Content marketing is still one of the most popular marketing strategies available, but with the rise of social media and visual forms of content, written content seems to have fallen out of fashion. In this era, it’s easy to underestimate the power of written content, but it’s still an incredibly valuable resource for certain applications.
The Value of Content
It’s hard to argue with the status of content as king in digital marketing. Content is an indispensable component in a variety of different marketing contexts, and continues to prove itself a valuable investment because of its many benefits.
Builds Brand Visibility
A good content strategy can help you build brand visibility. Regardless of whether you primarily focus on onsite content, offsite content, or a combination of the two, your content is going to generate more brand awareness and name recognition. This is especially powerful if you support your content with supplementary marketing and advertising strategies.
Increases Brand Reputation
Developing content is also an opportunity to increase your brand reputation and establish yourself as a thought leader. You can take up controversial opinions, innovate with novel lines of thinking, and show off your expertise simultaneously. It’s a way to prove that you know what you’re talking about while, at the same time, distinguishing your brand from those of your competitors.
Generates Traffic
There are many different ways in which content can help you generate traffic. Content is crucial for SEO, which can increase your rankings in search engines and generate more organic traffic. It’s also good for link building, which can generate referral traffic, as well as social media marketing. If your content is good enough, it’s going to be widely shared and distributed, multiplying your traffic and brand visibility.
Feeds Other Campaigns
Content is useful for feeding and supporting a host of other digital marketing strategies, particularly inbound strategies. For example, content is a central pillar in any SEO campaign, and it’s useful to fuel growth in email marketing, social media marketing, and community building.
Stay ahead of the competition
In addition, content is:
Accessible
If you’re already an expert in your field, creating content should be quite accessible to you. The main principles for creating good content aren’t especially hard to learn, though developing the content itself can be time-consuming if you’re dedicated to quality.
Inexpensive
Content is also relatively inexpensive. Compared to traditional advertising and other, more expensive marketing strategies, this allows it to yield an incredibly high ROI. If you go the DIY route, you can reduce your costs significantly (though you probably won’t be able to reach your full potential this way).
Permanent
The content you create is permanent, at least ostensibly. You can continue to use it for as long as it remains valuable to your audience, and you can even translate it into different formats to extend its capabilities.
The Benefits of Written Content
Written content, specifically, has even more advantages:
Low Production Costs
All content is relatively inexpensive to produce, but when it comes to podcasts, videos, and visual forms of content, production costs tend to be much higher. Written content is one of the cheapest and most accessible forms of content to produce.
Keyword Optimization Potential
If you care about SEO, written content is a practical necessity. It’s one of the best ways to optimize for specific keywords and phrases, increasing the relevance of your site for user queries that matter. It’s true that you can optimize videos and visual content with the use of titles, descriptions, and promotion, but it’s hard to beat the sheer potential that written content offers.
Traditional Publication Outlets
When you develop written content, you’ll get access to traditional publication outlets. Syndicating press releases, being featured as a guest author, and getting access to some of the most prestigious publications available are strategies that can be immensely valuable to your brand – and they aren’t possible to pursue with visual content alone.
Link Building Potential
Link building is a central component of SEO. In short, the idea is to build more valuable links pointed to your website, so you can boost the authority of your website and therefore increase your search engine rankings. Written content, published offsite, is arguably one of the best strategies to support your link building efforts (assuming you’re writing quality content). It’s an easy way to ensure the quality of your link while also getting access to domains with high authority and relevance to your brand. Building links with other types of content is possible, but less reliable.
Repurposing Options
Written content gives you more options for repurposing. You can consolidate individual pieces of content into a comprehensive, premium eBook. Longer posts can be split into pieces to use for email marketing or social media posts. You can update your content as you learn more information. The possibilities are almost limitless.
Navigating the New Challenges of Written Content
New formats and intense competition have warped the world of written content marketing, but you can survive by following these standards and approaches:
Narrow Your Scope
Consider narrowing the scope of topics you cover to make your position more niche and less vulnerable to competition. It’s an easy way to differentiate your brand and build a more loyal audience.
Pursue Quality Over Quantity
Content marketing always favored quality over quantity, but these days, it’s more important than ever. With the help of AI, anyone can turn out low-effort content with reckless abandon; you have to be better if you want to succeed.
Have Strategic Purpose
Ideally, every piece of content you generate should have a strategic purpose. Who is this for? How is it helping you? What are its goals and how is it going to achieve them? Mindlessly writing new pieces of content isn’t going to help your strategy or your followers.
Learn From Your Data
Gather objective data on your performance and study that data religiously. This should be your primary source of new insights, allowing you to increase your investments in strategies that work – and decrease your investments in strategies that don’t.
Should Written Content Remain a Part of Your Strategy?
t’s true that written content isn’t as in demand as it used to be. It’s also true that visual content mediums can and should be a vital part of your overall inbound marketing strategy. However, it’s a mistake to neglect or underestimate the value of written content; for most brands and in most content, it’s still integral for long-term success.
