Three reasons why you shouldn’t stop your content marketing

Content marketing is what Robin is to Batman, Laurel is to Hardy, and Mel Giedroyc is to Sue Perkins. Without content, other marketing services suffer, from social media to SEO.

If you’re thinking about ending your content contract, don’t. Here are three reasons why content is so important.

1. Content surrounds everything

As we demonstrate above, no form of marketing can survive without content. PR couldn’t have press releases; PPC landing pages would be bare; social media would have nothing to tweet about; emails would be blank; and designers would not be able to fill new websites.

Essentially, content helps SEO (and the other services) by delivering whatever it needs. SEO makes requests for content – perhaps a page needs to be rewritten as Google thinks the current content is too thin, or the site is missing a key piece of content that its audience is searching for – and content fulfils them. They make the perfect team, really; SEO identifies the gaps, and content plugs them.

High-quality content that will make a positive impact to your email marketing campaigns, website, PPC conversions, social interactions, PR outreach and organic rankings can’t be churned by just anyone. At Vertical Leap we use trained journalists (like me) and designers, to ensure our content is engaging and shareable. You shouldn’t aim to write content for the sake of it – you’ll only add to all the other fluff already out there.

2. Content helps build authority

Getting people to share your content is critical to boosting your brand authority. There’s a clear correlation between social interactions and search engine rankings; sites that are number one on Google or Bing have twice as many likes on Facebook than those in second place, data from the Searchmetrics Ranking Factors study 2015 revealed. Publishing new, engaging content to your social networks is likely to result in shares, likes and pins.

People won’t keep sharing that content forever, though, or at least not at the same volume as when it was first published. Imagine if you suddenly stopped producing content – you would have nothing to post to your social networks, and so people would stop sharing your content. This could affect your search engine rankings.

Even if you take social networks out of the equation, Google still loves fresh content. New content gets indexed by Google and appears higher in the SERPs than older content that offers little value.

Google also looks favourably at backlinks from highly-regarded, popular websites. Off-site content placements, such as blogs, guides and how-to pieces, are an important way to get valuable links to your site. Even if you don’t seek off-site placements, writing fantastic content or creating beautiful infographics will encourage other sites to talk about and share that content.

You need to keep publishing high-quality, shareable content in order to increase your brand/domain authority, and prevent it from falling back down. Keeping your long-term rankings will become a struggle if you decide to end your content contract. Don’t just take my word for it – this is what happened to one of our clients when they stopped posting content to their site:

Later on, they added a new content hub, and impressions increased again:

3. Content encourages engagement

We’ve all read something online that’s made us want to share it, leave a comment or bring it up in conversation with other people. That’s the beauty of content – it encourages people to interact with your brand. This interaction gives you the chance to create user-generated content, which is great for getting lots of shares on social media, as everyone featured in the article will want to show it off to the world.

In order for your brand’s social media marketing to be successful, it needs to be able to start and join in conversations. It will struggle to do that without content.

So you see, content marketing really does have a big role to play, and stopping it could be costly to your SEO, PCC and social media efforts. If you enjoyed this piece and would like to read more about the importance of content marketing, check out: Why momentum is key to long-term ROI.