Think of yourself for a moment as a potential customer. You see a social media post from a company or a blog post. Or, perhaps, someone hands you a flyer for their business. Are they thought-provoking? Memorable? Do they appeal to you in some way? If the answer is yes, then you see the importance of content marketing.

Small businesses need to use content marketing in order to drive clients and customers to them. Content marketing motivates people to act on your company’s best interests.

In fact, 70 percent of people want to learn about a company through content marketing rather than advertisements.

Overall, the benefits of good content marketing far outweigh the disadvantages.

Read on to learn how great content marketing can be for your small business!

Content marketing is the creation, publication, or distribution of content to a target audience. The goal of content marketing is to retain customers and drive new ones to your business.

Digital content marketing can include blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters. Print marketing can include handouts, flyers, and business cards.

In other words, content is anything you create that will help you connect with your audience, build a stronger brand reputation, and inspire them to action.

Part of the importance of content marketing comes from its ability to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. In fact, it is one of the most crucial parts of SEO.

If you are posting optimized content for your website, then your brand can increase its ranking for keywords. That makes it more likely that your site will come up when searchers look up a topic pertaining to your business.

One way to help your SEO ranking is by including blog posts in your content marketing strategy. If you write posts about topics relevant to your industry that provide valuable information to users, you fare better.

However, make sure you are not just writing content for content’s sake. Search engines, Google, in particular, will pick up on that and could penalize you by lowering your ranking. Instead, you want fresh, unique content that provides useful information to people.

Small businesses will often hire an outside firm, such as Frontier Marketing, for their content-needs. Frontier Marketing saves business owners valuable time by taking care of content and marketing for them. By having Frontier Marketing produce the unique content necessary for your goals, you can focus on actually running your business!

Once customers have arrived at your website or social channels, you want to make sure they take action. Content marketing is an excellent tool for inspiring your customers to act.

Think about how often businesses connect with customers over social media. That connection helps create a relationship between you and the customer. Through that connection, you can nurture your leads.

Furthermore, if your content is valuable and useful, customers will trust your brand even more. So, give your followers enough information to make an educated decision. That’s where the importance of content marketing shines. Don’t let them go off searching somewhere else for information you could have provided.

Remember, at the end of your content, to have a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA). Make it very easy for the audience to know what to do next.

Everything you produce, from email newsletters to blog posts to business cards, leaves a lasting impression on customers. You want to make sure that impression is a good one.

Another importance of content marketing is that it helps your brand reputation. This happens both through SEO optimization and exposure. If the blog post you’ve created is optimized correctly and provides a customer with the information they need, they’ll be more likely to share it with others.

The more content you produce, the more chances you have to build an authoritative voice. You want to be an industry leader. Producing quality content can turn your business into the go-to source for information relevant to your brand.

Furthermore, content creates lines of communication between you and your customers. Social media posts, in particular, encourage speaking with your followers. And as your quick, engaging, and valuable responses resonate with your followers, they’ll be more likely to shop at your business.

A big question a business owner has is, “Why content marketing?” Well, a big reason is it is significantly cheaper than traditional marketing.

Content marketing costs about 62 percent less and generates three times the number of leads for businesses. Going with an outside firm like Frontier Marketing also saves you money since you won’t have to train anyone, hire anyone else on, or dedicate your own time to content creation.

The highest cost will actually be the time it takes to build up your content on your website. Depending on where you’re starting from, it could take a few months before real traction is seen in SEO terms. But then the importance of content marketing will become clear as you should see a substantial growth for your ROI.

That’s right. According to a survey published by the online business guide, The Manifest, 53 percent of businesses are using content marketing. Of those businesses, 73 percent of them hire an outside firm to manage it.

With so many businesses using content marketing, you must set yourself apart with unique content that provides useful information. Your competitors might have a leg up on you in terms of brand authority. But through patient, diligent, and innovative content creation, you can establish yourself as an industry leader.

Why is content marketing so important? Because content marketing is vital to the success of a small business. And since your competitors already use it, there’s no time like the present to get started creating content!