Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing establishes trust and credibility by providing genuine value through information and solutions that align with audience interests, unlike traditional advertising.

How does content marketing work?

Content marketing works by understanding your audience, creating compelling content, distributing across the right channels, encouraging engagement, and analyzing data to optimize performance.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing flips the script. Instead of interrupting with ads, content marketing is about sharing valuable content that helps your ideal customers. It answers relevant questions and solves real problems, bringing customers to you.

Now, you attract customers through educating, entertaining, and solving problems.

Why content marketing actually works

Traditional marketing is on its way out. Before making a purchase, most people will check out blogs, forums, and other content to find what will give them the best value. Getting their most urgent problems solved first, without spending a dime, starts to seem like pretty good value.

The numbers back this up:

Consistent blogging generates 67% more leads per month
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing
For B2B companies, content marketing has become the primary way to generate leads

Bottom line: if you're not creating content, you're invisible to people researching solutions in your space.

Where to start

Know your audience (really know them)!

You can’t solve someone’s problem if you don’t know what their problem is. So the first step is to answer these questions about your potential customers:

What keeps them up at night?
What questions are they asking Google?
What problems do they need to solve?
What do they value (family, money, success, etc.)?
What motivates them to take action?

Knowing who you're talking to is everything! A cybersecurity company selling to enterprise IT directors creates content that's completely different from one targeting small business owners. The topics, tone, and complexity—everything changes based on who you're talking to.

You also need to think about where people are in their buying journey:

Early stage: They've just realized they have a problem
Middle stage: They're comparing different solutions
Late stage: They're deciding between specific options

Each stage needs different content.

Create content that's actually valuable

Remember, quality beats quantity. Every. Single. Time.

Tips for Great Content

Some people approach this from the perspective of the three Cs of content marketing: clear, consistent, creative, credible, and customer-centric. That makes for interesting copy, but let's look at it from a bit different angle.

Make it actionable

People can use what you teach. "Improve your marketing" is useless. Step-by-step, templates, and specific tactics? That's valuable. How about "Five ways to improve your Google search ranking" or "Three steps to better Facebook Ads"?

Share your expertise

Share your unique insights, proprietary research, specific case studies, and lessons from your experience. Give your audience something they can’t find in a dozen other blogs. Consider sharing your experience with that one ad that ran at nine cents per click because of a simple change in your target audience, reworded copy, or image tweaks. Explain how you attracted five new customers because of a simple process update.

Provide problem solving

Keep it simple, straight to the point, and address the concern. And, keep it relevant. You don’t want to generate more questions. Seriously, have you ever read a how-to article only to wonder what that one obscure term actually meant, or what that software did that they mentioned but didn't explain how they utilized?

Be consistent

Establish a rhythm and stick to it! If you can’t create something every day, do what you can, but be consistent. The world moves too fast to rely on great content from three weeks ago. Yes, it's hard. Hire someone if you need to or create content early and schedule it out.

Measure what matters

You can't improve what you don't measure, so here are a couple of things to think about:

Track your traffic

Are people finding your content? Where are they coming from?

Watch for engagement

Are they actually reading it? High traffic with low engagement means your content didn't deliver on the headline.

Track conversions

Newsletter signups, lead magnet downloads, demo requests, and actual sales show that your content is working.

What’s next?

Now that you understand the value of content marketing and have a grasp of the basics, you can dig deeper into the topic and experiment in your own industry; or you can contact us and see how we can help you move forward.