The Power of Content Marketing

There is a component of content that is often undervalued by marketers: the power of content to gain value over time and continually increase your return on investment. When you combine relevant content with the power of long-tail keywords and other SEO techniques, your investments start taking on a life of their own.

Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific and detailed search words. For example, if you are searching for a computer product online, a keyword might be “laptop computer." A long-tail version of this keyword would be, "New Apple Mac Book Pro 2021." These keywords are niche and capture users closer to a purchase decision or conversion. 

Content marketing is all the rage for progressive marketers today. Most of our clients at thunder::tech are at least dipping their toes into the space, if not going all in investing in its power. This trend is fueled by shifts in consumer behavior created by the increased accessibility and distribution of information. Within our own business, we try to practice what we preach. For example, we have published well over 1,000 blogs, continue to produce video series and publish an annual Marketing Trends magazine.

I can tell you firsthand that our investment in content continues to give us larger returns each year.
 
When content marketing is combined with the power of a Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) approach to content distribution, it increases the value of a single piece of content being published. Not only are marketers stretching the initial value of content through COPE thinking, but the ones that have committed to the practice are seeing a compound return on their initial investment. There are a few reasons for this and a few ways to take advantage of it.
 

Why the compounding power of content happens::

• Search engines can take time to index content
• Search engine rankings are constantly changing, especially for long-tail keywords
• With the power of the internet, content lives on forever and there is always the possibility someone will stumble across, share or link to it, therefore increasing the visibility and authority of your content

 

How can organizations take advantage of compounding content?

• Stick to it – the post you write today may take off in six months due to your persistence with a consistent program, but if you give up too soon, you are wasting your money
• Regularly perform long-tail research and write specifically for it
• Create evergreen content that can last over time and be repeatedly searched for
• Republish, redistribute and refresh old content that still attracts traffic
• Reformat content that compounds well into other mediums (text, video, audio, slides, etc.) to give people more options on how they can consume it

Here's the good news: most marketers do not have the stomach to keep at a program over time (two years or longer), so they miss out on the true compounding power of their investment. Even if their content marketing starts strong but trails off or shuts down, the true impact of their investment will only be visible in the long run. These are the types of people that put money into a bank and look at the interest rate and say, "Why bother” and stop. Thus, they miss the compounding power of time.

Content marketing is one of the few tactical marketing investments you can make that can return more over time, than the day you launch. Much like hiring a new salesperson won't deliver you instant success, in time they will grow a network, create referrals and impact sales, and so will your content marketing program.