We go through seven reasons why.
If Billy wants to drive more traffic to his site, he doesn’t search for “Ahrefs” and buy our toolset right away. That’s because he doesn’t even know what SEO is.
It’s more likely his journey goes like this:
We need content to gradually progress Billy from step #1 to step #10. For example, when Billy is researching ways to get more traffic, we need to create content that ranks for that topic and educates him on how SEO is the best channel.
Tim Soulo, our chief marketing officer, once told me this:
My theory is that people don’t sign up for your tool and then learn how to use it. My theory is that people first learn how to use your tool, and they sign up because they know how to use your tool.
At Ahrefs, we create content that explains how to solve SEO and marketing problems with our toolset. By the time someone purchases, they already know how to use Ahrefs and are getting immediate value out of our product.
This helps us acquire better customers and retain them too.
If you focus on creating helpful, evergreen content that people are searching for, your content can rank high on Google for more keywords over time. This generates consistent search traffic growth:
Our entire marketing team could potentially take a short break, and traffic would continue to flow. This can’t be said for paid marketing, where traffic ceases the second you stop running it.
The Ahrefs Blog generates an estimated 657,000 monthly search visits.
If we were to acquire that traffic via Google Ads, it would cost us an estimated $720,000 per month (or $8.6 million per year):
Given that we’re spending nowhere near that amount on content marketing, it’s reasonable to say content marketing is cheaper than paid ads in the long run.
If people are exposed to your content through other marketing channels, they’ll often share it with friends and colleagues.
For example, SEO Brodie Clark shared our content without any of us asking:
If you can help someone solve a problem they’re struggling with, they’ll start to trust you. That’s what content marketing is all about: Creating useful content that helps your target audience solve a problem.
If you can do this continuously, you’ll become an authority in their eyes. They’ll turn to you whenever they have questions or more problems to fix. They may even buy the product (in this case, yours) you recommend.
In all, 71% of marketers report that content marketing has become more important to their organization in the last year. And 82% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.
If you’re not doing content marketing, your competitors are.
They’ll be the ones to appear in the search results when your customers are Googling for solutions to problems. They’ll be the ones who will build trust with them and become an authority in their eyes. They’ll be the ones who will nurture and convince them that their product—not yours—is the best in the industry.
Simply put: They’ll reap all the benefits of content marketing, but you won’t.
What to do next
Convinced that you should be doing content marketing? Then check out these resources to get started:
