What are the benefits of a long-term content marketing strategy?

Your content is your greatest asset, allowing you to capture the essence of your brand, build trust, ensure recognition, boost search engine visibility and develop an authoritative voice.

In a world saturated with marketing campaigns, a quality content output is something that consumers demand. It also promises to drive some of the most significant results.

1. Reliable, consistent content builds trust

Who would you prefer to be answering your customers’ questions: you, or a competitor? Put simply, if you’re not out there creating insightful, user-focused content, then someone else will be.

If every time a potential customer has a question relating to your products or services, your brand needs to be the offering helpful, practical hints, tips or information. This is how they remember you.

Creating content aimed at satisfying your users’ queries shows them you’ve considered their experience and are invested beyond the initial purchase.

Ultimately, this builds trust, loyalty and consistency within your audience, but it also helps with your brand’s search engine visibility - but more on that in a bit.

2. Informative content positions you as an industry authority

Where there are gaps in consumer knowledge, opportunities arise to fill them. With that, chances to position yourself as the authority in your industry.

This is usually a process which happens over time. It comes from a considered approach and content strategy across multiple touchpoints, making your expertise all encompassing and memorable at various stages of the customer journey.

Building authority may come in many forms, including...

A content hub on your website

Content hubs are similar (but superior) to your traditional blog or ‘news’ section - rather than appearing as one huge chronological list, they are grouped by themes.

Google prefers this kind of structure, as do users.

Content hubs allow you to showcase your depth of knowledge across all relevant themes, offering insight and positioning yourself as an authoritative voice. They ensure that quality content isn’t buried deeper into the website, even if it’s still relevant.

Within your content hub, you should be creating topic-based, insight-driven articles. You should dig behind the data to see what your customers are searching for and then fulfil their thirst for knowledge.

Commentary on key issues and challenges

Be mindful of staying abreast of content opportunities in key press. Anything that users see on a trusted third-party platform lends weight to your credibility.

So, if there are seasonal issues, challenges, trends or exciting developments in your sector, being the expert in question can be great for your brand.

PR profiles in key titles and trusted press

As well as hot topics and in-the-moment reactive opportunities, don’t forget to add forward planning these opportunities into your content strategy.

To get started with your public relations game, there are free journalist request tools, as well as software you can buy, which will give you a strong list of rolling pieces you could put yourself and your brand forward for.

Sometimes these are interviews, opinion pieces or set Q&As which give insight into your business and help to build that affinity with your consumers.

Links from trusted websites

If a website links to yours, then they’ve indicated that you’re a credible resource - or at least that’s how Google sees it. So, the more links (or backlinks) you can accrue from relevant websites, the better.

All of the above press opportunities are great for building such links to aid your domain authority. If Google perceives your domain to be respectable, then it’s more likely to rank it in search results. Which, of course, means great things for your brand authority, awareness and conversions.

3. Good content creates a loyal audience and boosts your sales

With all this consistency, comes trust. If your customers have a positive experience with your great content, they seek you out for more of the same.

After that initial conversion, a good user experience - perhaps with a well-thought-through behavioural email workflow - ensures that loyalty will follow. Repeatedly capturing your audience’s attention and delivering once you have it, reinforces a positive impression of your brand.

Whether through paid media, organic social media, PR, email or your website content, everything should be consistent; your brand values and tone should be present in what you create and put out to ensure you’re recognisable to your audiences as they discover you via multiple touch points.

This can boost not just the quality, but the amount of leads you receive.

When a consumer is interacting with content anywhere from your service pages, product pages, blog, social feeds or email campaigns, if they feel engaged (and got what they came for) then a well-placed call to action can be all it takes to convert. Keep the user at the heart of your content.

4. Good content increases your search engine visibility

Content and search engine optimisation (SEO) go hand in hand. Having informative, useful content on your product, service and category pages helps them to rank in search results.

As touched on earlier, we prefer content hubs over traditional blogs — they’re better for users and search engines. Content hubs have a clearly defined structure with different subsections that address a certain topic.

Connecting pages like this builds semantic relationships between pieces of content and improves topic authority, meaning Google sees your site as authoritative when it comes to a particular subject.

5. Content investment repays itself many times

If you are appearing at the top of the organic search results, you don’t need to pay to stay there — unlike with PPC. Organic search visibility is basically ‘free’ and completely earned. After all, if Google trusts you, then why can't consumers?

Refining your content strategy can yield phenomenal results. If you're interested but not sure where to start, get in touch with our content marketing experts today.