Did you know that over 55% of effective content marketers publish new content each day? It’s clear that marketers who don’t correlate efficient content marketing with business goals are missing out on a significant opportunity. Here are six goals content marketing helps businesses achieve:

1. Generates leads

Over 80% of decision-makers prefer to get their information from well-thought-out content, rather than ads. Creating text or video blogs for your business is a great place to start as you formulate a content strategy. Research by Curata says that long-form blog posts produce nine times more leads than short-form blog posts, with 18% of effective posts being 750 words or longer. Have a look at Moz.com’s beautifully thought-out long-form piece on machine learning and its effects on several industries.

Another way to leverage long-form content for robust leads is through video, a medium that seamlessly lends itself to storytelling using charts, interviews, and experiences. As an example, take a look at ‘The Anatomy of an Attack’, Cisco’s 4-minute video blog with a suspenseful and riveting storyline.

Shareable content like this keeps customers hooked to your brand and makes them strong potential customers.

2. Increases brand image and reputation

The kind of content you put up on the web helps create your brand’s voice. As they engage with your content, consumers will begin to associate its qualities with your brand. Research shows that 70% of customers believe that brands creating custom content are genuinely interested in building a relationship with them. Content marketing helps create a positive image of your brand, boosts your reputation, and establishes you as a leader of your industry.

ALSO READ : Best ways to boost engagement on your company blog

3. Affects the bottom line

Research shows that content marketing generates six times more customer conversion rates for businesses. Meaningful content also helps save on the sales team’s efforts by addressing many basic concerns of potential buyers, thus simplifying the sales cycle. Onsite content helps keep it indexed higher on search engines, thereby attracting consumers right from the start.

For offsite content to be effective and to bring in traffic, brands should focus on getting linkbacks from high-authority sites, preferably those already frequented by the desired target audience. All these steps help Google rank these pages higher for audiences, and eventually converting leads into customers.

Take a look at this HubSpot infographic that explains how raising a company’s bottom line figures into one of the goals content marketing helps businesses achieve.

4. Brings in social media traffic

Content marketing isn’t just about developing and putting up content, but also about its promotion and sharing. Social media significantly helps bridge that gap by providing quick and easy access to where your audience is. Worldwide users on social media are estimated to reach 2.95 billion by 2020, so it’s a great idea to hook relevant users across all platforms.

For instance, consider Scatter’s project for the Lenovo ThinkPad: #DifferentSustainsBetter. Lenovo wanted to position itself as ‘the greatest laptop on Earth’. Scatter mated Lenovo’s exceptional engineering with a powerful content campaign. The ThinkPad was put through numerous torture tests – it was run over by a car, thrown off a building, dragged by a rope, and used as a chopping board for vegetables. Each time, the ThinkPad effectively demonstrated its toughness and durability by emerging unscathed. Scatter customised the videos for several social media platforms.

The campaign generated a reach of 8.58 million across different social media touchpoints, with 1.92 million views and 26,000 likes on Facebook alone. The result? Lenovo got 309 marketing leads by the end of the campaign. For the complete case study, see below:

Leveraging social media for content marketing means inching closer to business goals such as brand equity, higher sales, and customer retention.

5. Boosts website traffic

Well-researched and quality content can bring traffic to your website, and consequently to your products and services. HubSpot says that companies that published over 16 blog posts each month got almost 3.5 times more traffic than those that published four or fewer posts.

6. Promotes better SEO

Consistently pushing engaging, updated, and valuable content in itself considerably improves the quality of your SEO. Sites that blog frequently have 434% more pages indexed by search engines than those that don’t publish at all. Here is how SEO figures into the goals content marketing helps businesses achieve:

• Your content can leverage relevant keywords consistently, thereby increasing your overall website keyword density. This allows Google to see your content as valuable and rank it high in its index.
• SEO also improves significantly due to valuable content being shared by users across social media.
• Audiences spending more time on your site or blogs tell Google about the high quality of your content, resulting in a spike in the quality of your SEO.
• Higher authority websites will see your content as relevant and link your pages back to theirs. This is definitely an SEO ‘jackpot’, and something all businesses should aim for.

The best thing about content marketing is that it generates three times more leads than outbound marketing and costs 62% less. So how can you say no to something that is both SEO-centric and cost-effective?