The Compelling Case for Content Marketing

In online marketing, exposure is everything. Getting the word out to a targeted audience involves more than just designing a colorful website with flashy banners, some short text, and appealing imagery. You need meaningful, compelling content that gives people a reason for visitors to come to your website and purchase your product or service.

This is the era of content marketing and there are a lot of different ways to get your content online. Below are our top five reasons for more creating more high quality Web content.

1. Reach/Target More Customers

The more great content you have on your website, the more opportunities you have to reach people online. Search engines favor those that produce the type of content users are seeking. It would be analogous to fishing. Would you rather fish with just one hook in the water, or would you rather have hundreds or thousands of deliciously baited hooks in the water?

2. Feed Your Social Networks and Build Traffic

Facebook and other social networking sites such as Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are great ways to reach and interact with people online. But what better way to stimulate conversation and reach more people that to post links to your high quality content on your social networks? It gives you something meaningful to contribute and build awareness, trust, and your brand. As an added bonus, Google rewards websites that have social signals in the search engine rankings.

3. Content Keeps Your Website Fresh

Google likes the idea of fresh Web content. This signals a website is active and needs to be regularly crawled for the search results. And nothing is worse than outdated content on a website that inaccurately informs customers and contacts. Whenever you have a new product, event, announcement or promotion, posting it on your website has multiple benefits.

4. Build More Links To Your Website

Whether it is text, images, video or graphics, the more high quality content you have on your website, the more likely it is that other websites will naturally want to link to it. This has SEO benefits and also can be used to diversify your traffic and build up your social networks and email lists.

5. Use Your Content on Other Websites

Content can also be used to build up awareness about your company on other websites. While websites need to be carefully selected, a guest post on a high quality related website about your product or service can raise awareness and provide SEO value in the form of a link back to your website.

So what are the different types of content marketing and how does it all fight together? This infographic does a good job of demonstrating the content marketing funnel and the options available.