How Content Drives Sales

Content is King. You’ve heard it so many times that you’re sick of it. Your content is having no effect. Well, that might not be true. Knowing where content succeeds depends on understanding how content marketing drives sales.

Annabel Jamieson gives us an insight into why and how content drives sales, how it can build brand awareness and provide a good return on investment (ROI).

Which Content?

Often a piece of content cannot be directly attributed to a sale. It will be several pieces of content over a long period of time that pushes a customer to make a purchase. That sounds confusing, right? It is a little bit, but keep reading as everything will become clear

Content marketing drives sales but you need to focus on the chain of events that leads to the sale to understand where content marketing has an impact. For example, some of the main ways that content marketing drives sales include:

Increase Website Traffic

Content marketing increases website traffic (or it should if you’re doing it right). Creating valuable content that is not sales-focused but rather about sharing knowledge and insights around topics related to your brand will help you increase your website traffic.

For example, writing high-quality blog posts can increase your website traffic. Writing SEO-focused content will help you generate organic traffic through search engines. In addition, top-quality content often gets shared on social media and you can create traffic through this source too.

Build Brand Awareness

Have you ever purchased a product or service from a brand you knew nothing about? Unlikely.

According to Small Business Genius, it takes five to seven impressions for people to remember a brand. It is almost impossible to present your product to a new lead and for them to immediately be willing to make a purchase.

You use content to build awareness of your brand and trust with new and existing customers. By providing valuable insights through content to your audience, you present yourself as an expert or ‘thought leader’ in your field.

This trust and awareness that you have built, means that when your audience is ready to make a purchase, they come to you and not a competitor.

Push Customers Through The ‘Funnel’

A key way you drive sales through content is by pushing prospects through your marketing funnel.

There are three stages of a marketing funnel:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Purchase

You push your leads through each of these stages with content tailored to each stage of your funnel. Your content marketing answers their questions at each stage and nurtures them until they are ready to make a purchase.

How content drives sales

Measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) Of Content

Measuring ROI for content marketing campaigns is not as easy as with many other channels of marketing. But it’s also not very difficult.

The simple formula for measuring ROI for content marketing is:

Content Marketing ROI = [(return-investment) ÷ investment] x 100

What is Return?

Your return is how much return your content generated. This can be a little tricky as some content will continue to generate leads or sales long after it is launched or it can be difficult to attribute to a direct sale.

However, you can sometimes directly attribute a piece of content to purchase. For example, when a lead clicks on a ‘call to action’ on a piece of content and then makes a purchase.

What is Investment?

Your investment is how much money you put into creating your content. This should include your time, and anyone else who worked on the content, any assets you purchased, cost of distribution and more.

In Summary

Now you know how content drives sales. There’s not always a direct link. But a sale is generated through website traffic that comes from the content you’ve posted, because of trust established, when a prospect becomes more familiar with your brand or for many other reasons. Content does drive sales!

Annabel Jamieson is a digital marketing and tech strategist with over 25 years’ experience working in the digital environment driving business transformation and growth. She is currently a Co-founder and Director of two global businesses which specialise in content services.