In a world of ever-decreasing attention spans and an ever-growing number of forms of ad blocking, what is the best way to reach your target audience? How are you supposed to get your brand and your business noticed? Content marketing has proven it can drive engagement and audience growth. Businesses have been able to make increasing impacts using content marketing as their number one strategy.  While I don’t recommend hiring cats to do your writing (but who doesn’t love cats, right?), I do recommend that your start content marketing. Here are five reasons why:

1) Increase Brand Awareness

Companies that publish 16 or more blog posts each month have 3.5 times more traffic than those who publish four or less times each month. Take a look at what you’re writing. Are you actively engaging your audience by storytelling, or are you just listing dry data for people to read? Bueller? Bueller? No one is listening. Although the task may seem daunting, and on some days downright impossible, keeping the content on your blog or website as fresh and as interesting as possible is a crucial element in the success of your business.

2) Establish Yourself as an Industry Leader

The content you are publishing should be pushing the limits of what people expect of your given market. That’s how you differentiate yourself. Otherwise you aren’t promoting your brand, just your industry. Brands who are seen as leaders in their field experience 7.8 times more site traffic than those who are not. If the public doesn’t view you as an industry leader, you are missing out on a huge portion of your potential client base. It’s not enough to just have great information. Content marketing is engaging and interacting with your audience in a way that matters to you both.

3) Better Return on Investment

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional outbound marketing and yet it generates three times as many leads. This is good news for any business, especially for small businesses and startups that don’t come backed by million-dollar advertising budgets and agents that know how to do “things”. Most any new business is going to need a loan or investor in order to get itself off the ground, but every last penny’s worth of value needs to be squeezed out of those borrowed dollars. With content marketing, there is no need to spend a huge chunk of your precious startup capital on outbound marketing. Alternative business funding sources combined with content marketing are a powerful tool for small and new businesses.

4) Personalized Content Results in Higher Engagement

Rapidly growing investments in Big Data and predictive analytics are allowing the majority of businesses today to personalize everything from social media content to consumer emails. Why? Because personalization drives results. Getting the right message to the right person at the right time has never been easier.  54% of marketers believe that personalized content promotes higher engagement rates. Interactive content has rebranded marketing as a two-way street with conversations between business and consumer now being highly personalized and relevant. Companies that are actively recognizing these new customer expectations are seeing their engagement rates increase by leaps and bounds. Everyone likes to feel included.

5) Attention Spans

Say it well and get to the point. Statistically speaking, you have approximately 37 seconds to captivate and ensnare your target audience before they move on to the next thing. Don’t lecture people about the benefits of your product. Content marketing is not advertising. Produce content that engages, entertains, and depicts the ideology of your brand. Once that flows smoothly people who are consuming your content will automatically associate themselves with your brand, and that’s the ultimate goal.

Quality is key, and conversation is king when it comes to engineering content in today’s marketing field. Content marketing is a highly effective and low-cost way to promote your brand, drive traffic, and increase revenue. The continued, daily frustration of putting out new and captivating content can be stressful, but the results are inarguable. There are unlimited options when it comes to the content you create and the strategies you use to employ it. To be truly successful you should focus on what your customer needs from you and not on the payout. That will follow naturally.