“Content Marketing” is still ‘KING’, for generating leads for your business

November 18th, 2024

Why are business owners and marketing professionals so much focused on Content Marketing these days?

Answer: Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — (your customers) — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Why content marketing is so effective?

1. Content helps users/customers inspire trust. Articles about problems people face, blog posts, social media posts – all inspire potential prospects to look at you as knowledgeable source they can trust and form a relationship with.
2. Content aids discoverability. Content is how online customers search for questions they have, problems they face, issues they want to resolve. Helpful engaging content is how your SEO elevates your site for higher traffic performance.
3. Content is essential for building BRAND AWARENESS. This is how potential customers become aware of you and how they decide to buy from you instead of your competitor.
4. Increased leads through brand authority. Quality educational content helps you influence people who are potential buyers and brings in leads with good conversion rates.

If you define BUSINESS SUCCESS as achieving your organization’s desired/targeted results, then can hardly accomplish business success without a successful content marketing strategy in 2024.

According to the 11th Annual Content Marketing Survey (2021 report), 79% of B2B marketers reported their organization had and continues to have a content marketing strategy.

Of those, 70% made major or moderate adjustments to their strategy for performance improvements and reaching out to more prospects, and 83% said they made quick changes to their content marketing to improve lead generation and sales.

80% felt the changes were effective and 86% expected some of the changes to stay in effect for the foreseeable future.

Content marketing can achieve:

– Lead generation

– Brand awareness

– Trust and loyalty

– Publishing informative, well-researched content

– Authoritative How-To’s (blog articles)

– Educational and knowledge (ebooks)

– Expertise (whitepapers)

– Much better engagement than ads

– Much better conversion from leads to sales

– Build followers (an audience)

– Hopefully, content that can entertain, inspire, educate and convince

Where to start with content marketing?

In general, successful campaigning and marketing online demands a content marketing strategy and execution plan.

Businesses that wish to increase leads for their business, need to consider content marketing as a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, blog posts, and other media.

This approach will establish initial contact with prospects, promotes brand awareness for your business and your products/services, and keeps your business on top of the mind when it’s time to buy what you sell.

Content marketing best practices for businesses

Blog posts generate about 67% more leads for businesses and companies that adopt lead generation through blogs and informational articles. Some 47% of buyers view 3 to 5 pieces of online article/blog/other content before engaging with a sales representative.

Companies that use content marketing effectively as part of their prospecting reach, see approximately 30% higher growth rates than businesses not using it.

And, 72% of business to business (B2B) marketers say content marketing increases engagement, substantially increase leads, much better performing campaigns, and about 3 times higher conversion ratios, compared to campaigns that DO NOT include content marketing and are mostly based on search engine ad display or other forms of advertising.

Content marketing, final thoughts

As a business owner who understands your industry and how best your products and services can help resolve unique challenges people face (hence why you even developed your products) you can share your expertise and unique value to help people (both defining the problem and explaining solutions) by creating content to attract, engage, and sell your products and service and hence alleviate the problem at hand.

With some planning and systematic content marketing, or outsourcing your content marketing to a professional company, you can reach the right people and inspire loyalty to your brand.

Content marketing is a go-to tactic that’s proven to work, generates leads, and substantially improves conversion ration – AND it is very cost effective, often as much as 62% lower cost compared to other traditional marketing.

Also, it provides a competitive advantage.