Does content marketing really work?
It depends on how you define “work.” Content marketing won’t get the lawn mowed, and it won’t make you thinner, taller or more attractive. But content marketing can work to reach more customers, establish you as an expert in your field, promote brand loyalty, and even improve your bottom line.
Content Marketing Works in Today’s Changing World
Content marketing is changing the way businesses, organizations and individuals acquire customers. In the old days, a company would put an ad in the newspaper or do a radio spot that would broadcast the brand’s information to a wide audience of people in hopes of enticing potential clients to come to a brick-and-mortar location to purchase goods or services. This outbound approach ruled marketing for decades because it worked – magazines, TV ads and radio spots blared snippets of information to a gigantic audience of interested (and non-interested) people.
Then the internet came along and changed all that.
Successful organizations started dabbling in advertising on the internet, primarily through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This approach worked well for a while, until people decided that PPC just wasn’t working for them anymore – they were tired of impersonal snippets, and they wanted something valuable.
Content marketing provides that value, and in return, works to improve a brand’s bottom line.
Successful Business Agree – Content Marketing Works
You want the right customers to find value in your brand, and the content you provide helps them do that. Content marketing also works on a deeper level – sharing valuable information in the form of blogs, white papers and social media posts creates a bond between your organization and your consumers. Building bonds in this way helps your audience view your organization as a credible and trusted resource. In fact, 96 percent of successful marketers say that their audience views their brand as a credible and trusted resource.
Content marketing also works for many brands because it provides more bang for the buck. The costs of acquiring customers are rising across the board, but the customer acquisition cost (CAC) through content is about 15 percent less than paid CAC, for example. Furthermore, CMI says that content marketing costs 62 percent less than does outbound marketing, yet it generates three times as many leads. This means content marketing can drastically reduce what your organization spends on marketing.
At six times higher conversion rates than outbound marketing, content marketing is also significantly more effective. Content marketing also has the potential for a 7.8-fold spurt in web traffic.
To make content marketing work, though, you have to roll up your sleeves and put in a little effort. CMI found that success at content marketing relies largely on an organization’s commitment. In fact, research from CMI shows that “a strong commitment to content marketing often yields a higher level of overall success.”
The work pays off, though. A whopping 74 percent of business-to-consumer (B2C) content marketers say that their organization’s efforts at content marketing were “much more” or “somewhat more” successful in 2018 than they were the year before. Another 70 percent of business-to-business (B2B) content marketers also rated their marketing efforts as much/somewhat more success than the prior year.
Content marketing may be one of the best things you can do to boost your brand image, widen your customer base and improve your bottom line. Why? Because content marketing works.
For more information on content marketing, contact WriterAccess. Our content marketing writers and content marketing strategists can help you plan and develop a content marketing strategy that really works.
Lynn H has been a professional writer, providing exceptional content online and offline, for 20 years. In that time, she has penned thousands of articles for doctors, universities, researchers, small businesses, nursing organizations, sole proprietors and more. Lynn writes everything from blogs to white papers; her specialty is putting complex scientific concepts in simple terms. She specializes in medical writing, creating informative and engaging content for professionals in medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, medical manufacturing, chiropractics, optometry, emergency care, plastic surgery and others.
