Everything you see and do online involves some form of content. The text you read is content. The videos you watch are also a form of visual content. The same goes for any interviews, magazine articles, journalistic reportage, etc.
When a company wants to reach out to their customers, most of their marketing involves some kind of content. Even events have some kind of content strategy: taglines, activation ideas, social media posts to promote awareness – even the questions you’d ask someone on a quiz or poll are content.
The 3 biggest objectives marketers want to achieve using content are:
- Generating brand awareness
- Building credibility and trust
- Educating their audiences
To this we can add one more: Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Doing SEO to improve your page ranking is impossible without good content.
Let’s dig deeper to understand how you can achieve each of these objectives for your company.
1. How content generates brand awareness
As we have said before, people first research your brand online, which means they read something about you before deciding to do business with you. So, making sure that they’re reading the right things about you, your company and your products is crucial.
This is why you need to position your brand effectively online and then make a plan to increase brand awareness. Writing blogs, ‘how-to’ articles and simple, short guides are a great way to do this.
2. How to build trust online
When you want help, you go to the experts. So, in your field, if you want your customers to come to you first, you need to establish yourself as that expert.
Using your knowledge and expertise about your industry, you need to share your thoughts and expert tips with your customers so that they start trusting you more, and viewing your opinions and ideas as credible. This is called thought leadership: using your personal views to establish yourself as a leader and expert.
Writing good content is one of the best ways to break through the noise as a thought leader, helping you build credibility and establishing trust.
3. Best ways to educate customers
If you have a product or a service, the best way to get customers is to actually educate them first about precisely what you do or what your products are. Again, writing effective blogs, social media posts and simple, short visuals or videos are the best ways to educate your customers.
More importantly, people go through different stages before they are finally ready to buy your product or service: these stages form what’s called the ‘sales funnel’. You need to provide the right information for each stage of the sales funnel to properly convince your customers.
4. Why content is crucial for SEO
There are nearly 2 billion websites on the internet currently. Out of these, some 200 million are active at any given point of time.1 How does Google know which website to show for a particular search result? Content.
Google’s algorithms read both on-page and off-page content to understand the context behind each website, and then rank each one according to various factors.2
This means that writing the right content on each section of your website is absolutely crucial. It is also important to constantly refresh your website content so that you have something fresh to offer your customers, and you can also target new keywords and trending search terms.
If you do this right, it is one of the most effective – and long-lasting – ways to grow your business online.
These are the 4 crucial ways in which content can help you grow your business online.
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References:
- Internet Live Stats, Total Number of Websites
- Google, How Search Works
- The Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing Insights for 2022
