Content marketing is the most important element of any marketing strategy and focuses on the creation and distribution of original content that educates, inspires, or provides answers to your audience’s most important questions.  In many industries the online competition is tremendous, making content marketing more essential than ever.  If you’re not concerned about developing a solid and effective content strategy you should be, for five very important reasons.

Great content attracts new visitors to your website (or blog, social platforms, wherever you share your content).  By creating lots of quality content on a regular basis you’re using more keywords, in many cases less competitive long-tail keywords or search terms people use when searching online. Your content is more likely to be found in the search engine results pages, on social media or even forums. Informative, compelling content will attract new potential clients, especially if you produce and distribute it on a daily basis.

Content marketing increases brand awareness.  Building a trusted, reputable brand doesn’t happen overnight, but content is a huge component of building your brand.  When you think of a brand you may connect it with a logo, however, it’s your content that makes your brand stand out from the rest.  What does your brand represent, how is your company or product unique, what are your values and what is it you hope to provide your clients with that your competitors lack? Exceptional content enlightens your audience about all of these things and more, making your brand more memorable.

Awesome content generates exponentially more leads.  Whether on your company blog, social media platforms, a landing page on your website or videos, content is capable of generating more leads than you can imagine when done right.  Videos are a form of content marketing; imagine the interest of middle-aged women in a video that actually demonstrates how a product immediately smooths skin, or a blog or case study clearly detailing data and statistics supporting the effectiveness of a supplement.  This type of content is extremely powerful for lead generation.

Building relationships with your audience is important.  Your web pages, social media or blog posts, or other content can work to establish a strong relationship with your target audience and is essential to increasing leads and conversions.  Today’s consumers are savvy; they want to deal with companies they feel take a personal interest in their needs.  Developing great content helps you accomplish this goal, and establishes you as an authority in your industry.

Content is what the world wide web is made of.  Regardless of the goals content marketing helps you accomplish, it’s important in improving your SEO or search engine optimization efforts.  Search engines (particularly Google) want to deliver the best possible results to the user’s search query.  They also favor websites that provide fresh, quality content on a frequent basis. When you think about it, what does the internet consist of?  Content, whether it’s in the form of website pages, articles, blog posts, social media posts, videos, podcasts, or ebooks and white papers.

These are five of the most important reasons content marketing should be first and foremost in your overall marketing campaign. Consumers want legitimate, honest answers to their questions, trusted solutions to their problems or issues and to know the company or person they’re dealing with can be trusted to deliver results.  Content marketing can help you accomplish all of these things and so much more.