Content marketing is simply creating and distributing relevant and valuable information to change people’s minds without necessarily selling your product or service.
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Content marketing has satisfactorily proven to be an exceedingly effective tool in marketing. It costs 62% less and has a conversion rate 6 times higher than in other digital marketing methods. Many marketers have hailed the benefits but is it really as good as they say? It sounds cool, but like any other marketing method, content marketing naturally has its pros and cons which you genuinely need to be aware of in advance exploring it or reviewing your content marketing strategy.
Let’s dive in.
CONS
It is not easy.
Is anything worthwhile easy? This is absolutely accurate especially for those that are only just getting into content marketing. Everything will seem so cumbersome, and you wouldn’t even know where to start. It takes a considerable amount of patience and consistency to manage an effective content strategy. If you are unwilling to sacrifice and persevere, you cannot get the result of your content marketing strategy. Content marketing is everything that is promised and more but it takes time before you can get your result. Notwithstanding, if you are diligent and patient enough to see it through, it will suitably reward you.

It is time-intensive.
Developing a content strategy, generating unique content takes time and it is ongoing. Moreover, you need to spend time to understand your customers, their preferences, their needs, and problems so as to create content that they will find useful and valuable. Furthermore, collecting data and carefully analyzing it also takes considerable time.

It takes time.
You have to look at content marketing as an investment because it is virtually certain you will not get results immediately. It can take months for you to see the result and even when you see them they might be unimpressive at first. Don’t give up on content marketing if you don’t see an instantaneous result. It is a long-term approach to carefully building brand awareness for your business and establishing trust in your care.

You will still need promotion.
This is critical especially if you are in an extremely competitive market. Consequently, it’s more reliable to promote your content using social media and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You will need to create a budget for advertisement, influencer, seminars and conferences to raise awareness for your content.

PROS
Build Authority.
Content marketing boosts your authority and properly establishes you as a recognized leader in your industry. If you consistently develop and publish content that people find relevant and valuable, then you are seen as a reliable source of information. By that, you have established an outstanding reputation for yourself, and you are seen as a thought leader or industry leader.

It helps with SEO.
Developing and publishing more high-quality content for your website on a regular basis indicates to search engines that you are still active and relevant. Therefore, the SEO benefits are that each current content piece you add to your blog or website is another page Google is going to index.
The more pages you have may not necessarily lead to more search traffic; it is the quality content you have on pages that answer the searchers’ specific queries you have indexed, the more opportunities you get to rank for in these search queries.

It has a compound effect.
“Content is one of the few forms of marketing that has a compounding return” (Tomasz Tunguz). Content marketing efforts will require consistent investment but will eventually yield enormous results. It is a long-term investment, so what you will see are long-term, sustainable returns with time. It is also very important to know that content is not just relevant for a day. Furthermore, there should be a balance between evergreen contents and temporary content in a content marketing strategy. Temporary contents keep the blog or website fresh while the evergreen content lasts longer and still remains relevant.
A notable example is HubSpot, by creating quality content consistently over time, the blog has attracted over 1 million visits on a monthly basis. Useful, valuable content will stay relevant over time and will undoubtedly continue to generate traffic and leads past their publication date. Tunguz pointed out that only about one-third of views are generated on the first day of publication for a blog post on his site tomtunguz.com. With time, Tunguz says that a typical blog post will generate 1-2 times as much traffic.
So, what you are achieving by developing and publishing relevant content is that you are creating valuable assets that keep on working diligently for you.
Useful, valuable content will stay relevant over time and will continue to generate traffic and leads past their publication date.

It achieves more than traditional marketing and costs less.
Content marketing achieves a more outstanding result than the traditional marketing method and it costs far less than any traditional marketing method. Check the following statistics compiled by lyfemarketing.com that will sincerely convince you.

*Content marketing provides conversion rates about 6 times higher than other digital marketing methods. (ABG Essentials)
*After reading recommendations on a blog, 61% of online consumers in the U.S. then decided to make a purchase. (Content Marketing Institute)
*According to 74% of companies surveyed, content marketing has progressively increased their marketing leads, both in quantity and quality. (Curata)
*Video content can help provide a great ROI and significantly increase conversions, according to 72% of businesses surveyed. (CrazyEgg)
*HubSpot reports that inbound marketers are able to double the average site conversion rate (from 6 to 12%), in part due to their content marketing efforts.

What do you think of the pros and cons? What are the challenges that you have encountered or facing right now? Let me know in the comment.

Do you think it is worth the effort?
Well, we think it’s worth it.
The pros vastly outweigh the cons, so if you are genuinely thinking of embarking on a content marketing campaign, let me advise you to get started NOW!