Everyone who has been into marketing or websites have heard the common phrase ‘content is king.’ Content is, indeed, the king, and that is why companies are ready to hire writers who can convince customers to trust their business. Having great, entertaining, educational content on the website attracts traffic from search engines and social media, helping businesses build a customer base with minimal investments.

However, the importance of well-written, consistent, and unique content is often forgotten by startups and businesses. It's key to understand that when each blog post, social media share, and ad are aligned perfectly with the brand’s voice, tone, and messaging strategy, the brand-building process will become more effective, and the results will be seen in no time.

What is content writing?

Content writing is the process of planning, writing, and editing content to be published on websites and social media platforms. It includes articles, blog posts, white papers, social media posts, scripts for videos and podcasts, etc., and is a significant part of the branding strategies adopted by businesses. 

Writing is not a choice in marketing but a foundation of pretty much any content that you publish. And that is why it is critical to get content with the right choice of words and tone to change the audience’s perceptions.

Here’s why you must have a content strategy as a part of your marketing and branding strategies.

Attracting organic traffic

It is well known that organic traffic, or the “free” traffic from search engines, is the most valuable. The people using search engines have something in mind, like purchasing a product or getting more information about something they are interested in. These visitors will be mostly new leads and can be converted without much effort if your website has good content and landing pages.

However, to attract organic traffic, the website and the content has to be optimized for search engines without compromising on the content quality. The competition for the top spot in search engine result pages(SERPs) is very high, and there are thousands of websites targeting the same keywords. Nevertheless, with good SEO and content strategies, any website can rank on the first page within a few months.

The website visitors are ready to share quality content on their social media profiles, so once the website gets traffic from search engines, the social media traffic will also grow over time. Organic traffic is a precious asset that promises new leads consistently.

Increased audience retention

When we search for something online, the search results page shows the website address also apart from the title and meta description. More often than not, we look at the domain name and open it just because we are familiar with the website and expect it to have answers to our questions.

If your website has valuable content and people are getting answers from it, they’ll prefer your website when it appears on SERPs. Just like marketing, thinking from the audience’s perspective, understanding the pain points, and structuring the content with a focus on convenience is critical to get the best results.

Content writers are usually provided with a set of keywords from SEO specialists to use in the content to get the maximum visibility on search engines. After analyzing competitor websites and the current search results, writers find out the details that the audience is looking for. When there are missing pieces of information on these websites, it is a golden opportunity to rank on search engines and attract organic traffic.

Build brand awareness

Yes, social media and television advertisements build brand awareness, but knowledge sharing is a better way to do this. When you do a lot of research finding out less known facts and useful, genuine information, and share it on your social handles and blog, the readers will love it and share it on their profiles. Businesses include short descriptions about the products and services they offer in the blog posts, and it is very effective in converting website visitors.

However, it is important to note that readers are there to get the information they are looking for, and not necessarily to buy your product, although they might be interested in buying it. Making the content too salesy or filling it up with a lot of information about your products or services may backfire. A good practice is to use anchor text at relevant places and link it back to your website landing page.

Get contact details of prospects

The whole point of conducting thorough research and spending time writing in-depth articles is to increase sales and revenue. People know that good things come at a price, and they are ready to pay for valuable content and data.

One of the major strategies adopted by businesses is to offer high-quality content and research data as white papers and infographics and let anyone download it by providing their name and email address. These addresses are added to the email list to send periodic marketing emails and notifications about blog posts that they might be interested in. The idea here is to keep them engaged until they are ready to purchase from the brand.

And of course, content writing is a critical part of email marketing. Each email has to stand out from the rest of the emails in the inbox, and also, the content has to be relevant and tempting the reader to visit the brand’s website.

Summary

Content writing is an irreplaceable part of branding and marketing. Most of the content we see online, like social media posts, videos, podcasts, and blog posts go through a writing process, and it is the quality that determines how effective it is. In this era of digital marketing, competition is very high for ranking on search engines, and so it is necessary to produce high-quality, search engine optimized content to get the best results. 

Well-written, share-worthy content attracts organic traffic, increases revenue and audience retention, builds brand awareness, and helps businesses get contact details of prospects. Consistency is key in content writing and over time, it will help businesses be authoritative in their niche.