When most businesses start to do marketing for their brand, they become impatient for results. This short-term view is especially common when it comes to paid advertising.
But many business owners get impatient with content marketing as well. They misunderstand the real purpose of content marketing, and why it takes longer to ‘work’ for your business.
Unlike advertising, which may or may not turn a profit, content marketing offers intangible benefits beyond a sale.
Paid Advertising Vs. Content Marketing
It’s easy to think creating blogs, video, or audio content for your brand is a waste of time. Instead of taking the time to create valuable content that people will engage with, many companies only focus on paid advertisements.
The rationale is that advertisements will bring immediate results for a fixed amount of money. If your ads attract interest, then you can potentially sell the customer immediately.
The biggest issue with paid advertising is that you have to keep doing it forever. It builds no organic rankings for your brand, and it only attracts transactional customers.
Customers who click on ads very rarely remember how they found your website. They don’t return to the site more than once, so if they don’t buy, you lose the sale. Unless you keep retargeting them with ads, there is no value in them visiting your site at all.
The Hidden Benefits of Content Marketing
In contrast to paid advertising, content marketing builds up a relationship by positioning your company as a trusted advisor. It may not have immediate results, but it works to keep customers coming back.
When people find your site through an article, a video, or through a podcast, they are visiting because you offer them something or of value.
Also, content marketing is key to increasing your organic traffic on Google. Without updated content on your website, you won’t rank for keywords, or increase domain authority.
Content Marketing Case Study: Two Years for 10x Growth
I have worked on several businesses’ content marketing for several years, and have seen impressive results. Whenever I start working with a new person, I explain that content creation and content marketing is a long-term approach to growing a brand.
Recently, I completed two years of weekly content writing for a client in a competitive industry. We worked out a plan for me to create 2-3 new written pieces per week, and to focus on keywords that were important for their customers. We wrote a lot based on the business’ knowledge base, as well as researching topics that we knew would help.
Here are the statistics when we began in March 2018 (according to Spyfu reports):
At that stage, the business had been online for over eight years, but they had only managed to reach 227 keywords for their industry. The typical unique visitors per week to the site were approximately 800 people.
After a year of working together and creating new content every week, we had doubled the volume of keywords the site was ranking for to 472. The site visits had also increased to close to 2000 unique visits per week.
Midway through the second year, we started to see exponential growth. Several of the content pieces received snippets in Google, and a lot of the blog articles began to rank on the first page of Google.
After two full years of content marketing, here were the results:
The keywords the site was ranking for were almost ten times as high at 1900 keywords. Amazingly unique visitors were at nearly 5,000 per week.
In just two years of consistent content marketing, we managed to create almost ten times the organic keyword rankings, and increase unique site visitors by five times.
Patience and Persistence Bring Traffic
More than anything else, it’s essential not to overestimate the short-term results of your marketing. If you need customers today, then it can be a good idea to do some pay-per-click marketing.
But you should also commit to a long-term content marketing plan. This approach is the only way that you will consistently grow your organic reach and be able to reduce your advertising spend.
Content marketing is not easy to start. It’s even hard to keep doing it consistently. And that’s precisely why so few companies can benefit from it.
But those businesses that take the time put together a content calendar, and commit to a week content creation schedule will seem a boom in traffic over time.
If you are planning to run your business for a long time, it makes sense to invest in building your organic search rankings. Same as you invest in new equipment, team training, you should also invest in your brand. This long-term mindset will reap benefits, and help you stand out from your competitors, as long as you stay the course.