Marketing approaches today are much different than they were in the past.
Online access opened up a whole new world for marketers, with content needs quickly rising to the top of their strategies.
Who doesn’t remember the “content is king” phrase that caught on starting back in the mid-1990s?
Bill Gates created that now-famous phrase, ushering in the World Wide Web and a new way of content production and consumption for consumers.
But is that old news? The answer is no.
Now, more than 25 years later, content most certainly still is king and will continue to be so long into the future. What that content looks like may change, but make no mistake. It still reigns.
The best content marketing strategists today understand this and continually create, optimize, update, and modify content for the highest effect.
If you want to know exactly why content is still king, you came to the right place. Keep reading!
7 Top Reasons Why Content is King
So, why is content still king? Why is it still so vital to your marketing efforts? Here are 7 reasons.
1. Builds an Audience
Today’s consumers are looking for answers to their questions, solutions to their problems, and information that can help guide them along their buyer’s journey.
Content can provide all of this for them and can help you build your audience.
But first, in the crazy overcrowding of the online world, your organization needs consumers to find you somehow.
When a user enters questions or searches on specific keywords, you can expect them to look through the resulting search results until one captures their attention.
What this basically means for you is that, with high-quality and SEO-optimized content, you have a higher chance of appearing in those search results and gaining a bigger audience.
Examples of the types of content that may strongly resonate with users and make them a part of your audience include:
- How-to guides.
- Information visuals such as infographics.
- Educational and entertaining blog posts.
- Product or service comparisons.
Content overall can be used to build an audience for what your brand, product, or service can offer.
2. Improves Trust in Your Brand
Your content can also build authority and improve trust in your brand in ways that other sales campaign tools can’t.
To help boost trust in your brand today, do these three specific things.
Create and share only relevant content
Address your customer’s pain points, interests, wants, or needs. Express your mission, highlight the usefulness of your products or services, or include any other helpful information that in some way relates back to you.
Concentrate on value, not promotion
Develop trust by providing value in your content and avoiding constant promotion of your brand, products, services, or events. Offer insights into your industry, focus on one specific topic or customer pain point, and more.
Focus on authenticity
Consumers prefer interacting with authentic brands today. To show your authenticity, develop your brand personality and voice, share client experiences and stories, and find more ways to directly engage with customers.
3. Helps You Understand Your Audience
To increase your number of customers, conversions, and sales, you need to understand your audience. Content can help with this.
By trying out different content types and analyzing the results, you can better meet the needs of your targeted audience at different stages along the buyer’s journey.
- Where do they consume most of your content? Is it social media or your blog posts?
- What keywords are attracting the most attention?
- How do visitors get to your website? Is it from organic search results or backlinks on another website?
- Are they engaging with your content? If so, in what ways?
All of these can provide information on your audience, information you can use to better understand their interests, needs, wants, and pain points.
In turn, you can create more valuable content going forward.
4. Adds Value to Your Product or Service
Content can add value to your product or service in a number of ways.
Use it to solve a reader’s problem, one they experience in daily life, or teach the reader something completely new.
Include different types of content, such as:
- How-to videos
- Step-by-step guides
- Webinars
- Tutorials
- Question and answer segments
By doing so, you provide value, and this can shine a light on your brand, making it more interesting.
Then, once your audience better understands and appreciates your product or service, they are more likely to make a purchase.
5. Increases Traffic Because It Improves SEO and EAT
An important purpose for your content is to increase traffic to your website. Without more traffic, conversions and sales levels can become static and even drop.
What you need to bring more traffic in is the right content to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
The way Google ranks online content for search results relies on its EAT characteristics.
EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, three characteristics of what searchers are seeking in the results that Google returns for each query.
By successfully using your content to display your authority and trustworthiness, search engine algorithms will notice, and this will improve your SEO and lead to an increase in traffic to your website.
6. Serves as Leverage for Influencer Connections
Influencer Marketing continues to be beneficial to your brand today. One way to connect is through your content.
Use your content as leverage, showcasing your brand’s active culture and values, as this can serve as a way to connect with certain influencers.
Influencers are trusted by their devoted followers, so connecting and collaborating with them can boost your brand’s authority.
These influencers will promote your brand’s content and, in turn, expose you to a broader audience.
Just be sure the influencer is active in your industry or niche or in some way relates to what you offer.
7. Boosts User Engagement
Content can boost user engagement.
When your content is relevant, and something resonates with your readers, they are more likely to spend time engaging with it.
Regularly scheduling social media posts and incorporating more interactive content can help boost user engagement even higher.
Make it super easy to engage with, such as with likes, comments, and shares, and include other engagement opportunities, such as signing up for newsletters or emails.
A boost in user engagement can benefit you in several ways, including:
- Lower bounce rates.
- Increase website dwell time.
- Gain new or returning visitors.
- Increase the number of page views.
- Boost conversions.
What is the Basis for Relevant Content?
Now you know that content is still king. But how do you identify its greatness?
The basis for relevant content includes the following:
Quality
The top criterion for relevant content is quality. Quality content offers value to your readers and builds trust.
It is what viewers want to see and can lead to higher conversions and sales for your organization.
In other words, it speaks to your reader’s needs and wants and is useful, accurate, and clear on user intent.
Uniqueness
Unique content is original content, unduplicated elsewhere.
Its uniqueness plays a vital role in search engine rankings, where algorithms highly rate content that is unduplicated.
The algorithms can also penalize any websites that post duplicated content.
Targets a Specific Group
Relevant content is content geared toward specific groups instead of broad audiences.
It is meant to connect with a specific group. Instead of generic or vague messaging, relevant content is more focused, with a distinct purpose.
Targeting a specific group requires you to break down your market into customer segments.
The most commonly used types of customer segmentation include:
- Demographic
- Geographic
- Behavioral
- Psychographic segmentation
Entertains and Informs
Today, two important characteristics of relevant content are its ability to entertain and inform. Let’s look at each one separately.
Informative content adds value and addresses the reader’s interests, wants, or needs. You can also think of it as educational content.
Entertaining content adds an element of lightness or playfulness and provides a way to connect with readers on a more personal level, keeping them engaged longer.
When combined, the informative appeals to a reader’s rationality, while the entertaining parts appeal more to the emotions of the reader.
Is Reader-Friendly, Error Free, and Well-Structured
Creating a reader-friendly experience with well-structured content that is error-free results in relevant content.
The readability of your content is key to attracting and holding the attention of your visitor.
So too is the structure of that content, such as the inclusion of headings, subheadings, numbered or bulleted lists, visual elements, and shorter paragraphs, all making your content more scannable.
Structure also includes how you present the information in a logical sequence or format that readers can easily follow.
Relevant content is also error-free. Errors can serve as distractions to the reader, lower your authority, and generally annoy your visitors and push them away.
Optimized for Search Engines
Without optimization, your content loses the potential to reach a wider audience that potentially needs what you have to offer.
Non-optimized content also fails to serve your organization or brand adequately. For these reasons, relevant content is always optimized for search engines.
Wrap Up
Content continues to reign as the centerpiece of the best marketing plans today.
Use it to build a bigger audience, improve trust, understand customers, increase traffic, connect with influencers, and boost engagement with your brand.
The key is to make your content relevant to your audience, which includes maximizing the SEO potential, so a wider audience can find you.
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