Unique, Informative Content: Your Biggest Marketing Tool

Content marketing is huge. Really huge. According to a study by CMI in 2014, 92% of marketers now use content marketing as a part of their strategy. Out of those that used content marketing, 82% used 10 or more content marketing tactics. These facts combined tell you two things.

Content marketing is becoming one of the most popular marketing strategies.
The marketers who do use it use it A LOT.

This shift in focus towards content marketing is for three good reasons.

It increases search engine rankings
It sets you apart as an industry voice
It generates customer trust

Reason 1: SEO

The first reason that many marketers have shifted their focus towards generating great content is simple: an increase in search engine rankings. The theory is this: if you write unique and informative content, Google will rank you higher than your competitors. It makes sense. Google crawls websites. The crawlers determine whether or not you provide value to a topic. If you provide a lot of value, you will rank highly when someone searches for that topic.

In the same study linked above, 34% of content marketers gauged their success with how high Google ranked them.

A decent search engine ranking can be gained through technical SEO. However, to get on page one you have to set yourself apart from the competition, who also have perfect technical SEO. The key to that is content marketing. Neil Patel wrote more in depth about this specific topic at KISSMetrics.

Reason 2: Industry Voice

The second reason for the shift in focus is that being an industry voice pays off. It builds trust in your customers, which we’ll talk about next. This is also sometimes called “growing your brand”. Through writing content that your client or customer base uses on a regular basis you become an asset in your niche. Let’s use a small niche as an example: binaural microphone sellers. By providing information on how to set up binaural microphones, what makes a good binaural microphone, and what sets their microphones apart, they are going to set themselves up to be an industry voice in their niche. This means that whenever an artist posts on a forum “hey, where can I get a good binaural mic?” users will reply “oh there’s a really good guide on that here” and link to your website.

82% of prospects say content targeted to their industry is more valuable.

Reason 3: Customer Trust

The third, and most important benefit to unique and informative content marketing is that it generates customer trust. It is increasingly difficult to find reliable sources of information on the internet. By curating the content you provide to your customers, you will easily put yourself ahead of the competition. You will look and sound like you know what you are doing better than your competitors. This is key in increasing sales and growing your business’s brand.

The Content Standard Triangle

There are 3 standards that make content better. We like to call this the content standard triangle.

Point 1: It has to be unique!

Content that’s unique makes you stand apart. It makes you look like an industry leader, rather than a follower. If your competitors are all writing about one topic there are several ways you can approach this standard. One way is through finding the gap. If you were looking for information on your niche, what questions would be left unanswered by their content? Another way to keep this standard is to write it better. Do your competitors have typos in their articles? Do they use poor sentence structure? Do they use legitimate sources? Find ways that you can make your content unique through it’s sheer awesomeness.

Point 2: It has to be informative!

Content that’s informative provides a great amount of value to your customer. Great content will do the work for your customers. Neil Patel did an A/B test and found that long form content boosted both the quality of his leads, and the amount. Product guides, long form analysis, blog posts, anything that can be written with over 1000 words provides great results.

Point 3: It has to be necessary!

After you’ve performed business and marketing analysis, you should know your audience. If you think long and hard about this audience, you will be able to write content that they need. In certain businesses you can even use a content drip model through a membership website. Every piece of content that you write should be something that your target audience needs. If you sell stethoscopes, write research studies for doctors. If you sell bee hives, give your customer a top 5 list of the best bee hive models you sell. What information do your customers need to know when they are interested in what your business does?

In summary…

Each of these aspects of content marketing makes it one of the fastest growing marketing strategies today. Content marketing generates a great return on investment through it’s benefits with SEO, branding and trust. In order to write content that give you this return on investment, you need to write content that’s unique, informative, and finely tuned to what your clients or customers need.

Hype Online Marketing currently offers a fantastic all-around content writing service. This service is included in the Local Online Marketing & SEO plan. Our professionals work hard to deliver content that provides all of the benefits outlined in this post. We are confident that our content writing service will…