Did you know that more than 70% of marketers use content marketing as part of their strategy? Repeatedly, content marketing has shown that it can be a consistent driver of sales. Not just in the short-term, but in the long-term too. Proper content marketing can help to establish a brand and catapult them from a small company to one that is generating regular sales. Let’s look at how content marketing drives sales.
Content marketing is used by marketers in a variety of ways. The goal of any content marketing strategy is to increase the visibility of a brand. This may lead to more engagements on social media, more eyes on the business, and more appearances in search engines. All of these can lead to an increase in sales.
In the modern era of marketing, content marketing has become a key driver in connecting with customers and driving sales. Content marketing is an incredibly powerful tool for B2B marketers to engage their audience, build trust and credibility, create relationships with target buyers and ultimately convert them into customers.
As a marketer, you need to understand how content marketing drives sales. In this blog post, we’ll discuss all things content marketing so that you can have clear insights into how it’s used to drive sales. So whether you’re just starting out, or already entrenched in the world of content creation, there’s something here for everyone. Let’s dive in!
What Is Content Marketing?
Truth is, content marketing is a rather broad term. However, at its heart, content marketing is about sharing and promoting content. This could be video content, written content, or infographics. Even podcasts could be part of a content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is not about explicitly promoting products and services. It is about sharing quality and fun content, for free, that can help to boost brand awareness or improve the reputation of a brand.
How Content Marketing Drives Sales
We want to give you a broad overview of how content marketing drives sales. This way, businesses can see how investment in content marketing can lead to an increase in sales, even from the lightest touch of content marketing.
Boosts The Reputation of a Brand
In the world of business, reputation is everything. When people buy products or services, they want to purchase from businesses they can trust.
Companies that invest in content marketing are much more visible. Content marketing involves sharing quality, useful content. When potential customers notice that a business has genuine knowledge about the products they are selling or is very visible through multiple content channels, then they are much more likely to make a purchase from them. The company is much more trustworthy.
This is especially important in the B2B world. One study suggested that over 60% of B2B purchasers read through content marketing material (e.g. reports, webinars, etc.) before they made their final decision. This means that good content marketing could be influencing the purchasing decisions of at least 60% of potential customers and clients.
Boosts Social Media Awareness
Content marketing on social media is more important than ever before, for a multitude of different reasons.
Firstly, businesses that invest heavily in content marketing on social media can develop a nice community around their brand. These people will regularly be engaging in content, posting comments, etc. Many of these people will either turn into customers or already are customers.
Those loyal to brands through social media will ‘share’ content that they like, putting it in front of their friends and family. A study suggested that 88% of people would trust shared content from their friends ; family more than any other form of marketing.
Of course, the more content is shared by people on social media, the more visible a brand gets.
Boosts Search Engine Position
Search engines, especially Google, absolutely thrive on content.
Search engines want their search results to be useful for the searcher. So, a website that is packed to the brim with quality content is much more likely to rank higher than a website that just has a couple of pages of sales information. Sites that are useful tend to have a far easier time ranking for more competitive keywords too.
The average website gets about 68% of its traffic through search engines, so websites should always strive to be as close to the top three ranking positions as possible.
Get Your Content In Front Of Your Target Market
Any content marketing strategy will look at how pieces of content can be put in front of the target market for the business. While social media really helps here, having quality pieces of content posted on websites in the same niche (not competitors) can drastically improve the number of people that know about a business. The link will even help with SEO.
Once a business is deep into its content marketing strategy, sites in the same niche may start to pick up on a few articles naturally. They will link to them, boosting the profile of a business without that business really needing to do anything. Again, more eyes on the content mean more potential sales.
Boost Conversions From Leads
Recent studies have indicated that it is far, far easier to generate leads from a solid content marketing strategy than it is to pick up leads using more traditional marketing methods.
This study indicated that you could gain 300% more leads from content marketing at a far lower price than traditional marketing methods. This means more sales for a far, far lower cost (as much as 60% of cash saved).
Invest in Content Marketing Today
Businesses need to invest in content marketing to help drive sales. It’s one of the best methods for boosting sales. There’s a reason why all the big companies in the world are doing it. And it’s the reason why this is the go-to marketing method for any business looking to increase leads. The best part? It doesn’t even cost that much to get started. It is not only one of the most effective forms of marketing but one of the most affordable too.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing is truly the way forward for any business wanting to drive sales. If done correctly, it can be the difference between a small failing business and a booming success story! There are plenty of tools available that make content creation easy and ensure your content reaches the right people at the right time.
Focus on what works best for your company and brand and reach out to customers in smart ways. And if you need assistance, the team here at Schubert b2b can help.
