You’ve no doubt heard the buzz about this thing called content marketing. All the gurus are telling you that you must start reaching out to your prospects in this way.

But content marketing can seem so ephemeral: “You mean I provide a ton of content over a period of months and I’ll get sales? But HOW and WHY will I get these sales?”

Content Marketing

Read below for four ways content marketing will grow your business and why.

  1. Content can help you earn strong trust with your customers. You’ll be recognized as the source for the service or product you offer because you consistently share valuable content, useful information, and updates. Potential customers will learn to trust what you give them, and that trust means you’ll be the seller they choose when they’re ready to make a purchase.
  2. Great content will bring visitors to your website (visitors who eventually become buyers if you provide them with No. 1, above). You do this by providing highly targeted content that you know your particular prospects want. Because you do this – and because you broadcast your content on social media while also optimizing the content for the keywords your prospects use when searching for your type of products/services – they’ll end up exploring your website.
  3. Make sure you have an active presence on the major social media players (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and you’ll strengthen your engagement and relationships with your prospects/customers. Engaged relationships lead to customers.
  4. As time progresses and you continue to provide informative content that you know your target market wants, optimize it for search, and broadcast it on social media, your prospects will grow to believe ever more that you’re an expert and trustworthy. People do buy from experts they trust; your prospects will buy from you. Your business will

As you engage in content marketing, you absolutely must not provide content that’s too sales-focused. You want to provide information first, calls-to-action second.

You can and should broadcast information about sales, coupons and discounts, as well as the features and benefits of your products and services. But stay clear of the blatant sales pitch.

If this makes picturing the proper ratio of information to sales pitch easier, keep this in mind as you create your content: 90 percent wise guru; 10 percent car salesman (and you should be an extremely un-pushy car salesman).

“But,” you may be saying, “this sounds like it can take several months of producing high-caliber content before I see any new business.” That’s correct.

Any marketing takes time to catch a prospect’s attention. Yes, content marketing takes time to see results, but the work you do in the first six months remains forever! A radio ad works only when it airs. A billboard no longer works once your ad is removed from it.

But the content you produce and broadcast, as well as your social media channels are always on, always working for you, months and years after you hit the publish or send buttons.

Content marketing provides extremely long-term benefits, so long as you engage in it consistently and for the long-term.