When comparing content marketing to traditional marketing techniques such as billboard advertising as a brand building exercise, it can easily be argued that content marketing is better value for money, will have a more significant impact on the audience and has the potential to get your brand in front of people for longer, and in many cases long after the campaign has been paid for.
Below are a few of the main reasons content marketing is one of the best ways to build your brand, using my client, Epara Skincare, as an example:
Better forecasting
Content marketing that is based on SEO and keyword research allows us to get an understanding of the audience size before launching a campaign. Using a piece of content I wrote for Epara Skincare as an example, initial research showed that the keyword/question ‘How to get rid of hyperpigmentation around mouth’ has 260 searches per month. Combine that with the search volumes of associated keywords such as ‘hyperpigmentation around mouth’ which the piece also has the potential to rank for and get traffic from organically, we are looking at over 3,000 searches per month. Now we know we have a decent audience size for a campaign which directly targets the core audience of Epara Skincare’s products.
Measuring results
Once the content goes live, it’s easy to measure results using tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console to understand exactly how many people saw your content/campaign and how many people interacted with it. Using the same ‘hyperpigmentation’ example for Epara Skincare, since going live in September 2021, that particular piece has been ‘seen’ by 297,608 people (this is the number of ‘Impressions’ the piece has had on Google) and has been ‘interacted with’ by 7,553 people (this is the number of ‘Clicks’ the piece has had from users on Google).
Content marketing for this client started in September 2021 and since then, organic traffic to the site has grown massively, therefore proving the theory that content marketing has successfully increased brand awareness for Epara Skincare. See the graph below which shows the growth in ‘Impressions’ and ‘Clicks’ since content marketing started. This growth is purely from content marketing. We can further prove to the client that content marketing is the main contributor to this growth by filtering down to show only the articles that have been written within the campaign vs. the rest of the website. We can also use Google Analytics to see how our work has impacted revenue, therefore adding a financial figure to our work. In the case of Epara Skincare, their organic revenue has seen a strong 33% increase YoY for April 2022. All of this specific measurement goes a long way to proving the value of content marketing.
Impacting the audience
When we compare content marketing to other, traditional marketing methods such as billboard advertising, it’s clear to see which of the two has a more direct impact on the audience’s lives. With a billboard, yes you are building brand recognition, but you aren’t offering any value. With content marketing, we can answer our audience’s questions right at the time they are actively searching for answers within Google. We can help them, educate them and satisfy their curiosity, therefore leaving a long-lasting impression and building trust with them.
Longevity
The beauty of content marketing is that once a campaign has been paid for, it can continue driving brand awareness long into the future. Taking the ‘How to get rid of hyperpigmentation around mouth’ article as an example, this piece was written and paid for in September 2021. The client has not paid another penny for that piece of content since, yet it is still the highest traffic driving page on the entire website (driving even more traffic than the home page or brand keywords themselves!). This may continue for many years to come, driving the audience to the Epara Skincare brand and building brand recognition with the people who matter.
This is just one example of how content marketing can help to raise brand awareness and prove its worth through the use of real-life statistics and data. To find out how I can help improve your brand’s visibility in the Search Engine Results Pages, get in touch with me today!