How Content Marketing Drives Sales

For the past several years, content marketing has maintained a position as the number one avenue for reaching a target audience, expanding your client base, and gaining worldwide recognition for your brand.

You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to reap the benefits of savvy content marketing. Local businesses, e-commerce sites, healthcare providers, contractors, and restaurants can all drive up sales and profits by incorporating high-value content from a reputable agency into their marketing strategy.

When you ignore the potential gains a well-crafted blog or buyer’s guide can generate for your business, you’re not just leaving money on the table.

You’re denying yourself the chance to build your online reach, rally and energize your client base, and outpace the local competition.

Not sure where to start? No worries – I got you.

Content Marketing: The Basics

Hold up – before I get into how content marketing drives sales, let’s make sure we cover the basics: what exactly is content marketing?

Content marketing aims to drum up interest in a brand or company’s products or services by generating and distributing informative, entertaining, and/or helpful online material. Social media posts, podcasts, animation videos, and blog posts are all popular vehicles for content marketing.

While other forms of online media have gained massive popularity in recent years, written content continues to form the backbone of content-based digital marketing strategies.

Enriching your web presence with authoritative, relevant, high-value writing extends your reach beyond anything a rudimentary sales pitch can accomplish. It allows you to draw in and retain your target audience – and amp up your conversion rate as a result.

Here’s a rundown of the five main forms of written content marketing, including how each one can be implemented to increase sales and brand recognition.

1. Blog Posts

If you know anything about how content marketing drives sales, it won’t surprise you to see blogs at the top of my list. Almost every sales- and service-oriented company runs a blog.

Most blog posts fit into one of three categories: educational, entertaining, or sales-focused. Your blog’s ideal tone and content depend on the experience you’re trying to offer your readers and potential customers, as well as the types of products and services you’re offering.

Of course, you can also mix and match these categories to hit the perfect tone for your brand. There’s no reason why an educational blog post can’t also be entertaining, as long as it matches the voice and style of the rest of your website.

That kind of consistency and fine-tuned flair is the sort of expert-level technical prowess you can expect from working with a top-tier content firm to create your blog. 

How Can Blog Posts Drive Sales?

Blogs are one of the most popular forms of digital content marketing. When crafted by expert SEO content writers, they offer a tremendous return on your initial investment.

There are a few reasons for this:

• Blogs are a great vehicle for regular posting. Consistently producing high-value, informative content is a cornerstone of good search engine optimization (SEO). If you keep up a steady stream of blog posts, you’ll generate a catalog of content on topics related to your business. The algorithm will rank your website higher because it has more to look at – as long as your posts are high-quality as well as high-quantity.
• Blogs draw more eyes to your website. If the content you’re offering is high-value, entertaining, and actually helps satisfy customer questions and curiosities, you’re more likely to drum up engagement with your webpage, improving your bounce rate and search engine ranking. You’ll also increase your odds of getting your best posts shared on social media, which offers a huge boost to your reach. Remember: more traffic to your webpage directly correlates to higher conversion rates!
• Blogs establish you as an authority in your field. Well-written blog posts with thoughtful linking, expertly distributed keywords, and topics that are meticulously geared toward attracting your target audience bolster your brand’s online reputation by establishing you as a source of reliable and valuable information. Higher authority means a better search engine ranking; better rankings mean a higher chance of standing out from the competition.

Consistency is the key feature of a successful blog. You need to keep up a steady stream of valuable posts in order to maintain customer engagement and keep up your domain authority and reach. 

That’s one reason why many successful businesses outsource their blogs to reputable content marketing agencies – it’s hard to stick to a regular posting schedule when the day-to-day tasks of running your company need most of your focus.

2. Sales and Service Pages

Sales and service pages function as menus for your potential clients and customers. They’re the digital version of an attractively-arranged market stall in a crowded bazaar: they present your wares in an eye-catching and tantalizing way that draws customers to your stand and away from your competitors’.

A sales page needs to… drive sales. It needs regular, well-chosen CTAs to engage your target audience at every stage.

You also need to keep it personal. Neglecting your website’s sales or service pages and just enumerating your offerings in a boring, lifeless list won’t get you noticed by potential clients. 

In fact, it makes you look less professional than the more polished pages from competing companies – and you’re more likely to be passed over for jobs and sales.

How Can Sales and Service Pages Drive Sales?

The primary strength of an impeccably-optimized sales or service page has to do with geotargeting and local SEO.

Say you run a local exterior painting company. Your service area includes the city where your headquarters are located, plus the twenty or so smaller towns and communities within about a fifty-mile radius.

Rather than listing your services on a single webpage and hoping for the best, what if you ordered a separate service page for every community within your service area?

People search different terms. You need to be there to answer all their queries.

Now, instead of only showing up in search engines when people look for painting services in your base city, you’ll rank when anyone in your service area needs a professional house painter.

Broader geographic reach, more eyes on your website, more calls to your front desk, and shopping bags filled with your products – it’s that straightforward.

3. Affiliate Product Reviews

We can’t talk about how content marketing drives sales without bringing up product reviews.

I mean, think about your own shopping experience – when you’re making a high-stakes purchase and find yourself paralyzed by choice, what’s your go-to move? Reading detailed reviews about your top picks? Yeah, I thought so.

You’re not alone, by the way – a 2021 survey on the share of shoppers reading reviews before purchase found that nearly 70% of consumers read anywhere from one to six online reviews to help them make the best buying decision. 

If you’re an affiliate seller, product reviews should be your bread and butter. They’re the number one way to generate those sweet, sweet cookies and increase your odds of getting a commission.

Let’s expand on that…

How Can Affiliate Product Reviews Drive Sales?

Since most people check out at least a few online reviews before deciding to buy something, it follows that product reviews are a natural vehicle for affiliate marketing.

After reading your review, potential buyers are more likely to click on the links you’ve provided to your partner’s website. If they buy the product at the end of that link, you get your commission, and your partner site gets another sale.

When your sales-focused business involves boosting another company’s visibility, you want to target the people who are trying to decide whether to spend their money on that company’s products – and show them why it’s a good idea to do so. Affiliate reviews are designed to do just that.

That said, there are a ton of ways affiliate reviews can go wrong. Proselytizing or coming across as overly sales-y is super off-putting to most would-be customers. You want to create a nuanced, fair review that acknowledges a product’s cons while also highlighting its pros.

That’s a difficult balance to strike! It’s worth rounding up the products you need reviewed and passing them along to a seasoned SEO firm to handle the rest to ensure you get results that work.

4. Buyer’s Guides

Hang on – what’s the difference between a buyer’s guide and a product review?

Well, buyer’s guides typically incorporate product reviews, but they expand on that by going into more detail about the product under discussion – what it does, what the various types are, and how purchasing one can improve your life.

Let’s break it down:

• A product review assumes the customer already has a decent grasp on what the product they’re looking at is and what it does. They’re just trying to decide whether or not to buy it – or which product from a given category to spend their hard-earned money on.
• A buyer’s guide aims to educate shoppers on a product they’re interested in but don’t know much about. You might publish a buyer’s guide called “Choosing Your First Espresso Machine: What You Need to Know” that explains how an espresso machine differs from a coffee maker, describes the different kinds on the market, and answers frequently asked questions about espresso machines.

How Can Buyer’s Guides Drive Sales?

Buyer’s guides are a sort of hybrid between blog posts and affiliate product reviews. They’re a perfect case study on how content marketing drives sales.

They draw in potential customers from a specific target audience, entertain those customers while answering their burning questions about a product, and leave them feeling better informed and more positive about purchasing that product.

Buyer’s guides and affiliate reviews both include links to the partner website’s product pages. Once your flawlessly optimized content convinces your reader to click a link and buy that product, another cookie drops into your jar – and your sales commission goes up.

5. Product Descriptions

Ah, product descriptions – so much potential for increasing leads, so often overlooked.

Most blogs detailing how content marketing drives sales don’t even mention product descriptions because…they’re short? Because they’re often added to product pages as an afterthought, or not added at all?

Whatever the reason, I’m about to show you why you’re missing out if you don’t show your product descriptions a little love.

How Can Product Descriptions Drive Sales?

Optimizing your product descriptions should be one of your first moves while building your e-commerce site. 

Think about it: in terms of keywords you want to rank for, the types of products you sell are likely high on your list, along with the descriptors customers search while browsing for products like yours – “organic,” “fair-trade,” “designer,” that kind of thing.

Search engine optimization is most successful when you hone in on details. It’s not enough to focus on the big stuff like blogs and landing pages; putting effort into short-form content like product descriptions is a surefire way to attract attention from people who are looking for products exactly like the ones you sell. 

Those are the people who are most likely to convert to paying customers.

4 Advantages of Outsourcing Your Content Marketing

We’ve elaborated on some of the key types of written content marketing in order to demonstrate how content marketing drives sales for businesses with an online presence – these days, that’s just about every business.

Here’s the rub: a lot of companies – particularly small businesses – can’t afford to create a whole department dedicated to their digital advertising.

Business owners are often tempted to try their hand at writing their own content or to pay the least expensive contractors they can find. A blog post here, a service page rewrite there. Isn’t that all you need?

That’s a hard no.

The problem with that approach is that it lacks consistency, and the chances of your online sales efforts gaining real traction are slim.

Budgeting for professional content from a real SEO agency is worth the investment. And it’s more affordable than you might think – the best providers offer a discount for bulk orders.

Here’s why you should consider outsourcing your SEO and content marketing.

1. Proven Results from Industry Experts…

When you’re investing in your business’s online presence and digital advertising strategies, you want to feel assured you’re spending your money wisely. Contracting a well-reviewed SEO service with a long history of successful content marketing is one of the safest bets you can make.

Professional content writers not only have a comprehensive understanding of how content marketing drives sales: they know the specific techniques and tricks that get results for your particular industry.

You won’t be flying blind or spending hours scrolling through inscrutable blogs on current best SEO practices – they’re always changing, anyway. Keeping up with the algorithm is a full-time job, and you already have one of those.

2. …So Your Employees Can Focus on Their Jobs

And so do your employees!

There’s no sense in pulling current employees away from the tasks you hired them to do or adding content marketing to their already-full plates. That’s a surefire way to stall productivity, and it can also lower morale.

Hiring an SEO firm to write your content removes the need to train employees or create a whole new department devoted to content marketing. You and your employees will be free to focus on your business’s core functions, keeping your operation running on all cylinders.

3. Responsible White Hat SEO Techniques

Nothing gets a website blacklisted faster than keyword spamming or underhanded tactics. As AI advances and programs become more sophisticated, SEO practices that violate search engines’ terms of service are becoming easier to bust – and those who attempt to slip through loopholes are paying the price.

With a reputable firm, you’re guaranteed nothing but white hat SEO methods with a proven track record of driving up sales – no shady tactics, no under-the-table deals, just stellar writing that ticks all the boxes and boosts your search engine ranking, website clicks, and conversion rate. 

4. A Wide Variety of Content With Consistent Output and Tone

Top-tier SEO firms offer a lot more than just blogs and sales pages. You can build your website’s domain authority and online visibility by tacking on guest posts, citations, and social signals. 

There’s something for everyone on the SEO menu: reviews and buyer’s guides for affiliate sites, product descriptions for retailers, service pages for local professionals. You can schedule regular orders so that you always have new blog entries to post – maintaining your website’s presence and relevance.

How Content Marketing Drives Sales: Final Thoughts

There’s no time like the present to harness the power of written content to drive your business’s sales, customer engagement, and digital reach.

If you already own a company website, it’s a cinch to hire a firm to give your sales and service pages an SEO-focused revision. And if you’re just starting out, ensure you start on the right foot with professionally produced, customized content designed to give your fledgling business a leg up from the outset.

Ready to take your company’s online reach to the next level?

Contact SEO Butler to learn more about our services and how our targeted and individualized approach to SEO content writing has driven up sales for hundreds of business owners and marketing clients. We’d love to work with you!