Linking is often touted as one of the greatest benefits of content marketing.

It’s true that quality content marketing can generate high quality return links, but it’s a welcome side effect – this shouldn’t be a primary goal.

There are a profusion of other content marketing benefits that produce as many positive effects, and often more, than backlinks. Here are 13 ways content marketing can benefit your business beyond links.

Public conversion throughout the buyer’s journey

Content marketing is beneficial at all stages of the buyer’s journey. Content can help you be seen, build trust, convert leads and increase your income.

When you stop thinking about links and strategy as it connects to your sales funnel, you’ll have a better chance of creating content that attracts customers and potential customers, and then guiding them down the path that will allow them to make it do with you.

Increased brand awareness

A link to a highly authoritative website does not improve brand awareness. Mentioning your brand is what increases awareness.

The value of being mentioned on popular sites is that your brand name passes in front of a large audience. Your trademark is not affected by a mention that includes a link or nofollow link.

When your brand is listed on a highly-followed website with great online authority, it introduces you to a new audience. For new brands trying to become well-known brands, public relations content marketing can help them gain a foothold in the marketplace.

Fractl helped Movoto, a real estate research site, increase brand awareness through content marketing. Campaigns such as Twitter reading levels and Marvel Origins mapping have allowed Movoto to make a name for itself on MTV, Yahoo, Glamour, Mental Wire, Lifehacker, The Huffington Post, People, Business Insider, etc. The constant visibility on several high-ranking government websites has allowed Movoto to become a memorable and recognizable name.
Promote a product or service

Highlight the unique features and benefits of products or services

Products and services can also be promoted through content marketing by showing their essential features and benefits. On-site content can be simpler in explaining products and services, as audiences are on the brand’s website, which means they are already somewhat interested in the product.

However, to effectively highlight the characteristics and benefits of a product or service through off-site content, it must be presented in an attractive and interesting manner.

Land Rover does it well in its online magazine called Onelife. Instead of selling the public directly on Land Rover, the magazine tells stories of adventures with its vehicles. A recent story documented by surfer Chrystal Jameson Fitzgerald during his 4,000 km journey to Alaska to show what it’s like to drive a Range Rover Evoque.

Addressing the public’s problem

Just as content can be used to present a brand, product or service to a broad audience, it can also be used to raise awareness of a particular problem.

When you create content that exposes a potential problem to your prospects, you are educing your audience and bringing it back to your products or services that solve the problem.

To raise awareness of the drug problem in America, we collaborated with Recovery Brands to produce an interactive infographic that presents statistics on drug-related deaths in the United States. The striking infographic of the parallax exposed a problem and then guided the public to information to overcome the problem in the client. website where they can find rehabilitation resources and treatment centres.

Increased traffic on the site

Links are powerful because of their referencing value. But they are even more powerful because of the potential traffic they send to a website. When working on content marketing campaigns, remember that link-generated traffic can be more valuable than the link itself.

A Fractl customer received a nofollow link to its BuzzFeed content. Although the placement did not generate any link, it achieved a much better result: the client saw an increase of 271 organic traffic generated by this placement.

Establishing a central message

If your brand has a unique perspective or perspective, you can use content marketing to get that message across. This helps attract a tribe of loyal followers and fans.

Receive traditional media coverage

You can’t get a link when someone mentions your website or brand on TV, but that certainly doesn’t make the reference invaluable. Being mentioned in traditional media is a powerful way to draw your company’s attention to a new audience, build brand awareness and draw more attention to your project, products and services.

Content marketing campaigns can lead to traditional local and national media coverage. One of our client campaigns led to the Today Show, which is part of the “What’s Trending Today” segment, which puts it in front of a large national audience.

Increase in shares

When content marketing is well done, it can spread on social networks. This exhibition serves other purposes, such as increasing brand awareness and generating traffic on your website. In addition, it may be related to improving your REFERencing in some respects.

But the real benefit of increasing the number of social shares is that you get the free promotion offered when users share and promote your content. Our perceptions of perfection across borders have accumulated more than 900,000 actions, as social media users have connected to and shared content, reinforcing interest and creating a more intense buzz among our customer.

Cultivating your social suite

When social media users find the content they like, they want to know how to get more out of it. So if you produce viral or valuable content that resonates with the public, you create an opportunity to develop your social audience.

With a wider social audience, you’ll be more likely to succeed with other content campaigns because you’ll have an existing audience with which you can share your new content and rely on to help spread the word.

Build your subscription list by email

You can use the content to create the following social media, as well as a mailing list. Content marketing efforts can capture the public’s attention via off-site content, and then bring them back to on-site content that invites them to enter their email address for content upgrades, exclusive content or even quiz results.

Afar Magazine has increased its mailing list to 4,240 email addresses by creating a quiz “What is your city of mind” and asking users to provide their email address in exchange for its results.

Introducing authority and building trust

Publishing authoritative, researched content helps you create a climate of trust for your brand. This type of content marketing allows you to show what your brand knows and why you are a leader in your industry. This puts your brand in the minds of prospects, shows them that you are the best option in your field and allows you to find your product or service when the prospect is ready to buy.

HubSpot is a marketing software company. So it’s not surprising that this is a good example of effective content marketing, as it’s about demonstrating authority and building trust. Its website is full of dozens and dozens of free resources that showcase his knowledge in the sector and prove why he is an authority in his field.

Increase your prospects and sales

When content requires users to enter their information to access content upgrades such as e-books, white papers, and problem guides solved by your organization, you do more than develop your mailing list. You collect information from valuable leads, which can turn into sales.

To continue the HubSpot example, the content marketing software has a vast library of free guides and resources related to its core offering. Every person who signs up for one of their free offers is a track that looks at their offers, making it a hot track for their sales pipeline.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of links when it comes to content marketing. Backlinks are a powerful part of creating a strong digital presence for your brand. However, links should not be the only objective or benefit to defining a content marketing plan. There are many content marketing benefits that outperform backlinks. And when you focus on those benefits, you’ll naturally create the backlinks you’ve tried to create.