A couple of years ago, content marketing was only used to advertise products or services through direct advertising. Call to actions like ‘Buy Now’ ‘Click Here’ ‘Shop Now’ ‘Call Today’ and many more, were used by content creators to influence in customer behavior, but as consumers needs evolved, so did marketing techniques.

Nowadays, it is not enough to have compelling call to actions on your website and some descriptive information on your products or services, instead, it is about how much information you provide and how valuable it is to your prospects and/or customers.

In recent years, the importance of content marketing has been on the rise and it is a trend that is here to stay. As of 2015, content marketing has been placed in number one as the most commercially important digital marketing trend, so if you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘content is king’ is because it really is.

But why is content marketing so important, and why should you pay more attention to it? Here are 5 reasons why:

Reason #1 – It increases traffic to your site

Whenever you build a piece of content and share it to your social media channels, it brings in traffic to your website, plus, having keywords linked within the piece to different pages on your site will help users find relevant information on your services or products that otherwise wouldn’t be able to find.

Also, linking a blog post to another blog post is a good way of promoting useful content and get users to spend more time on your site.

Reason #2 – It increases brand awareness

Updating your website’s content frequently with relevant and useful information will not only help you promote your products and services, but it will also help you promote your culture, and the reasons why your brand stands out from the crowd.

By sharing valuable content, you can make your target market think of your company when they’re looking to buy what you offer. Now, there are many ways to share your content and it doesn’t matter if you’re more of a webinar person, an email marketing campaign advocate or you have a preference to share on social media, the important thing is that you share your content in every possible way. The more you share, the more aware your customers will be of your brand.

Reason #3 – It sells knowledge and expertise

The main reason why you create frequent high-quality content is to inform your target market about the products/services you offer, but if you fail to create good content that will help solve your consumer’s questions or need for information you will also give the idea of not having the knowledge and expertise on your area.

By providing customers with helpful guides, blogs, and tips, you increase company authority in your industry. Through high-quality content marketing, you gain your customer’s respect and loyalty just for being smart.

Reason #4 – It improves customer relationships

No business can ever be successful if it doesn’t aim to build good customer relations since the beginning. Good content helps you create a bond between you and your customers.

If you create content written like a human being rather than a robot or a toneless customer service representative, you will catch your customers attention, you can even make them smile once in a while using a little bit of humor if you like.

Relationships are built on trust. Good content builds trust with customers, so whenever they need your services, they will feel more confident to contact you, and they’ll have the security that theres going to be a person on the other side who they can communicate with that’s going to provide them with what they need, instead of finding a robot.

Content marketing offers way too many benefits for businesses to ignore. It is a great way to build and reinforce your brand and voice, it set’s your business up as an expert in your field and it is also a great way to communicate with customers and build strong customer relations.

Content creation is oftentimes overlooked by business owners mostly because a good piece of content takes time to create, and time is what most business owners lack, and we get it, but if you really want to get serious about your business, there is no way you can overlook content marketing.