Before I dive into the details, some of you might be wondering:

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the use of content – emails, tweets, landing pages, product descriptions, blog posts – to help meet a marketing goal for your organization or business. That marketing goal could be acquisition of potential customers, retention of existing customers, increasing brand awareness, increasing or improving product recognition, or nearly anything else.

How can content marketing benefit my business?

Some companies are reluctant to focus on content marketing because it can be difficult to understand the benefits of content marketing. In truth, however, there are many benefits of content marketing. After all, content is king, and there are both tangible and intangible benefits to content marketing.

The Intangible Benefits of Content Marketing

Strong brand awareness

Creating content gives your audience something to talk about. When they’re talking about your organization or company, they’re teaching each other about you or your company, passing referrals and recommendations and links around in the process. This is intangible marketing gold.

Respect and industry admiration

You’ll need to establish trust first, but once you have proven your knowledge, you can become the reliable source of information in your niche where your audience or prospects can turn to for clear advice or resources. The authority you gain then transfers to your products and services and makes it more likely that customers will choose you over your competition.

Indirect customer conversations

If you create content that targets potential customers or clients, you’re bridging the gap between those people and your products or services, making it more likely they will buy from you or hire you in the future.

The Tangible Benefits of Content Marketing

Site traffic

If you create great content, more people will come to your site, where they will hopefully also find information about your company and your products/services.

Improved SEO

Great content attracts editorial links which tell Google that you are important and authoritative. Google will also crawl your site more frequently and have a better idea of what you are about and what products and services you provide.

Direct customer conversions

Occasionally, great content actually yields a direct customer conversion.