Are you looking to increase the reach of your business or website? Crafting engaging content is one of the most effective ways to reach a wide audience, and content writing is the key first step to doing so.
In this article, we'll be discussing the many benefits that content writing brings to the table and what it can do to help you promote your business or website. Content writing can be a powerful ally in your marketing efforts, from increasing visibility to building trust and brand loyalty.
Let's dive into the benefits of content writing and see how it can help you promote your business.
The Different Types of Content Writing
Before diving into the specifics of the benefits of content writing, it's important to distinguish the different types of content writing.
Content writing is more than writing blogs, articles, and landing pages on a website.
Content writing is applicable for:
Digital Marketing
Social Media
Technical Writing
Email Marketing
Ghostwriting
And I'm sure I've missed plenty of niches within the written content arena.
Each one of those content writing niches requires a vastly different approach, and some even require unique skill sets to achieve high-quality results.
For all intended purposes, this article primarily focuses on blog posts and website copywriting.
Why Writing Content is Important
One of the most important benefits of content writing is that it allows you to position your product or service in the marketplace uniquely.
There are likely a thousand other websites that offer similar products or services, and your website content allows you to present yours in a way that sets you apart from the competition.
Beyond that, there are also other benefits to content writing, such as your SEO rankings.
Content Improves Your SEO Rankings
Content writing does not guarantee better SEO rankings. However, properly done, it certainly increases the chances of doing so.
By using the correct title tags and meta descriptions, providing valuable insights, and creating unique and original content will allow you to utilize your business website so that more people are likely to discover your content and ultimately become customers.
Content Increases Your Visibility
This brings us to the benefit of increased visibility.
The more quality content you create, the more likely it is that something you've created will appear online when people search for your product or service.
As more people discover your content, it has a higher chance of being shared by others on their own networks.
In general, the more content you create, the higher your visibility in one way or another.
So, create a ton of great content!
Content Builds Trust
In addition to increasing your visibility, one of the other benefits to content writing is that you have an opportunity to establish yourself as an authority in your niche, which in turn builds trust and confidence.
If your potential customers are convinced that you are a reliable and trustworthy source of information, then they're more likely to do business with you.
Content writing also gives you the opportunity to highlight other things that build trust, such as product warranties, service guarantees, testimonials, customer use cases, and much more.
Content Can Increase Conversion Rates
If you're going to make the effort to create great content, then you can't forget the call to action. The best pieces of content always include a call to action.
A call to action is where you ask the reader to do something. It could be to visit your business, purchase online, schedule an appointment, leave a review, etc. But the call to action should be compelling enough to take the person from a passive reader to an actively engaged customer.
Consider offering incentives (e.g., discounts, coupon codes, referral bonuses, etc) to get a person to take the action you want them to do at that moment.
But content should also support every stage of the customer journey, too.
The customer journey typically consists of four standard stages, each representing a different phase in the customer's interaction with a brand or product. These stages are:
Awareness: This is the initial stage where potential customers become aware of a brand or product. It often involves discovering the product through various channels like advertising, word-of-mouth, social media, or online content. The key here is to capture the customer's interest and make them aware of a solution to their problem or help fulfill their need.
Consideration: In this stage, potential customers start considering the product or service as a possible solution to their needs or problems. They actively seek information, compare different options, read reviews, and weigh the pros and cons. Content at this stage often involves detailed product information, comparisons with competitors, customer testimonials, and demonstrations of product effectiveness.
Decision: This stage is when the customer makes a purchase decision. They have evaluated the options and are ready to proceed with a transaction. Factors influencing this stage include pricing, customer service, brand reputation, and return policies. Effective strategies here include offering incentives, showcasing unique selling points, and providing easy and accessible purchase methods.
Retention: After a purchase, the focus shifts to retaining the customer and fostering loyalty. This involves post-purchase support, customer service, asking for feedback, and offering additional products or services. The goal is to create a positive post-purchase experience, encouraging repeat business and customer advocacy through word-of-mouth or online reviews.
Each stage of the customer journey requires different marketing strategies and types of engagement to effectively guide the customer from awareness to loyalty. Understanding these stages can help you tailor your content to meet the customers' needs and expectations at each point in their journey.
Information Enhances the User Experience
Last but not least, information simply enhances the user experience. And what better way to provide information than through content writing?
There are a lot of keyboard professionals out there who have input on just about everything. Which in turn makes information on any given subject a little difficult to navigate through and determine what's accurate and what's not.
By providing valuable information about your product or service, you can clarify things for your potential customers.
Your customers will often thank you for that clarification in the form of a commercial transaction.
Understanding Your Audience
But before you can provide anybody with valuable information, build trust, or convert them into a customer... you first have to know who your audience is, and understand how to talk to them.
A significant piece to that puzzle is utilizing keyword research to understand what types of questions people are asking about your product or service, how they're asking them, and in which formats they prefer to learn the answers.
Keyword research helps you also understand search intent so that you can decipher if the person is searching with the intent to find more information, make a purchase, navigate to a specific destination that they are already familiar with, or if it's a long-term investigation into a larger purchase they're planning in the future.
If keyword research is a relatively new concept for you, you'll find our short Keyword Research Course beneficial.
Methods To Streamline Content Writing
Not everybody has the copywriting skills for creating valuable content, and even those who do may not have the time to create content.
If that's you, don't worry.
There are ways to streamline your content marketing strategy so that you can still create valuable blog content.
AI Writing Service
An AI writing tool can be helpful for article writing by doing two things:
Ultimately, you should never JUST use AI-written content (this is covered in our courses), but it's perfectly fine and acceptable to use it in your content creation flow. Even many professional content writers now use AI tools to help facilitate creating high-quality, compelling content quicker.
Different AI tools may work better for your use case depending on whether you're writing long-form content or short-form content.
Hire a Professional Content Writer
Hiring a freelance writer is a great way to get high-quality content created. Just keep in mind that the best freelance writers are generally going to be one of the more expensive routes to go. But if they come highly recommended, then the good content that they'll be able to create will likely be more valuable in the long run than hiring a content writing agency.
A content writing company is usually going to be more focused on volume and less on quality. Whereas an independent professional writer will be the exact opposite; they'll focus more emphasis on quality and less on quantity.
Outsourcing Content Writing
There are a ton of ways to hire content writing services. Whether you go with a full-blown digital marketing agency, a dedicated article writing service, or some other website content writing provider, you just want to make sure you properly vet them before signing on the dotted line and sending them payment.
Some of the easiest ways to do this are:
There may be some scenarios in which that won't be possible, such as hiring a VA (Virtual Assistant) to create content for you or hiring a relatively new content writing professional or agency. In those cases, you may want to do a trial run with a blog post or two and see how it goes. If the content performs well on the search engine results pages (SERP), then you may want to consider including them in your content strategy moving forward.
Learn Content SEO Skills
Even if you hire a blog writing service to create web content for you, it's still essential that you personally understand the ins and outs of SEO content writing.
If you need to create content on your own, those skills will be invaluable.
But they can also be invaluable when considering hiring an agency or an individual to create SEO content for you because you'll have a better understanding of what to look for, as well as how to vet those who are vying for your marketing money.
It will allow you to select the best content writing service because you'll already know if they know what they're doing or not.