Content marketing is best known for creating more website traffic and leads.
However, short-term website lead generation is only one positive impact of continuously producing content that’s helpful to an audience.
Plus, some content doesn’t lend itself to keyword optimization.
Here are some other beneficial outcomes of a content marketing initiative. While measurable results are best, only some outcomes can be measured.
Caveat: Content must be visited to provide benefit. Google Analytics will let you know whether a given content piece is getting users (unique visitors)
Increased brand awareness
Content marketing is more than just creating awareness of products and services. It’s also about building and reinforcing a company’s brand.
A customer’s CEO told us he was surprised that a senior-level executive at a multi-billion dollar vendor-partner he spoke to knew his company existed.
The senior executive’s awareness was due to our customers’ prolific website content, some of which covered the vendor’s solutions.
Elevated brand reputation
Content that genuinely demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) can improve a brand’s reputation with people who are already aware of the brand.
This type of content conveys, “These people know what they’re talking about.” When a prospect evaluates your company by checking out your website, expert and authoritative blog content can positively impact them.
Improved customer engagement
A content marketing initiative isn’t for only attracting the “unknowns.” Sharing new and helpful content with existing customers helps maintain strong relationships with those customers.
People, including customer contacts, don’t want to be sold — they like to be informed.
Shorter sales cycles
One-to-one email templates and video scripts are content salespeople use to speed up the sales process. Another tactic is to share links to specific blog content with prospects.
These types of sales enablement content can shorten sales cycles.
Differentiation in competitive deals
In 2019, we recorded a tongue-in-cheek, narrated slide video for one of our customers. It makes light of companies that rely on a ‘lone wolf’ IT support guy.
Since then, our customer’s salespeople have often shared the footage with prospects.
A salesperson told us that one prospect, in particular, got a good chuckle from the video. That prospect later became one of the highest-value customers in the company’s history.
The video content didn’t close the deal but played a part in the salesperson’s relationship with the prospect.
More referrals
Content marketing helps B2B companies stay ‘top of mind’ with referral sources.
Rather than just asking for referrals, salespeople and business development reps can share new content with their referral sources.
Attract & convert qualified job candidates
You may have created content that gets traffic from people within your industry.
If so, adding calls-to-action that direct these visitors to your Jobs page can result in more qualified applicants for open positions.
Get backlinks
Some blog posts don’t get much traffic, but they help the overall site performance by attracting backlinks.
One example is a calculator. Another is a post with helpful statistics.
Source material for widespread content distribution
Long-form content can be distributed in shorter forms on X, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile platforms.
Generative AI helps summarize long-form content for social distribution.
You can also use the points on a blog post for a YouTube video.
