You might be thinking that content marketing is just throwing up a blog post on your website. You would be wrong. Content marketing has real ROI (return on investment), so while it is normal to be apprehensive about making an investment in something that seems entirely hypothetical, but the stats don’t lie.
Consider these;
Web traffic growth
Companies that have active blogs have, on average, 434 percent more indexed pages than websites that don’t. More content equals more traffic, and content marketers have seen 7.8 times higher growth year-on-year in unique site visitors.
Leaner budget and bigger results
Content marketing attracts three times the number of leads than paid search advertising does in the same period. Possibly more crucial is that it costs 62 percent less to execute content marketing against any other type of campaign.
Higher Conversion Rates
Brands that regularly use content marketing can expect conversion rates that are six times higher that other campaign types.
In front of your audience
There are more chances for your brand to get in front of your target audience with 47 percent of internet users reading posts on blogs on a daily basis.
Content is important in the buying process
Buyers crave content when making a decision. 80 percent of business owners and executives prefer to learn about brands through articles rather than seeing the same brands in an advert. 41percent of B2b buyers consume between three and five pieces of content before talking to a member of the sales team.
Thought Leadership
Having a credible library of content that signals your authority and expertise will draw in decision-makers and begins to establish trust before they even speak to a representative of your company. 60 per cent of buyers have said that thought leadership convinced them to purchase a product or service that they would never have considered before.
The numbers don’t lie
These are a small number of figures that you can aim to achieve when you put momentum behind your content marketing activities. However, like everything in marketing, before you start you need to have a strategy. Identifying what you want to get out of content marketing and what it means to your business will help you keep the content you produce and disperse intentional.
There are plenty of great content marketing examples from both big and small brands across all types of industries.
A great example of content marketing in action is from Cleveland Clinic, who established content around its value of putting “Patients First”. The aim was to have all 40,000 of its employees to engae with this value and live it every day.
To do this, they created a video “Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care”. This video was initially distributed internally but was then posted publicly online through their social media pages and its blog. Their blog saw huge growth with 6 million visitors each month.
It was a huge win for their content marketing team. They understood their audiences, both internal and external, and created content that resonated and had a lasting impression.
Content is the route to delivering us from “death from spam” approach that still persists in many marketing organisations.
If you take advantage of this business opportunity you have a lot to gain for your business.
