In this episode of the Content Marketing Podcast, Wilson answers one of the toughest questions…
One of the most common questions that we come across when speaking with our clients is whether or not they can get a solid ROI (return on investment) from content marketing. How do I know that my investment in content will guarantee a positive return?
Well…the simple answer is that content marketing works, but we get it. You want to see results from investing in content marketing and we’ll be breaking down 10 ways content marketing can generate a solid return on investment for your business or product.
Content marketing will help you acquire new users
Everyone is obsessed with customer acquisition and content marketing is one of the best channels to acquire new users both long term and short term. You can acquire new customers short term by leveraging content promotion, community engagement, content submission, and paid acquisition channels.
For the long term, your SEO and content assets can act as evergreen content for a domino SEO effect. Imagine not having to spend a dollar on paid ads and still have organic traffic drive you more customers? Isn’t that the ideal situation for every company?
As long as the articles rank well in Google and generate a consistent stream of relevant inbound traffic, there’s no reason why users won’t be visiting your website.
And as long as you promote the functionality of your product within those articles – there’s almost no way for you to not get conversions.
Now, the quality and the approach of the content matter a lot. Having long-form educational articles will help your customers understand more about your offerings and build trust around your brand. Educating your customers goes a long way. You want to be able to spark that “aha I need this!” moment in them.
Content marketing improves customer retention
You spent all that effort to acquire a new customer, now it’s time to keep them engaged. Remember how we mentioned the importance of customer education above? There is no better way to educate the customer about your product and industry other than content marketing.
You can get creative by engaging your customers with drip emails to constantly educate them with educational blog posts. This is also extremely important and effective if you are selling a complex product that has a steep learning curve.
By publishing lots of educational content you can help your users figure it out, achieve their goals and stick with you longer.
At the same time, you can open up doors for them to upgrade or reuse your service by informing them about features that they never knew about.
Content marketing can help you win back customers
There could be many reasons why a customer stopped using your product/service, but that does not mean that they are gone forever. This is where you can use content marketing to win back your customers.
Let’s say they left because you didn’t have a feature that they were initially looking for, but now things changed and your team was able to push out the feature that they wanted. You can send them the update about the new feature in detail and win them back.
Another common situation is where a customer would leave because they didn’t know about a feature that your product already has or how to use it. With content marketing, you can consistently drip them with content around that feature and win them back.
Content marketing can help with cross and upsells
Cross-selling is a strategy to sell related products to the one a customer already owns (or is buying). Such products generally belong to different product categories but will be complementary in nature. Like the hay-stack for the cow, or batteries for a wall-clock.
If you’re running a software company, an upsell could be something along the lines of an upgraded plan.
By reading the articles your users might discover some functionality that is not available on their plan and push for an upgrade.
You can also teach them how to scale their operations with a larger plan.
Of course, this will vary between different industries and offerings, but you get the point.
Content marketing encourages sharing
Imagine if you wrote a killer piece on “the best diet for losing weight”. In this article you breakdown the different types of diets out there, their pros and cons, and which diet is best for any individual to lose weight.
Someone that is in the process of losing weight might find the information so valuable that they will share the article with their friends, which will result in more brand awareness.
Better yet, using the weight loss example, you can provide a solution that your product can offer for them that can help the reader lose weight.
We often hear stories behind companies that gained massive traction off a single piece of content that went viral. The best way to create a viral effect for any piece of content is through user sharing.
The key to this is coming up with quality articles that can generate hype.
Most folks love to help each other, so good content marketing encourages word of mouth.
Content marketing can bring you evergreen results
Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date. It revolves around a topic that’s always relevant to readers, regardless of the current news cycle or season.
Evergreen topics are those with consistent interest and search volume over time.
Here are some examples of evergreen topics:
- “How to lose weight”—It doesn’t matter if it’s 2019 or 100 years from now. People will always want to lose weight.
- “How to fry an egg”—Eggs are a stable part of English breakfasts and many other of the world’s favorite meals. People aren’t going to stop eating fried eggs anytime soon, which is why there’s consistent interest in learning how to fry one.
- “Football scores”—Football matches (sorry, US folks) get played all the time, and football fans are always interested in the latest scores.
Here’s an image of some evergreen content marketing results
Content marketing helps you build your brand
People want to buy from someone who knows what they’re doing, right?
By publicly sharing your knowledge you promote yourself as credible experts that customers can trust.
A study done by Bonfire Marketing found that as many as 63 percent of customers will opt for an authentic brand when making a purchase. On the other side of the equation, a lack of trust can drive churn rates up. In a customer loyalty study conducted by Accenture, 43 percent of subscribers left their current provider company when they lost trust in the brand.
In order to build trust, you can’t run a marketing campaign about how reliable your brand is. You have to build trust brick by brick, one piece of content at a time.
The best solution for this? Through long form educational blog post that can provide both value and education to the readers.
Content marketing can fuel paid acquisition
Each of your blog articles is essentially a “sales page” for your product.
So instead of creating dedicated “sales pages” and sending paid traffic there, you can simply send that paid traffic to your blog articles.
This goes back to the point mentioned above for building trust.
Having solid content assets in place such as e-books, white papers, drip email courses can be extremely valuable in the long run for paid acquisition and short term growth.
Content marketing will help make your support team’s life easier
Most of the customer support tickets revolve around the same repeated questions.
How do I set up XYZ feature?
How can I use XYZ feature?
What’s the best integration for XYZ?
Instead of draining out your customer success/suppoort team with manual work, you can simply send the customer a link to a piece of content that shows how to solve that problem.
The more educational content you create, the less support requests you’re going to get.
Wrapping it up
The points mentioned above are just SOME of the value that you can get from investing in content marketing. Every company is different and every industry is different. Solid content marketing requires good planning.
If you’re looking for a done for you all in one solution to ramp up your content marketing, then feel free to reach out to us anytime and we’ll take good care of ya!
