It’s widely known that content marketing is a highly effective strategy for attracting new customers. It boosts website traffic, establishes your brand as an industry thought leader, and provides audiences with valuable, practical content to address their needs. However, content marketing offers numerous other, less apparent advantages.

Today, we’ll delve into four unexpected benefits of content marketing. We’ll explore how these indirect content advantages can contribute to business growth and highlight key considerations before launching your next content marketing campaign.

Content Marketing Benefit #1: Strengthened Brand Affinity

One of the most significant bonuses content marketing provides is increased brand affinity—a deep emotional connection and shared values between consumers and a brand. Brand affinity is the ultimate goal for marketers. Individuals with high brand affinity don’t just appreciate your products or services—they are deeply passionate about your brand. They love what you offer, enthusiastically recommend you to friends and family, and advocate for your products without any prompting or incentives.

“Don’t even need to ask!” Essentially, customers with high brand affinity are your biggest fans and arguably your most valuable asset. When it comes to potential customers, those who already connect with your brand through your content are more likely to convert. Click-through rates are noticeably higher among audiences familiar with your brand:

How Does Content Marketing Enhance Brand Affinity?

Reputation is paramount in building and maintaining brand affinity. Simply offering excellent products or services isn’t enough. You need to establish yourself as a trusted voice in your industry, and producing high-quality content is an effective way to achieve this. Shared values are fundamental to brand affinity. Content not only attracts visitors to your website but also allows you to showcase your organization’s authentic values.

Social media management platform Buffer exemplifies this principle. Besides creating one of the most fascinating, data-driven blogs in digital marketing, Buffer consistently demonstrates its commitment to transparency and work-life balance by offering insights into its operations as a largely remote team. This commitment to transparency includes publicly sharing information that many organizations consider sensitive, such as salary details for the entire Buffer team (including executives and management), revenue figures, fundraising goals, and equity structure. Unheard of! This goes beyond typical transparency efforts—it’s a genuine display of openness and trust, qualities that Buffer highly values. It’s fascinating to observe how Buffer’s operating revenue has been impacted by embracing radical transparency.

How Can I Cultivate Greater Brand Affinity Through Content Marketing?

Regardless of the content you produce, developing a unique brand voice is essential. A significant amount of online content is bland and forgettable because many websites shy away from taking a stance or expressing a distinct point of view. Take it a step further by infusing your content with your organizational values. For instance, let’s consider nexus-security. We understand that online advertising can be challenging, so we avoid unnecessary jargon and industry buzzwords. We strive for clarity and accessibility in our content, reflecting the same values in every aspect of our company, from our partnerships with Google and Facebook to our client onboarding process. We also recognize that PPC and digital marketing, while effective, can be a bit dry. To counter this, we inject humor into our content with memes, gifs, and the occasional Star Wars reference. Identify what truly matters to your organization and explore how your content can authentically reflect those values. A content audit can be invaluable in this process. Utilize our content audit guide blog post (complete with free templates!) to ensure your content aligns with your brand identity.

Content Marketing Benefit #2: Expanding Remarketing Audiences

Ideally, your meticulously crafted SEO strategy would organically lead users to your website, where they would eagerly consume every word of your meticulously written blog posts and make countless purchases. Unfortunately, this isn’t quite how content marketing works.

“Not gonna happen.” Fortunately, one strategic advantage of content marketing is the ability to create highly targeted remarketing audiences based on your website traffic, a powerful technique for boosting conversion rates.

How Does Content Marketing Contribute to Building Remarketing Audiences?

One of the best aspects of remarketing is the ability to segment audiences based on practically any relevant criteria. Behavioral signals derived from content consumption can be incredibly valuable, especially when segmenting by intent or conversion funnel stage.

“Your messaging should adapt to user behavior.” For example, we leverage content remarketing to create custom lists for various segments, which are then integrated into ongoing campaigns or nurture pathways. We have lists of individuals who regularly read our blog but haven’t downloaded any guides, those who have downloaded multiple guides on specific topics and visited specific website pages (like Product or Pricing), and those who engaged with certain content but didn’t convert. In essence, your content analytics are a goldmine of valuable user data that can enhance other marketing campaigns.

How Can I Generate Remarketing Lists Using Content Data?

Creating a remarketing list using analytics data from your content largely mirrors the process of using other data sets.

“Creepy? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.” You’ll need to determine the type of remarketing segment you want (PPC, Facebook, Google Display Network, etc.), as this dictates the tracking cookies used. Generally, the Google Analytics tracking code is more versatile than the AdWords tracking code, as it captures visitor behavior. From there, you can delve into your data, and the rest of the process should feel familiar. Regardless of how you create your lists, pay close attention to tracking parameters and frequency caps—keeping in mind that certain industries benefit from longer frequency caps.

Content Marketing Benefit #3: Driving Traffic Through Image Search

Similar to residents of Los Angeles dreading the notorious traffic, website owners crave more traffic.

"#TrafficIsTheWorst" What’s one highly effective yet frequently overlooked traffic-driving technique? Image search. Regularly publishing high-quality content offers unparalleled optimization opportunities compared to static websites, including image optimization. Image search is gaining traction and accuracy, with more than 11% of Google searches including images on the SERP, but many websites treat images as an afterthought. This presents a golden opportunity for proactive content marketers to capitalize on this oversight and leverage image search for enhanced visibility.

How Can Content Marketing Improve My Visibility in Image Search?

Every image in your content can be optimized for better visibility in image searches, representing a “free” opportunity to rank for specific image queries and drive substantial traffic to your site over time.

“A typical Google image search results page, including Sponsored results, for ‘patio furniture’” While this is less critical for visuals like memes or gifs (which add personality and visual interest), it’s incredibly valuable for original data visualizations, infographics, charts, and other visual assets that other websites and publications might reuse.

How Do I Optimize Images for Search?

Understanding image optimization fundamentals is crucial, starting with image metadata.

“Example of metadata that can be captured and edited within an image file” Every online image can be optimized by including metadata, essentially data about data. This includes attributes like alt text, which web browsers use to identify image content. While primarily an accessibility feature for screen readers used by visually impaired individuals, alt text also influences image search rankings. For a comprehensive guide, explore this post I wrote about optimizing images for commercial intent queries.

Content Marketing Benefit #4: Fueling Your Social Flywheel

Our final content marketing benefit revolves around social media—specifically, how consistent content publication can create a “flywheel effect,” continuously growing your audience, establishing greater industry credibility, and generating more conversion opportunities.

How Can Content Marketing Help Me Expand My Social Audience?

Content marketing and social media are a perfect pairing. Publish content on your site, promote it on social media, grow your audience, and repeat. However, the real magic lies in the flywheel concept.

“Time for some SCIENCE!” As explained by Larry Kim in his roundup of top paid social hacks, a flywheel is a mechanical device that powers machinery. It requires significant energy to get a flywheel spinning, but once in motion, it can maintain momentum for extended periods with minimal effort. This principle applies perfectly to content marketing and the social media flywheel effect.

“Screenshot from Larry’s Twitter Analytics dashboard showing follower growth between August 2012 and January 2015” When Larry began building his now-massive social media following, it took him almost six years to reach 12,000 followers. However, once he surpassed this critical point, his growth rate skyrocketed—within just one year, he gained an additional 50,000 followers. This exemplifies the flywheel concept. The initial investment of time and effort represented the energy required to get the flywheel moving, and the subsequent surge in growth reflects the flywheel’s momentum.

“Image via Moz”_ The same principle applies to content marketing. Sadly, many blogs, websites, and companies abandon their content marketing efforts before gaining sufficient momentum to achieve their goals. The figure above demonstrates that it took two years of consistent effort before this particular website experienced significant traffic growth from its content marketing strategy—but the results were remarkable. So, what actions can you take?

How Do I Utilize Social Media for Content Promotion?

First, acknowledge that building a social media following takes time and can be incredibly challenging. Consistently creating and publishing exceptional content for months or even years without seeing tangible results can be disheartening. However, it’s all about perspective. Instead of dwelling on the perceived time, effort, and resources “wasted” on a seemingly unnoticed blog and a Twitter account with a modest following, reframe it as the initial energy investment to set your flywheel in motion. The momentum will eventually build, leading to desired traffic and growth. It requires patience and perseverance. In a nutshell: Compelling content provides material for your social feeds, showcasing their value and attracting followers. As your following grows, so does your reach when you publish more great content. Of course, content promotion involves more than simply pushing content for years and hoping for the best. For a deeper dive into leveraging social media for content promotion and audience growth, check out this comprehensive guide to social media content promotion.

Content (with Benefits)

This list of content marketing benefits is far from exhaustive. We didn’t even touch upon how content marketing can boost your coolness factor, enhance your athletic abilities, or make you the life of the party (though we’d like to think it does). However, we hope this has sparked some ideas about extracting even more value from your content creation efforts. As always, share your suggestions, success stories, and any insights on maximizing content impact in the comments below.