Why is this the case? That even after decades, no matter the medium, content is still the crux of good marketing?
It Builds Loyalty
Businesses aren’t built on first-time visitors. Companies like the Wall Street Journal don’t make most of their money from people picking up their papers for the first time.
They make money from people who’ve read their content and then decided it was good enough that they either want to purchase again or get a subscription. If a business had to get a new customer every time in order to get paid, they’d all have gone under by now.
Yet, many companies still approach their business that way. Instead of focusing on repeat visitors, they focus on optimizing for search engines so they can get more new customers.
At the end of the day, however, the companies that are frequently publishing content are getting most of the traffic from repeat visitors who enjoy their content. Yes, search engines love them – but their businesses would be a fraction of what they are today if they didn’t have great content.
In order to be effective, the content has to be engaging, helpful, and relevant to the target audiences’ wants and needs as related to your industry.
Search Engines Feed Off of Content
For many years, Google and other search engines have worked towards pulling up better results that are more closely related to the user’s intent.
They want people who search on their engines to find the best content possible in relationship to what they’re looking for.
As search engines get smarter, marketers who focus primarily on marketing tactics rather than actual content will die away.
Google has proven this repeatedly by continually downgrading the importance of low-quality links and upgrading the importance of usage statistics and other metrics to actually measure the content of a website.
If you build your website around great content while having a decent understanding of basic SEO, your site will flourish. If you put all your attention on SEO and don’t pay much attention to your content, you’ll always be trying to stay one step ahead of the search engines.
Great Content Soft-Sells Your Products and/or Services
Not only is good, solid content necessary for ultimate online exposure; it’s also a powerful additional tool that can sell your products and services for you on auto-pilot.
Having great quality content allows you to build a relationship with your readers; and ultimately, that relationship builds trust, which leads to sales.
In the long run, fresh content that can help your audience in some form or fashion is most likely to contribute to your overall marketing success online.