5 Reasons Content is So Important for Your Website

Your company's website is the cornerstone of your marketing strategy. It's your number one place to educate potential customers, provide detailed information about your company and even interact with customers. But your website should be more than a dumping ground for product information and contact details. You want your website to engage customers and give them a reason to come back. The best way to do this? Offer original content.

By now, you've likely heard the term content marketing. Here's why it's so important for your website.

1. Engage Your Customers with Compelling Content

Think of the websites you frequent most. What keeps you coming back? The answer almost always has to do with content. Social media sites are continually posting user-generated content. News sites keep readers coming back for breaking stories that are posted several times a day. More and more, big brands are positioning themselves as thought leaders through blogs.

If you can generate content potential customers care about, they will keep coming back to your website. This gives you more opportunities to convert a blog reader into a customer.

2. Build Trust In Your Brand

Trust is an essential marketing tool, but it's hard to measure. We often hear more about company scandals that destroy consumer trust than the ways it's built. Take the Volkswagen emissions scandal for example. The news story broke in September 2015, but coverage lasted roughly 18 months before a U.S. judge ordered Volkswagen to pay a $2.8 billion criminal fine. That's 18 months of undoing the brand's relationship with consumers.

We know that criminal activity can destroy trust, but how can a brand build trust? One way is to offer your customers and potential customers free content. What are your customer's needs? How can your brand offer expert information to address their pain points? Writing thoughtful articles and publishing them within industry publications, as well as on your website, will drive leads back to your company. More importantly, you'll give customers insight into your expertise in the field. This builds trust between your brand and the customer, and trust sells.

3. Great Content Builds Links

If you can generate awesome content, whether it's a blog post, infographic or e-book, other sites will link to you. Quality backlinks are a key component in SEO. Want to rank high for specific keywords? Bake those keywords into your content. Not only will link-building help your SEO campaign, but it will also get your branded content in front of more eyes.

4. Make a Lasting Impression

What's the last commercial you watched on YouTube? Can't remember? That's likely because we see so many advertisements each day that we start to ignore the sponsored videos and banner ads that pop up on the screen. Now, what's the last good article you read online? You likely not only remember, but you may have shared it on social media or via email. That's the power of good content.

A great article can last in a person's memory and also last in their digital archive. A potential customer may want to revisit it for reference or they may share it with their network. All of this adds up to much more than just the "impressions" you get from a more traditional digital ad.

5. Demonstrate Your Brand's Core Values

What does your brand value most? Is it sincerity, customer service or a particular expertise? Good writers live by the axiom "show, don't tell." A commercial or banner ad tells consumers what your brand is. But great content can show what your brand values in a much deeper way. You can demonstrate sincerity by providing free content that customers can't get anywhere else. You can show customer service by posting case studies and testimonials. And you can establish expertise by writing for industry publications on topics that are core to your brand.

Content marketing is a strategy built on give and take. You'll need to invest the resources and time to develop compelling content, and then you'll need to give it away for free. Once you establish a content strategy, you'll start building trust, engagement and SEO like never before. It's worth the investment.