Today literally every company has come to terms with the sheer popularity and dominance of the digital online world among its target customers. Internet has simply become too ubiquitous for companies to ignore its impact on its topline. Acknowledging this reality, companies cutting across industries over the years have embraced content marketing to push up their topline and sales. According to Forbes Advisor’s content marketing survey 2024, almost 36% businesses in the US allocate nearly 10% to 29% of their budget to content marketing.
To dig deeper into this, we’ll look into exactly how content marketing drives sales in this latest blog post.
First and foremost, it is important to shed light on the fact that content marketing does not try to hard sell your product and services. It is not really a sales-oriented strategy. Despite this it can still push up your sales numbers in a big way.
Let us first talk about content marketing. What’s is its precise definition. Many people who are naively aware about content marketing believe that it is all about random blogging, social media posting, writing e-books, whitepapers so and so forth. But this is not what content marketing really is. The problem with this shallow definition is that it does not reflect the positive impact it could have on your customers.
At the heart of it, content marketing is a long-term strategy that solely focuses on building an enduring and long-term relationship with your target customer by delivering them consistently high-quality content. Conventionally, a content becomes high-quality when it tries to solve the customer’s pain-point, educates them about your product or services or emotionally resonates with them.
Related Article: Content Marketing for SaaS Companies
As it tries to educate and solve the pain-point, it offers several benefits that indirectly helps in shoring up your sales numbers. We will look into these benefits in great detail in the coming section.
Important Takeaways
Before going ahead, let us briefly run through some important takeaways from the above definition.
- Content marketing does not offer instant results. It is long-term strategy.
- It does not hard sell products and services. Rather it tries to build long-term relationship with your target customers.
- To achieve desirable results, high quality content has to be delivered consistently rather than in random or unplanned manner.
How content marketing drives sales?
Let us now finally look into how content marketing can positively impact your sales by helping in achieving even the most ambitious sales target.
Creates brand awareness and increases brand equity:
As we’d already mentioned in the above definition that content marketing strives to consistently add or offer intrinsic value to your target customers. By this content marketing tries to kill two birds with one stone. It not only increases brand awareness but also brand equity of your product or services. This is to say that your target buyers will not only become aware about your brand but also start to hold a positive perception about it as compared to your competitors. As a result, more and more target customers are likely to buy your product or services, thereby driving your sales northwards.
Encourages buyer’s purchasing decision:
While encouraging prospective buyers to make purchasing decision is one thing, content marketing can actually go one step ahead. It can even propel confused and undecided buyers towards purchasing decision. By consistently solving their pain-points, educating them and offering relevant information, content marketing seeks to convince them about the great value your product or services has to offer. Ultimately, this adds up to your sales and greatly helps in achieving your target.
Keeps your sales funnel active:
One of the unique things about content marketing is that it comprehensively covers every important step in the customer journey. Right from awareness to conversion. This keeps your sales funnels filled with prospective customers. It goes without saying that an active sales funnel always bodes well for your company’s pursuit to achieve its sales target. This also explains why content marketing succeeds in converting confused and undecided buyers.
Improves brand loyalty and customer retention:
Brand loyalty is immensely critical for achieving repeat purchases, something that every company desperately aims for. Content marketing can be a great way of achieving this critical goal. After all, it offers consistent value to customers through high quality content even after their conversion. This helps in creating enduring connection between your brand and the existing customers. Owing to this connection, they are more likely to flock to your brand when making a repeat purchase.
Increases organic traffic and lead generation:
Today Content marketing and SEO are intrinsically linked, which helps in improving your content’s visibility in search engine ranking pages. This can ultimately bring tones of organic traffic for your website, which in-turn can convert your website into a lead generation magnet. Your website could see a visible increase in form fill-ups and sign-ups.
However, as we’d already mentioned that content marketing is not a sales-oriented strategy, lead generation may not be top most priority for most content marketers. That said, it can still have hugely positive impact on lead generation.
Promotes user generated content:
One of the advantages of this particular form of digital marketing is that it actively promotes user generated content (UGC.) UGC is a form of content pertaining to your brand or service that is created by your customers, fans or followers. Since this content have been created by your customers or fans, it can act as a social proof or reliable review.
Talking specifically about their positive impact on sales, here is an interesting statistic to consider. According to survey conducted in 2018 by G2, nearly 90% B2B buyers said that they are more likely to make a purchasing decision after reading a reliable review.
Content Marketing Best Practices
To maximize the impact of content marketing on sales, you’ve to devotionally follow the best and some of the sought-after practices.
Developing comprehensive strategy:
The success of your content marketing campaign hinges on a proper and comprehensive strategy rather than randomly posting blog and social media posts. The latter is actually a recipe for failure. Here are some of the important things to be considered while trying to make a comprehensive strategy:
- Define your goals (increasing brand awareness, generating leads or increasing website traffic).
- Understanding Target audience (main pain-points, preferences & motivation).
- Identifying content types and formats that will help in effectively reaching out to your target customers (blog posts, social media posts, infographics, videos, podcasts etc).
- Creating a distribution plan, identifying the most effective and right platform for publishing and distributing your content. (Website blog section, social media platforms, email newsletters etc).
- Creating a content calendar to maintain consistency.
- Focusing on quality rather dumping content in order to increase the content volume.
Content has to be SEO optimized:
We’ve already highlighted the importance of SEO. To tell you more about it, in order to increase your product or services’ brand awareness a big chunk of your traffic will have to come from organic search. This is exactly why your content – mainly your blog posts and website content – has to be SEO optimized. It drastically increases the chances of your content’s online visibility across the search engine, in-turn also drastically increasing the prospect of enjoying a higher ROI from your online marketing efforts.
According to SEMRush’s State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report, nearly 46% content marketers claimed that using SEO leads to success in content marketing.
Create a dedicated content marketing team inclusive talent and skills:
Content marketing is very much a team game rather than pursuit of a single individual. This greatly helps in balancing quality with quantity. While creating a dedicated team might put some strain on your budget, you actually don’t need a very big team actually.
- Couple of good & experienced content writers.
- Content marketing specialist.
- Graphic designer.
- Social media specialist.
Companies with shoestring budget can certainly choose to trim the size of their team.
Make your content engaging and interactive:
Not withstanding other important factors, the success of your content marketing campaign greatly hinges on its ability to engage with your target audience. Higher the engagement, better are the chances that your content will resonate with your target customers, ultimately maximizing the positive impact on your sales.
While there are several ways to make your content engaging, the one sure way is to add high quality images and videos. Make sure that you don’t overuse them or use needlessly in your content, which can prove to be counterproductive.
Using conversational tone, being concise and including important stats with diagrams and charts wherever possible are some of the other tips that will help in making your content engaging.
Monitoring and measuring your performance:
A good content marketing strategy is incomplete without constant performance monitoring. This will help in gauging the real impact of your content on your target customers and where does your campaign stand in terms of your goals. And is there any need for any major improvement and change of strategy.
You can use free tools like Google analytics for assessing your performance, while paid tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs will be equally useful.
Conclusion:
To summarize, a successful content marketing campaign is all about getting a deep understanding of your target audience – their expectations & pain-points – followed by delivering valuable content consistently based on your insight. This not only helps in creating brand awareness but also ultimately increases your lead generation as well as sales. If done with great efficiency, it could have an enduring and long- term positive impact on your sales. However, it is important to remember that content marketing is not a destination but an ever continuing journey where perseverance and persistence assumes unparalleled importance.