5 Ways Content Marketing Fuels Brand Growth

Successful content marketing is the ultimate skeleton key for unlocking brand growth. In this article, we’ll show you five ways you can use a mix of content types across multiple channels to educate your audience, optimise the buyer’s journey, and generate leads.

Types of content marketing

Before we jump into how content can fuel brand growth, let’s quickly define what we mean by ‘content’. 

Content is information in any format that informs, educates, assists or entertains your target audience. Content marketing involves using content to achieve various goals, especially attracting, engaging and converting prospects. 

There are many different forms of content marketing, including:

• Long-form written content – such as blog content and thought leadership pieces
• Video
• Email
• How-to guides 
• Paid ads/influencer marketing 
• Case studies 
• Infographics
• Ebooks
• White papers
• Presentations
• Quizzes/tools
• Checklists
• Courses
• Webinars
• Social media posts

And more.

While content is often used in paid marketing strategies, it’s usually used to achieve organic goals like increasing site traffic, boosting visitor engagement, improving SEO, and generating leads. Now let’s look at 5 ways the content formats above can fuel brand growth.

1. Increase your share of voice

Before a prospect becomes a buyer, they’re a seeker. They seek answers, advice, comparisons and opinions. Well-crafted content delivers the information they crave in the most accessible, engaging formats. Content lets you tell your brand story and make a personal connection with your audience. 

Bottom-of-the-funnel tactics can provide clear results and ROI, but once your brand reaches a certain level of maturity, you’ll probably see diminishing returns. To push past the inflection point and increase your share of voice, you’ll need to stand out in the awareness stage of the marketing funnel. That means creating top-of-the-funnel content that adds value to your audience’s journey of discovery.

2. Tune-up every customer touchpoint

There are more touchpoints in the customer journey than ever before.

Content can remove the friction from most customer touchpoints. For example, by:

• Helping prospects figure out what they need (blog posts, explainer videos)
• Showing that your product/service is worth it (reviews, comparison tables)
• Removing niggling doubts (FAQs, testimonials)
• Confirming they made a wise choice (personalised follow-ups and offers)
• Retaining them as a customer (online help centre, marketing emails, referral bonuses)

By addressing pre-purchase barriers and offering superior post-purchase support, you show customers that your brand offers real value.

3. Earn your trust

We increasingly turn to Google to satisfy not only our functional needs but our emotional needs too. Google Search trends in 2022 show people across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are filled with heightened emotions as we navigate our ever-changing world.

Brands that offer a wealth of useful and accurate information without pushing their own products and services too heavily build trust and credibility in consumers’ eyes. 

MoneySavingExpert is the perfect example. Despite being a for-profit business, MSE has championed the consumer from its inception and always been clear about how it does and doesn’t finance its site (signposted affiliate links, but no paid-for placements). 

Consumers have come to trust the site (and the reputation of its founder Martin Lewis) as a source of detailed, up-to-date advice on how to manage their money. The only way to build this kind of credibility is through truly amazing content that gives people much more than it asks for. 

4. Education, education, education

No matter what industry you’re in, there are dozens if not hundreds of ‘why’ questions that your target audience wants answers for. 

For other questions, quick, easy-to-skim content is preferred. (On average, listicles get 80% more traffic than other types of articles.)

Whatever format you decide is the most useful, every piece of content represents an opportunity to demo your expertise, share your knowledge, and guide your audience in the right direction.

5. Organic and evergreen

One advantage of paid advertising is that its ROI is obvious in the dashboard, whether it’s measured in cost-per-click, profit-per-impression, or another metric. But one major downside is that the benefits only last as long as the paid campaign is live. When the ad vanishes, so does your traffic. 

Organic content is evergreen, which means its benefits last long into the future. An amazing guide will be just as amazing in a year’s time. And you can gradually improve your best content to further boost its visibility, traffic and conversions. According to a SEMRush survey, 51% of companies say that updating old content has proven the most efficient tactic they’ve implemented. 

Content marketing is also extremely scalable. You don’t have to launch a full-blown content empire to see results. Instead, a carefully planned MVP content strategy can show what will work for your brand. You can then hone and scale up while keeping a close eye on ROI through key metrics like organic traffic and, of course, sales.

The more content you have catering to the top of the funnel, the more traffic you can attract and usher into the middle and bottom of the funnel. In other words, more content equals more leads. 

More specifically, by creating more landing pages, you create more entry points into your funnel, more call-to-action opportunities, and more collateral for various marketing channels, including emails. 

A study by HubSpot showed that on average companies who increase their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 saw a 55% increase in leads. 

Scaling up your content also lets you segment your audience, with different content designed to appeal to different buyer personas. 

A particularly effective strategy is to develop a tool that will streamline the consideration process for your audience.

The bottom line

With quality content and the right strategy, you can harness the power of content marketing to create long-term and sustainable growth, demonstrate your brand’s thought leadership, and serve up the information your audience needs so they view you being a trustworthy, authoritative and credible source. 

Check out our article about how you can use an interactive tool as a lead generation magnet.