Are Your Competitors Leaving You Behind?

With hundreds of millions of people reading blogs every month, what are you doing to capture their attention? If your company isn’t creating content for potential customers to consume, your competition is. Content creation (see: blogging), is absolutely crucial for building an inbound marketing strategy. Not surprisingly, 90% of organizations market specifically with content and spend over 25% of their marketing budget on creating content.(demand metric) There are a number of reasons that companies big and small employ blogs and other content for inbound marketing:

1. Customers Like Reading About You

Yes, people actually like reading your blog. If you don’t have a blog, then people like reading your competitor’s content. Demand Metric’s survey showed that 70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles rather than an advert.  If you are wondering what is wrong with the other 30% of people who like seeing advertisements, sadly, I have no answers.

What do these readers really want to see? Custom Content.  As many as 78% of CMO’s not only want to see custom content, but feel that custom content is the future of marketing. So now, not only do you need to be publishing content but you need to make it personal and custom to different profiles of clients.

This also creates the need to identify the different types of buyers you would like to target or the primary types of customers you already get and would like more of. Because of the complexities this produces, it makes sense that nearly two-thirds of companies are outsourcing their content marketing (demandmetric).

2. Generates More high quality leads

Do you TiVo through commercials? Thought so, most of us do. Nearly 9 out of 10 people skip TV advertisements (for the other 10 percent that actually watch commercials, see the above 30% statistic). The same number of consumers, 9 out of 10, not only read your custom content but also finds your content to be useful. Similarly, nearly all of those people feel more positive about your company after reading relevant custom content. I wonder if the 90% that find your content useful are the same 90% that skip through commercials?

Not only is your content attracting potential consumers who want it, but it produces more leads per dollar spent than traditional marketing. For every marketing dollar spent, traditional marketing acquires 66% less leads than what inbound marketing brings in. Yes, it’s true, inbound marketing brings in 3X more leads than traditional marketing per dollar spent. SearchEngineJournal

If you are like me, you are probably wondering, “what the quality is of leads generated this way?” Great question! Let’s let the numbers answer this one for us again. Organic (inbound) search leads have an impressive 14.6% close rate, while outbound marketing leads have a 1.7% close rate. Hubspot.  Overall, companies that blog generate 126% more leads than those that don’t.

3. Improves and Grows Branding and Positioning

More than 4 out of 5 organizations use content marketing for brand awareness already. (Source: CMI) Essentially, for every 1 company in your vertical that is not using content to grow their branding, there are 4 others that are.

Blogs increase your digital share of voice in several ways. The most apparent area where you initially see this happen is the search engine results pages (SERPs). Blogs give websites on average 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. (Content+)).

This means that your website will have a significantly higher chance of showing up as a result for a keyword or phrase related to your business because you have “more than one ticket in the drawing” plus your additional content will be optimizing you for a large number of long tail key phrases. Just as important, your chance is increased for obtaining more than one result spot on the first page.­

Companies that exceed their revenue goals report branding, web design and optimization, and social media as their top 3 marketing investments. (Hubspot) Additionally, these companies note telemarketing and traditional advertising as their lowest areas of marketing investment. Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%). (Kapost) Positioning and leadership in your vertical are essential objectives for significant growth.

Social Media, mentions, and backlinks are all affected as well by inbound content marketing. With authority in your verticals comes recognition.  As your brand grows your positioning will leap forward and consumers will share their thoughts online through social media, blog posts, and comments. Amazingly, social endorsements have been known to increase conversion by as much as 300%. (Hubspot) Some of the reason for this phenomenon is that social proof cannot be built overnight.

What if your competitors already have an inbound marketing strategy in place?  Is it too late? The simple answer is no. You need in depth competitive analysis to compile a marketing plan that allows you to quickly yet steadily close the gap.  A good inbound marketing plan should also have room to adapt as the competitive landscape changes. However, this does not mean that you should change strategies with the direction of the wind or jump on to every trend and fad that comes along. Contact us today to get your inbound marketing campaign into action!