Using Content as a Marketing Strategy

by Debbie Burgin

If you’re currently marketing your business online and haven’t put much thought into using content as a marketing strategy on your website/blog, you might be making an expensive mistake.

What IS “content”?

Well, more simply put, “content” is what’s known as blog posts, or articles…anything in which you’d be sharing information with others about some aspect of your business.

The easiest way to provide content to prospective customers would be by way of a blog.

Whether or not your company has a website, you should absolutely have a blog to accompany it.

Why?

Some business owners think that it’s enough to have a website to display their products or services. And ‘back in the day’, that was probably true.

But in this, the age of ‘inbound marketing’, where your potential customer is going to likely hop online to search for information about a product or service before he/she actually goes out and buys it, you want them to find you because of the information that you’ve provided them.

The content on your website is valuable for a number of reasons. It gives visitors to your website their first impression of your business and the products and services you have to offer. In addition, well written content can be instrumental in selling your products and services to your potential customers.

Well written copy can also let your site visitor know that you’re knowledgeable in your industry, thereby giving them the confidence that they need to dig a little deeper into how you can best service their needs with what you have to offer.

The content on your website can also influence the size of the target audience you are able to reach by helping to improve your search engine rankings. With your content capable of doing so much, it’s clear that you should either be writing your own site content, or hiring a professional content writer to assist you with writing the copy for your website.

It should go without saying, but one of the most basic reasons that the quality of the content on your website is so important, is because visitors to your website will very likely form their initial opinions of your business based on the content that you put on that site. If the copy is written as if by a 5 year old, is riddled with spelling errors and doesn’t hold your visitors attention, they’ll probably leave your website at the point that all the ‘fluff’ becomes annoying.

Conversely, if the copy on your website is well written, engages the reader and promotes the products and services you offer well, your visitor is more likely to investigate the website further to learn more about the products and services and may make a purchase, or inquiry.

The content on your website is also important because it can greatly influence your search engine rankings. This is critical because high search engine rankings help your business to reach a larger audience, by coming up closer to the top of the Google search page.

Those searching the web are typically looking for information quickly and want quick results to their inquiries. Search engines understand this and write algorithms that help them to supply the most relevant websites when a user searches for a particular word or phrase. This is important to your business because those of us who conduct web searches (and who doesn’t?) realize the value of search engines and are likely to only visit websites that rank well in the search. This includes websites that rank on the first page or two of search results. Your business might sell football jerseys and you may have a well designed website, a superior inventory and excellent prices, but if your site doesn’t rank well in search engines because it’s lacking content that would help boost your Google standing, you’re missing out on a TON of free advertising.

If your website lands on the third page or lower, most visitors who search for relevant terms probably won’t visit your site because they will likely have found what they were looking for on earlier pages. This is where the content on your website becomes super important. Sites containing content that has been optimized for particular keywords will likely rank well with search engines. Hiring a writer who is skilled in writing optimized content can drastically help to improve your search engine rankings so that your site lands on those first few search result pages, therefore reaching more potential customers.

If your site doesn’t already have content that relates to your product or services, what’re you waiting for?