For centuries, a king was the highest lawmaker in the land and the most powerful and revered person in the land. The king's word was law, and going against the king was not a good idea. That was the accepted truth, and those who lost sight of this truth were often met with grave misfortune. In short, the king always wins.
As the centuries passed and kings faded away, the power they once held was not forgotten and was often used to describe other powerful entities. You may have heard the term in the 1960s when they said: "rock and roll is king." In the 1980s, when Wall Street brokers were riding high and swimming in money, the term of the day was "cash is king."
Then came the internet, one of the most powerful and profound creations humanity has ever seen. The internet changed the world, thanks to the help of a certain guy named Bill Gates. (He founded a small company you might be familiar with named Microsoft.) In 1996 Mr. Gates wrote an essay, and in that essay, he coined a new phrase based on an old but unforgotten axiom; content is king.
What made content so important to Bill Gates that he described it as being "king"? The answer is simple; premium content always wins. Content is the end-all and be-all online, the standard by which all websites are measured. Engaging, informative, well-written content will always beat dull, poorly written, uninteresting, or, ugh, plagiarized content. More than that, with the right content delivered in the right way at the right time, even the lowest website can make it to the top, reaching the "throne" of the internet; Page 1 of Google.
Nothing else on the internet has this potent level of power, not keywords, page design, word counts, or backlinks. Content will make or break a blog, blast a landing page to the stratosphere, or, when poorly planned, burn a website to the virtual ground. As you might have already guessed, businesses, organizations, and internet marketers who lose sight of this truth are often met with grave (financial) misfortune.
Not only is content still king in 2022 it's more powerful than ever. Today there's an entirely new marketing method based solely on content, the aptly named "content marketing." Most businesses have entire teams that focus on nothing else besides creating new content, knowing full well that, if theirs isn't superior, someone else will usurp the throne and rank higher on Google. The list below shows just a fraction of what superior, well-planned, and well-executed content can provide:
• Ranking on Page 1 of Google. Nearly 80% of searchers never make it past page 1. If your content is there, you rule! If not, you're the king's fool.
• Branding you as the expert in your field. When you provide premium content that helps, informs, illuminates, or entertains, consumers will beat a path to your virtual door and crown you the reigning expert.
• Brand awareness. Even the tiniest, newest brands can rocket to the top with great content. Many use video content to do so, shooting from obscurity to household name almost overnight. (Just ask Dollar Shave Club!)
• Tons of traffic. When you provide content that provides genuine value, the amount of traffic it can drive to your web pages is astounding.
• More new customers than your business can handle.
The reason that content marketing is so important today boils down to a single fact; when consumers need something, the first thing they do is search for information online. This holds true from shoes and clothing to food, cars, houses, restaurants, and even doctors and hospitals. Consumers first grab their laptop, smartphone, or other connected device and search for information. If done right, when they search for something you create, manufacture, or sell, your content will lead them directly to you.
More than leading consumers to your business, unique, scintillating content has the power to persuade, change minds, influence opinions, and even create social change. Here are a few of the goals you can accomplish with outstanding content:
• Create a strong affinity for your brand, a connection formed by trust that's almost impossible to break.
• Encourage consumers to engage with your brand, ask questions, seek answers and, eventually, make a purchase decision.
• Educate, inform and assist consumers in reaching their goals.
• Prove that you genuinely care about your customers' wants, desires, needs, and life goals.
• Show the real-life, real-world benefits of what you offer without being pushy, salesy, or annoying.
At the end of the day, there's no better, faster, more powerful way to reach the pinnacle of success than content marketing. It truly is the king, the most powerful marketing strategy online with no equal. The organizations, entrepreneurs, and businesses that embrace this fact will inevitably rule from atop page 1 of Google, Bing, Facebook, and Yahoo.
The best content is created by a combination of factors that work together to form something valuable, useful, educational, inspirational, or simply entertaining. Sometimes content will have all of these features, and sometimes only 1, but every time it fulfills a human need of one kind or another. Great content:
• Answers a question in an understandable, relatable way.
• Provides the solution to a problem.
• Shows how to accomplish a task or goal.
• Teaches something new and valuable.
• Elicits an emotional response in the reader, viewer, or listener.
• Persuades using well-written, unbiased, and 100% transparent information.
• Is geared toward a specific audience.
Did today's content provide the answer you were looking for and illustrate why content is the king of marketing methods? If yes, this content has accomplished its goal by providing you, the reader, with the information you need to accomplish your goal. (Pretty nifty, yes?)
Here's the thing; kings come and go, and power fades. Some day, there will likely be another online marketing method that comes along and dethrones content, taking its place at the top of the heap. However, until that method arrives, there's no denying that content is king and will remain on its throne indefinitely. As a marketer, entrepreneur, or business leader, the faster you accept this truth, the faster you'll ascend to the most important throne there is; Google's Page 1.