Content is a fundamental part of a marketing strategy that drives measurable outcomes. With more buyers researching solutions online before engaging with sales, companies that invest in content growth are far better positioned to attract potential customers, support the customer journey, and build long-term brand authority.

If you want to implement a solid strategy for content marketing, one that requires spending time and money, you’ll need to know how to clearly define, explain, and present it to a decision-maker or key stakeholder. Here’s how.

Explain Why You Need Content Marketing To Stay Competitive

A company that chooses not to embrace content marketing can lead to the potential risk of falling behind competitors. In fact, 82% of modern businesses use content marketing as part of their overall strategy.

If your competitors are already successfully executing a content marketing strategy, then they are most likely reaping bottom-line benefits like increased traffic, search rankings, conversions, and customer loyalty.

You Need Content To Compete in Search

Search engines are a go-to habit for most people. Without strategic content, you’ll have a tough time attracting online users searching for information about your industry or product. 

If your competitors are creating valuable content that is ranking well in search engines and delivering a strong customer experience, there’s a good chance that your prospective customers are spending time on their websites rather than yours.

Content Marketing’s Return Compounds Over Time

Content marketing has compounding returns. As you create content, you build a library of results and resources that become more valuable over time. The longer your content exists and the more content you create, the higher your returns will be.

If your competitors are leveraging content marketing (and you aren’t), they have a head start in their content investment. The sooner you begin creating content, the sooner you can match the breadth and volume of your competitors’ content in support of your company’s goals.

Show the Benefits Based on Your Goals

To further explain the importance of starting a content marketing plan, describe the benefits and how they correspond with your immediate goals. By showing the benefits related to your business goals, you will have a better chance of explaining how and why content marketing matters.

Builds Brand Awareness

Content marketing provides value through all sections of the sales funnel. Starting at the top, it’s a powerful tool for building brand awareness.

A brand awareness content marketing strategy includes producing a piece of likable, on-site content that will be promoted on other websites. This form of digital PR gets exposure for your brand each time a website features your content. When a high-authority website with a large audience mentions your brand, it is introduced to a new audience.

This type of coverage is organic; your brand gets the exposure without paying for it. Content is not listed as an “ad” or “sponsored,” which makes it more authentic and enables it to build a closer relationship with audiences.

Example

One of our Fractl campaigns drastically improved the brand awareness for our client, Movoto. The campaign, “The Wealthiest People in America,” included an interactive infographic for Movoto’s blog that showed the wealth gap between the state’s richest and average residents.

The content caught the attention of more than 130 publishers (including the Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and Yahoo), helping it build major brand awareness for our client and attracting more than 1.4 million website views.

Content marketing builds brand awareness online, as we’ve seen, but content marketing campaigns can even earn TV coverage.

Increases Site Traffic

The exposure created through content marketing does more than put your brand in front of a wide, new audience. It also directs that audience back to your website and increases your site traffic.

Content marketing increases both organic and referral website traffic. It does this by:

• Driving referral traffic from placements. As you gain high-quality placements through content marketing, you drive referral traffic back to your site. In other words, you can tap into the audience of a larger publisher and direct users back to your website.
• Increasing the volume and quality of sites linking to your website. Having a large number of high-quality links for your website is a major factor in SEO rankings. As you build links through placements, you optimize your website’s organic SEO authority.
• Increasing the amount of content on your website. Another major factor in improving the SEO authority of a website is content. As you publish new content on your website, you send signals to search engines that improve your website’s organic SEO authority.
• Improving SEO rankings and increasing organic traffic. As your site gains links and publishes more content, it begins to appear higher and higher in search rankings. Higher search rankings result in more organic traffic leading back to your site.

Content marketing is a holistic strategy with many elements that work together. Producing on-site content that gets featured off-site drives referral traffic and improves search rankings, which drives organic traffic.

This is important because it’s not enough to have one type of traffic. Referral traffic is great as it can draw a lot of users to your site in a short amount of time. But, you also need organic traffic because it is more sustainable and will drive continuous traffic to your site over time.

Examples

With content marketing, you drive both types of traffic: organic and referral. At Fractl, we’ve seen how content marketing can boost traffic with a single campaign and over time with long-term campaigns.

One of our clients received a 271% increase in traffic after receiving just one placement on BuzzFeed. This shows just how powerful one link back to a website can be.

We also saw content marketing’s ability to increase traffic during our long-term campaign for Recovery Brands. Over a three-year period, we published a series of campaigns that resulted in a 1,100% increase in organic traffic. Over the course of the campaign, the client site received 4 million page views and more than 1 million social shares.

Generates Leads

Improving brand awareness and increasing site traffic are powerful benefits, but both of these goals are designed to lead to another result: generating leads. This will probably be the metric most likely to catch the attention of the decision-maker who needs to agree to your content marketing business case plan. So, explain this process of lead-generating content marketing.

Quality, off-site content leads audiences to on-site landing pages that offer gated content. Gated content is an extremely valuable piece of content (such as a white paper, survey results, study, video series, templates, etc.) that users can only access if they provide their contact information.

Through these content marketing efforts, engaged users are led to this landing page and, therefore, are likely to enter their information in exchange for the gated content. This process creates valuable, targeted leads and better conversion rates.

Example

During a Fractl campaign for our client, BuzzStream, we produced gated content assets that were tied to off-site content. The content assets were made up of original, research-based reports that would be useful and appealing to BuzzStream’s target audience.

We then secured off-site placements that shared parts of the research and used calls to action to lead users back to the gated content, where they could enter their information to get the full report. This lead generation funnel succeeded in driving conversations and helped the client break their record for new leads.

Mention the Many Other Benefits of Content Marketing

To make a strong business case to a decision-maker, include a few other talking points to show the full value of content marketing:

• Consumers value content. Blogs help buyers learn, compare options, and feel more confident before committing to a purchase.
• Extremely cost-effective. A single content marketing campaign has the potential to reach millions of viewers, making it a better value than traditional advertising and many forms of digital advertising.
• Improves search visibility over time. Publishing in-depth content sends ongoing signals to search engines, strengthening rankings and helping potential customers discover your brand earlier in the customer journey.
• Supports email marketing and CRM workflows. Leads generated through content can be nurtured through email campaigns and managed within CRM platforms like Salesforce, improving coordination between marketing teams and sales.
• Strengthens trust and credibility. Educational content, testimonials, and real-world success stories act as social proof, helping decision-makers feel confident in pricing, positioning, and next steps.
• Extends campaign longevity. Content can be repurposed across social media marketing, LinkedIn, email marketing, and sales materials, supporting multiple digital marketing campaigns from a single investment.
• Positions brands as industry leaders. Research-driven content and marketing case studies help companies demonstrate expertise, influence conversations, and address audience pain points with authority.
• Content can be repurposed. Because content has compounding value, you can use it over and over. You can repurpose and reformat the content you create so you can reuse it multiple times. It can also be updated or repackaged down the line, so you continue to get benefits from it years later.

From Strategy to Measurable Results

Content marketing improves overall brand messaging and authority. When your brand gets high-quality media coverage, it garners higher brand authority. The visibility helps you become a known leader in your industry. When your content that is featured on other sites is tied to your industry (such as a data-focused study or report), you establish that authority even more. You show that you are a leader and influencer in your field, which builds trust and power.

As you share the risks of not using content marketing and the value and potential of using content marketing, deliver one final detail to your decision-maker…

Producing quality content must become a philosophy rather than a thing to check off a task list. Your organization needs to fully commit to this strategy to see high-value returns. Ultimately, you will find that content marketing is well worth the time and resources.

Want to see what this looks like in practice? Visit Fractl to see how our research-driven content marketing builds authority, trust, and long-term growth for your brand.