Content writing is essential to any successful digital marketing strategy. Without it, you’re giving competitors the upper hand. You’ll miss out on opportunities to connect with your customers, drive traffic, boost conversions and establish your brand as the top dog in your industry.
With so many different approaches to content writing, it can be difficult to know where to start. In this article, I’ll show you how content writing helps businesses.
Read to the end to discover practical tips on how to create quality content that drives results.
Table of Contents
11 ways content writing helps businesses
1. Content writing drives traffic to your website
Creating content your audience wants attracts them to your website. To do this, you need to consider the search phrases your potential customers use. What questions do they ask Google? What problems do they have? Create content meeting their needs and you’ll drive traffic towards your page.
For this to be successful, your content will need to be optimised for the search phrase you’re targeting. This isn’t as simple as placing keywords in the text (although that does play a part): you need to ensure your content is engaging, valuable and better than the information already out there. This can be tough, and the landscape is competitive — but the rewards can be huge.
According to HubSpot, ‘Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t.’
2. Content writing builds brand awareness
For your customer to buy from you, they’ve obviously got to know your brand exists. Even better, they’ll not only have heard of your business but will recognise you as a trusted expert with a clear brand identity.
Content writing plays a crucial role in achieving this. It helps get messages out about your brand that reach your customers in a way that resonates with them.
Consistency is key here. To succeed, you should consistently create high-quality content that exhibits far and wide how your brand aligns with customer values and can help solve their problems.
3. Content writing establishes thought leadership
Thought leadership is a term used to describe recognition as an expert in your industry. Just like you trust an optician’s knowledge of eyesight or a plumber’s advice on your pipework, so too do consumers trust thought leaders’ insights into their respective domains.
How do you establish yourself as an expert? Through high-quality, insightful content writing.
A study found 89% of decision-makers say thought leadership enhances their opinions of an organisation. After reading thought leadership content, they found their respect for and trust in the publisher increased.
Demonstrate your industry expertise by creating valuable and informative articles, blogs and whitepapers. Incorporate expert insights, industry projections, in-house data and other unique and valuable commentaries. This helps establish your thought leader status, as well as educating your audience and building a trusting relationship with them.
4. Content writing increases conversions and drives revenue
Content writing is part of a holistic, organic approach to online sales. By engaging potential customers, building trust and providing them with value, content writing nurtures customer relationships and guides readers down the sales funnel towards a conversion. Over time, a successful content strategy rakes in 600% more conversions than other marketing methods.
When creating a content strategy, it’s important to consider what your funnel looks like. How does the content speak to your customer’s needs and interests? What’s the next stage of the funnel you wish to guide them to through a clear and persuasive call to action?
5. Content writing builds backlinks and increases domain authority
Backlinks from reputable sites are a key factor in determining domain authority. And a key way to garner more backlinks is through — you guessed it — content writing. But, not just any content.
The kind of content that secures backlinks is high quality, high value. It’s engaging and attention-grabbing. It’s topical and timely. And it’s backed by novel insights — from in-house data, a survey, expert commentary or other research.
High-performing link-building content also includes linkable assets. These are pieces of content designed specifically to be linked to by other websites. Examples of linkable assets include infographics, guides and research studies.
Once you’ve created high-quality content or linkable assets, outreach and promotion is then key to building backlinks. Promote your content to publications and websites in your industry to increase the chances of them linking back to your website.
To show you an example, here’s a link-building content piece I created for the shared ownership property portal Share to Buy. It’s topical (created for Valentine’s Day), uses buckets of data and is a fun, attention-grabbing piece. As a result, it received over 150 backlinks in the month it was initially published, with an average domain authority of 57. (You can read the full case study here.)
6. Content writing builds relationships with and educates customers
Like a trusted friend who always offers valuable advice, if you build a good relationship with your audience, they’ll be likely to turn to you again.
Addressing reader pain points and offering solutions to problems builds brand loyalty. It encourages customers to return to you the next time they have a problem that your business can help with. Research finds 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading its content.
This can include educating customers about your products or services. Creating content explaining how to use a product or service can improve the customer experience, encourage sales and reduce support inquiries.
7. Content writing maximises the potential of your existing content
Auditing your existing content identifies areas for improvement, such as outdated information or poor formatting. You can use these insights to make changes which enhance the content’s effectiveness.
Don’t underestimate the impact of this. I’ve found through working with various clients that refreshing old content can double its performance month on month.
Another way to maximise the potential of existing content is by repurposing it for different formats and channels. For example, a blog post could be repurposed into an infographic or a video. Or share highlights from the post on social media for increased reach and engagement. Link back to your blog post or website to reap the website traffic rewards.
Here’s an example from HubSpot where they’ve used an article to create a social media post directing readers over to their blog:
View this post on Instagram
Moreover, a content audit can identify gaps in your content strategy. Analyse the performance of existing content to identify topics that resonate with your audience. Then, create more of this type of content to drive further engagement and conversions.
8. Content writing maintains a consistent tone of voice that resonates with your audience
Tone of voice refers to the personality, attitude and style of communication in your content. It represents your brand’s values and establishes how you connect with your customers.
Studies have shown that how ‘human’ or ‘corporate’ your tone of voice is can influence customer purchasing decisions. (And there’s no easy answer, either — customer interpretations of tone of voice are very industry dependant.) So, it’s important to get your tone of voice right and be consistent with it across all channels.
Implementing this successfully makes it easier for customers to identify and relate to your brand. It also ensures that you’re easily recognisable and distinct from competitors.
9. Content writing increases social media engagement
With so much content published on social media platforms every day, it can be challenging to stand out and capture your audience’s attention. That’s where content writing comes in.
Writing engaging content for social media post descriptions and captions is crucial to engaging and resonating with your audience.
And your website content can help with your social media engagement too. Whenever you create a blog post, think about how to distribute it across social media.
Any content piece could be repurposed into ideas for social media videos, infographics, carousels, images or otherwise. In doing so, you make the most out of the content writing you’ve created and spend less time thinking of new social media post ideas. Which is invaluable, considering that the average you’re competing with is 11 posts per day!
Here’s an example from That Sassy Thing that turns a blog post into a full Instagram carousel:
View this post on Instagram
10. Content writing enhances customer retention
Your existing customers are also most likely to be your future customers. It’s far easier and more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. And content writing can play a significant role in customer retention.
Half of marketers say they create content to strengthen bonds with customers and boost retention.
Creating high-quality and informative content keeps customers engaged and interested in your brand, making it less likely for them to switch to a competitor.
11. Evergreen content continues to work for you in the long-term
Evergreen content remains relevant and valuable for an extended period — sometimes years after publication. This makes it a useful resource for businesses, reliably driving organic traffic and nurturing customer relationships over an extended time period.
It’s important to note that you should still consider regularly refreshing evergreen content to ensure it remains ahead of the competition. This also helps indicate to search engines that the content remains relevant and rank-worthy.
Best practices for content writing for businesses
There are some best practices that help ensure content writing for your business is as effective as possible.
Here are some key considerations to keep in mind:
- Know your audience. Before you start writing, ensure you have a clear understanding of your target audience. What are their interests, pain points and needs? This will help you tailor your content to them. If you’re not writing the content yourself, consider having a customer avatar and tone of voice guide to help the content writer understand your audience too.
- Use a clear structure. Make it easy for your audience to read your content. Use headings, subheadings and bullet points to break up text and improve readability. This will keep readers engaged and make it more likely that they will read the entire piece.
- Write with SEO in mind. Incorporate relevant keywords into your content to help it rank higher in search engine results pages.
- Focus on quality. Rather than churning out a high volume of low-quality content, focus on creating high-quality content that provides value. This helps build trust and credibility with your readers, making them more likely to engage with your brand.
- Edit and proofread. Before publishing any content, take the time to edit and proofread it carefully. Make sure your content is error-free and reads smoothly so that it’s engaging and easy to consume.
For more tips on content writing best practices for your business, read the full guide to creating quality content here.
How to grow your business with content writing
Once you’ve got the content writing practices down, how do you use your content to grow your business?
To truly achieve success, you need to have a well-planned content strategy that aligns with your business goals.
Here are some key steps to help you get started:
- Define your target audience. Identify the group of people you want to reach with your content. This will help you create content that resonates with your ideal customer and delivers value to them.
- Keep an eye on competitors. Conduct a full competitor analysis to see what they’re doing in their content strategies. Doing so will help you identify what works well and what tactics to avoid. It will also help give you a picture of gaps in their content marketing for you to fill.
- Conduct keyword research. Research keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business and your customers’ pain points. Using these keywords in your content will help it rank higher in search engine results.
- Create a content calendar. Plan your content in advance and create a schedule for publishing it. This will help ensure that you consistently produce fresh and relevant content, and don’t miss any important calendar dates for your industry.
- Promote your content. Share your content through social media, email newsletters and other channels to drive traffic to your website and increase brand awareness.
Remember, it takes time and effort to see results with an organic content marketing strategy. So be patient. With persistence and the right knowledge, your content writing can become a valuable asset for your business.
If you’d like help with content writing or your content strategy, I’d love to chat about how I can help. Feel free to get in touch via the contact form here.
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