search for answers to their questions. Think about the questions that might be keeping your customers up at night and create content that provides an authoritative answer. Chances are, your customers are Googling their problems and have a high level of confidence in what they find there.

Create compelling answers to your target audience’s questions and post it to your site. Your site ranking will improve. (For more on this, check out: How to Think About SEO Like a Human)

2. Quality content generates website traffic

You’ve got a beautiful website but your traffic graphs are less than glamorous. Content can fix that. Content is currency in search engines (see point #1) and in social media. Posting content to a website you own (and optimizing it for search and social) will increase your current web traffic. Besides, that website ain’t gonna visit itself.

3. Content improves brand awareness (and great content improves brand perception)

Visibility in search and social leads to … visibility in general. The more content you develop as currency for your earned audience efforts, the more exposure your brand will generate in return. It’s that simple. (Plus, there are a lot of benefits to improving your brand’s image.)

4. Smart content boosts sales

Increased brand awareness leads to increased brand consideration which leads to increased likelihood of purchase. Content marketing serves as a fantastic customer incubator that pulls your audience into a branded environment where you can control the calls to action. Make those calls to action ads/offers for your products and you will see an increase in sales.

5. An investment in content can help cut ad spending

This is my favorite distinction to make: you spend money on ads, you invest money in content. The difference? Your exposure via advertising is used up when your ad budget runs out. Your exposure via content lasts much longer. In other words – your advertising spend is based on your ongoing budget and your content investment affords you the opportunity to rank for keywords in search for years, as one example. While advertising certainly has power, content has more staying power.