Having a website for your business is a step toward the right decision. However, what good is a website if no one pays it a visit? A website is your online business address. If you want your business to grow, you must bring people to your website. In particular, you should encourage people to visit your website.

The question is “how”?

Some unscrupulous marketing experts may advise you to buy an e-mail list; however, doing so is unethical and does not conform to acceptable business practices. Some may tell you to be aggressive and pay for traffic by spending on paid ads.

If you follow any of these strategies, you may probably run out of money before you see any result.

An effective and efficient option is to implement content marketing. It involves transitioning prospects through different stages within the sales funnel. Thus, referring to content marketing as a process is more accurate than seeing it as a strategy.

However, content marketing requires strategy because its components must be in place before you can run this process. The central part of this process is a website, which is your place of business on the World Wide Web. Then, you have to set up social media accounts and explore other Internet communities that can serve as your distribution channels.

Overall, content marketing operates like the solar system. You have a website at the center of the multitude of strategies, techniques, and avenues that are directed to generate inbound traffic for your site.

1. Generates Inbound Traffic

An effective strategy to build inbound traffic is to craft great content consistently. Let’s take blogging for example.

Every time you post a new blog translates to one additional indexed page on your website. Thus, a new opportunity is created for your website to be found and appear on the search engines results page or SERP.

Search engines, particularly Google, encourage websites to post fresh and relevant content frequently. By posting blogs on a regular basis, you are sending a signal to search engines that your website is active.

Social media is a medium that you should use to distribute your blogs. Establish a regular schedule for posting blogs on at least three social media networks. Twitter is great for acquiring an audience; Facebook’s large community is perfect for engagement, whereas LinkedIn can be used to expand your connections.

Content that is engaging and compelling enough to encourage readers to share can lead to increased website visits.

2. Enhance Your Online Reputation

As an entrepreneur, how often have you felt your ideas should be heard? How many times have you come across an article that made you think, “I have a better solution than that!”? A content strategy, such as blogging, provides the platform to highlight your expertise and enhance your online reputation.

The first rule in creating content is to address issues or needs that concern your audience. Your content can help establish your credibility as an expert in the industry by presenting options, solutions, and ideas that deliver great value to your audience.

Great content in the virtual world can create a snowball effect that spreads faster than its counterpart in reality. Sharing is done with a tap of a keypad or a click of the mouse. People will not share your content if they don’t find a measure of value in it.

An important rule to keep in mind when creating content is to write less about what you do and more about what you can do for your audience. People look for content that offers solutions and not those that feature personalities.

3. Builds Your Brand

The success of your business may ultimately lie in how effectively you build your brand.

Branding is important because it establishes who you are in the industry. A good branding strategy generates a very important quality for the long-term success of every business: recall.

The best way to build your brand is to establish trust with your market. An ad is not enough. It has too many components to be considered in a protracted format; thus, the message can be easily misinterpreted.

With content marketing techniques, you have many tools at your disposal to design campaigns that can drive your brand further into the market’s consciousness. You can create videos or host podcasts that you can post on your website and link to various social media websites.

4. Improves Lead Generation

Statistics show that B2B marketers who use blogs generate increased leads by 67%.

People who come across great content would want more. They will openly and willingly follow the person who authored the blog or post. If you consistently create engaging and relevant content and remain active online, you can attract new followers significantly.

Thus, the people who visit your website become qualified leads through your blogs. They openly and willingly decide to explore your website because they are compelled by the content of your blog post.

This scenario shows the strength of content marketing over traditional marketing strategies. Content marketing is non-intrusive; it does not inundate people with collaterals that do not address a specific need. Great content compels people to discover your value proposition.

5. Increase Sales Conversion

If you have a great proportion of qualified leads entering your sales funnel, conversions increase accordingly. You can double your website conversion rates statistically through inbound strategies.

Visitors are converted from “strangers” to “leads” through the website content. They have an expectation when they visit your site because the content has an influenced perception.

The focus now shifts from lead generation to sales conversion. The features and components of your website must come together to support your content. These features and components include calls-to-action, social sharing, sign-up buttons, and landing pages.

If you are an e-commerce retailer, your ordering page must be easy to navigate, customer friendly, and efficient.

6. Creates Affordable Advertising Opportunities

Setting up a blog page on your website and linking content to various social media channels and blogging communities are efficient and affordable ways to create advertising opportunities.

By contrast, creating and conceptualizing ads as well as printing marketing collateral entail increased expenses with very limited visibility. Traditional marketing is more expensive and more efficient than content marketing.

How sure are you that the posters and flyers that you produce are read and patronized? How confident are you that the advertorial you paid for yields enough returns to justify the investment?

Content marketing not only costs less than traditional marketing but also provides value to people catered by it. When you develop a large following, many companies want to advertise with you.

7. Achieves Long-Term Results

Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing presents a flexible approach to promoting your business.

Markets constantly evolve; people’s tastes and preferences have become increasingly sensitive because information can be easily accessed via the Internet. Content marketing puts you in the driver’s seat and allows you to take different avenues while remaining on course.

You can revise your content marketing strategy simply by staying updated with industry developments. Put simply, the flexibility of content marketing allows you to reinvent your business while staying relevant to your audience.

8. Serves as an Effective Way To Grow Your Audience

Another advantage of content marketing over traditional marketing is that the former allows you to reach a wide audience.

Your target audience has different needs. By addressing these needs frequently through your content, you can expand your coverage to other people who have similar concerns. Once they put out a search query, your content may appear high on the SERP.

Through regular engagement, readers who have remained passive can see you as a proprietor who is genuinely passionate about his/her business and committed to serving the best interests of the subscribers. Regular engagement encourages them to join and become part of your community.

9. Provides an Efficient Method To Market Your Products or Services

The only thing that you produce is content. You don’t have to produce hardcopy collaterals or point-of-purchase materials. How you quantify your time essentially determines the cost of content marketing.

The avenues for distribution, namely, social media, blogging communities, online directories, and contribution sites, do not cost a cent. Everything can be delivered with a press of a keypad or a click of the mouse.

You don’t have to waste paper, and results can be tracked with online analytics. You can even automate social media posting schedules via online programs, such as Sprout Social.

10. Builds Solid Relationships With Your Audience

With the evolution of the Internet and social media, the relationship with the customer does not end with a sale or with a sign-up.

Great website content helps you maintain your customer or subscriber base by building solid relationships. Consistent posting of relevant content becomes a testimony to not only your expertise but also who you are.

You can accomplish this goal by sharing your experiences as a way to empathize with your audience. Another way is by courteously engaging with them through comments or e-mail.

Engagement is the most valuable by-product of social media. It creates a forum for you to give immediate solutions to the issues raised by your audience.

11. Improves Company Culture

One of the strongest forces that catapult businesses toward success is alignment. For organizations, it means having people who are aligned with values, purpose, and vision.

What better way to cultivate alignment than have your people share in creating content? Open a subpage on your website that features blogs and content from your employees. Of course, these should be subject to guidelines and review, but allow them the venue to share their thoughts and ideas with your market.

This simple strategy of giving employees a voice within the organization builds a strong sense of trust and a feeling of family. It sends the message that you value their opinions and appreciate their contributions to the success of the business.

12. Attracts Right-Fit Opportunities

The people and businesses gravitate toward your content because they understand your message and they are aligned with your purpose and vision.

Companies that would want to connect with you are those who believe that you are the right fit for their proposition. People who reach out to you are those who want to be part of your organization.

Right-fit relationships are ideal for businesses because these relationships promote shared interests. Each party looks after the interest of the other. Getting things done and accomplishing goals is easy when everyone in the value chain moves at the same pace and moves toward a single destination.

13. Success Applies to EVERY Industry!

It doesn’t matter if you are in the apparel retail industry or actively involved with the organization of bird watchers. Content marketing works for your business regardless of industry.

Your success depends on the information that you put out and how it is presented. Similar to any other endeavor, content marketing requires time, effort, and resources. If you don’t give your best, you will not yield the results that you want.

Do not underestimate what content marketing can do for your business. If you are unsure of how to go about it or if you are not confident in your writing skills, do not hesitate to hire someone who can.

14. Enhances Customer Experience

The best way to determine what your audience wants or needs is by engaging with them. Brilliant and compelling contents open the doors to engagement.

When someone placed a comment on your content, whether it is favorable or not, always keep in mind that he/she took the time to bring his/her concern or opinion to your attention. Hence, you should value every comment regardless of tone or delivery. Although you do not have to act upon every comment or suggestion that comes your way, you should acknowledge them as valuable resources.

A comment initiates engagement which in turn sets the potential for a relationship to be established. Customers or Subscribers always value responses to their comments. It is a sign of courtesy and respect.

15. Levels the Playing Field Versus the Giants

Content-based marketing takes a personal approach to reach your market. You’re not focusing on what your competitors can do. Your focus is on what you can offer to your market or audience.

The reason is that you are catering to a different audience or buyer persona. If you are a retailer of athletic shoes without the resources of Nike or Under Armour to sign up endorsers, why would you create content about a signature line?

Your focus should be on how your shoes can benefit its user. If the strongest value proposition of your product is customization, write content about the benefits of wearing precisely fitted shoes for athletic performance.

16. Great Content is Sustainable

What happens to a classified ad once it has been published? How about the flyers that have run over the course of the promotional period? They will find their way into the recycling bin for proper disposal.

On the contrary, great content can be recycled and reused while maintaining its effectiveness. This is because great content is evergreen; it can stand the test of time. If you have written a valuable blog post on your life experiences as an entrepreneur, other budding entrepreneurs will still find great value in your content after 5 to 10 years since it was written.

Evergreen content can be reposted after a few months because it can surely find a whole new audience. Remember, markets are forever dynamic. Their components and demographics are in a constant state of change, thanks in large part to social media.

Invest in Content

Although traditional marketing and outbound marketing methods still have their place within a holistic marketing campaign, content marketing will clearly be the preferred platform of the future.

In the past years, companies and businesses that had to initiate budget cuts would drop the axe on marketing programs because results routinely underperformed, and progress was difficult to track.

With content marketing, none of these deficiencies exists. It does not require the budget of a traditional marketing approach. It is evergreen, nonintrusive, and sustainable, and results can be measured.

The biggest investment for a content marketing campaign is time and dedicated human effort. However, it is a process where the dividends you reap are far greater than what you have invested. It is an approach to marketing that will continue to benefit your business in the years ahead.