Top 5 reasons companies use content marketing to draw leads

I’m sure you’ve heard of the term content marketing many times but perhaps never knew what it was and how to use it. Content and marketing of your content holds great potential in reaching your audience, drawing leads, improving your business’s performance and boosting sales.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is defined as:

‘a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.’

 (https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/)

This definition paints a very clear picture of content marketing and how it is relevant to all companies. It does not specify that the content is only about your company, service or product but that is relevant to the audience the company is targeting.

This definition is clear that content marketing contributes to profitable customer actions. Therefore, by providing valuable and relevant content to your audience, the company will generate more leads for the purpose of boosting sales and profits.

Top 5 reasons to use content marketing to generate leads

1. Audience Connections

As already shown previously, content is created to provide relevant and valuable information to the audience. As a company you are able to target your audience in a less formal way, more conversational and start to build a relationship with your customer. This relationship contributes to customer loyalty and trust.

In addition, the quality, value and consistency of the content also aids building strong relationships with customers. They begin to trust the brand, trust the information and choose to visit you when they have a problem or need answers.

2. Reach

As a result of becoming a trusted, valued and relatable source to the companies target audience, the potential reach is also increased. This happens in a few ways. Firstly, the authority and expertise of your website is increased and Google will recognise this. Therefore, over time your website will rank higher in Google.

This has proved to be very useful in gaining more traffic and therefore, the content has gained more leads and potential sales.

Secondly, building a strong and trusted connection with the audience can increase sharing, commenting, and engagement with the content. This is also extremely advantageous, especially on social media, as content with better engagement is shown higher in newsfeeds.

3. Expense

Another reason that companies use content marketing to draw leads is the possibility of minimal expense. Thankfully, with many social medias and search engines content can be promoted and shared for free. This is especially valuable when expenses are limited. Therefore, an appropriate social media strategy is essential to take advantage of the free exposure the company can obtain.

This was proved by a study conducted by Kapost in collaboration with Eloqua. This proved that content marketing performed better than paid search and at a much lower cost.

In addition, by creating excellent relationships with the audience, they may also sign up for the email list. The email list is one of the most valuable customer information databases you will have because it will not be effected by changes in algorithms or policies, like on various social medias. Therefore, the company has the ability to reach all customers on the list, for free most of the time, and gain more leads.

4. The Power of Blogging

Blogging is only one way of creating content online for business. The evidence that blogging is one the best ways to increase leads is overwhelming. Take a look at a few of these statistics from Impact:

• Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than small businesses that do not blog.
• 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging.
• 61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog.
• Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors.

This is clear evidence that blog content marketing is essential in growing leads because of its versatility, its visibility and its ability to attract so many more people to the website and ultimately generate more leads.

5. Higher Conversions

All of these factors of content marketing ultimately lead to higher conversion rates. By building a connection to your audience, sharing the content and promoting it, using email to directly target the audience and improving search engine ranking, the company can easily convert warm leads to sales leads.

Increase in brand awareness, loyalty and trust greatly contribute to increasing conversion rates from content generated leads.

Conclusion

Ultimately, content marketing is a huge contributor to lead generation for business and is recommended to all businesses to implement it. The benefits it brings to the company will improve performance across the board. Therefore, using content marketing to generate more leads boosts sales, profits and conversions of the business on a whole.

 

Author Bio: Ellie Richards is an online Marketing Manager for PhD Writing company Original PhD. She specialises in research, content and article writing on various topics, including Education, Marketing, and Technology.