One of the more well-known benefits of content marketing revolves around its direct technical relationship with SEO through link building, including increases in organic and search site traffic and higher search rankings. Its ability to uncover referral traffic from campaign media mentions, build a diverse link portfolio, and increase the amount of on-site content prove that content marketing is truly a holistic strategy for driving site traffic.

Brand awareness is another widely discussed benefit directly related to content marketing. Targeted digital media promotions allow your brand and its content to be seen by publishers’ audiences through organic coverage (i.e. not paid native advertisements or sponsored content), making it more authentic and credible to the audiences you want to reach.

More Than Just a Driver for Site Traffic and Brand Awareness

While these are both incredibly valuable benefits that compound over time, high-quality content marketing also offers a plethora of other cost-effective perks allowing brands to stay competitive. So if you’re looking for more reasons to join the other 76 percent of B2C and 88 percent of B2B marketers already using content marketing, we have a list of some of the peripheral benefits our current clients have seen.

1. Qualified Demand and Lead Generation

With more control over your brand’s messaging, content marketing allows your brand to either create content with broad appeal for mass awareness or gated content targeted at specific buyer personas.

A broader approach aimed at raising awareness leads to mass demand generation through widely appealing content. Videos, listicles, blog posts, and free resources are often promoted on social media, and therefore can still target specific audiences while still offering that mass appeal to help with demand generation.

The latter generates more qualified leads through valuable, detailed content. Gated content in particular often offers valuable information in the form of case studies, white papers, industry reports, ebooks, and even webinars in exchange for contact information. This gate acts as a filter to help weed out low potential leads.

2. Thought Leadership

By producing and promoting valuable content, audiences and potential leads will recognize your brand as a credible resource and trustworthy authority in your industry. Like other content marketing benefits, thought leadership has a compounding effect as it also helps your brand grow a long-term audience.

For example, by supplementing industry knowledge with new data-driven research, our nine-month engagement initiative with BuzzStream helped establish the influencer marketing CRMI as an authoritative tool and resource among PR professionals. A mix of large-scope campaigns, gated assets, and evergreen on-site content helped BuzzStream break its weekly record for new signups.

3. Audience Growth and Retention

To further the previous point, as your brand becomes an established authority in your industry, your audience will organically grow. Consistently producing quality and valuable content is not only helpful for attracting an audience, but for retaining it as well. When social media users come across something they find share-worthy, they often go to the source to find out how to get more.

Our partnership with online sports merchandiser Fanatics focused specifically on relaunching its blog. A mix of evergreen and timely content about the most popular teams and athletes helped the blog see a 1,100 percent increase in organic search traffic within just six months – a substantial growth in the client’s audience.

4. Industry Recognition

Thought leadership built upon quality content goes beyond your audience of potential customers and clients; key players and even competitors will also begin to take note and recognize your brand as an innovative authority figure within your industry.

B2B client Alexa approached us wanting to get its name and resources in front of the right people, which meant we needed to brainstorm a targeted content creation and promotion strategy that secured top-tier industry coverage.

Over the course of just four campaigns, we did just that through a thorough analysis of its target audience’s needs as well as adapting to what the publishers feeding that audience wanted. This balance, paired with using Alexa’s own internal, authority-making data, helped our promotions team secure over 560 media mentions, including coverage on Marketing Land, Adweek, and Inc— all closely related to Alexa’s target audience.

5. Team Recruitment and Morale

Brand awareness isn’t just about generating interest in your brand among potential leads or customers; it’s also about making your brand known to potential talent. The most ambitious job seekers will be on the hunt for a company with an established reputation, and with the help of content marketing and subsequently increased search rankings, your brand will be on the radar of inbound job applicants’ queries.

Additionally, employee-generated content helps give your brand a unique voice and your team a voice within the brand. While it’s important to maintain a consistent brand image, employees contributing to various content efforts, like an on-site blog or social accounts, humanize a brand.

With so much attention on building a robust link portfolio for boosting search rankings, it can be easy to lose sight on the bigger picture and the other benefits a holistic content marketing strategy provides. Backlinks are an important aspect of content marketing, but focusing just on this one aspect in your strategy means you’ll be missing out on these other invaluable benefits.

Want to see more examples of the real impact of content marketing? Check out this roundup of case studies featuring the strategies and results of 10 recent campaigns.