5 Ways Content Is a Business Advantage

How can content give your organization a business advantage? I love to count the ways. Let’s start with five.

But first, let me clarify why. You might already be convinced that the right content approach can set your organization apart. But chances are not every leader or stakeholder is as convinced.

And it certainly doesn’t help that prominent business magazines such as Harvard Business Review and Inc give little coverage to the role of content in business. I’m making an effort to change that with my contributions to the great magazine Entrepreneur, but for now the coverage gap is big.

So, to help you make the case for content as a source of competitive advantage, consider this list.

1. Attract + Win Over Customers (or Audiences)

People research most decisions and most purchases—whether for personal or business situations—online. For B2B sales, customers spend only 17% of their time meeting with sellers live, and 75% of customers would prefer a “rep-free” process, meaning no live meeting or interaction. For B2C sales, a study by Nosto found 67% of consumers have significantly increased their online purchasing since the pandemic. (Learn more about those insights in 5 Signs Your CX Problem Is Really a Content Problem.)

Effective content makes your organization and what you offer easy to discover and compelling to consider as potential customers do their research. Content should be a key part of any go-to-market approach for a business or its products and services.

For instance, I talked recently with a Chief Product Officer of a hiring platform for engineers about his dramatic change to their go-to-market approach. He shifted to a philosophy of “lead with value,” and, in turn, to focus on content such as useful research reports, how-to articles, and more. Within a few months of making that shift, the visibility of his company in search engine results rose and the amount of quality traffic to their website skyrocketed.

As another example, The Home Depot offers a wealth of articles, tutorials, and videos with practical advice and inspirational ideas to help Do-It-Yourselfers plan and execute projects. This content positions The Home Depot as a trusted advisor early in the customer relationship and differentiates it from potential competitors.

2. Keep Customers by Improving End-to-End Customer Experiences

It’s not enough to win customers over once. Any business that wants to succeed has to win each customer over repeatedly. Gartner has found that two-thirds of companies see themselves as competing on customer experience. But more than half of customers are not impressed, saying most companies fall short. (Learn more about those insights in 5 Signs Your CX Problem Is Really a Content Problem.)

Content can play many important roles in keeping customers, from adding educational value to enabling customer success.

When it comes to adding educational value, Salesforce stands out with Salesforce+, a Netflix-style resource for businesses. It’s also a digital version of its wildly successful Dreamforce event, which was disrupted during the pandemic. Salesforce+ offers free access to high-production video and audio series featuring business leaders, challenges, and trends with the intent of building a trusted relationship.

For customer success, content such as robust onboarding, microcopy, success tips, notifications, contextual help, and clear guides are an opportunity to leapfrog the ho-hum CX of your competition. For example, the fitness equipment manufacturing company Precor revamped their welcome kit for customers to ensure successful setup. As another example, Intuit has earned much acclaim for Intuit Assist, a useful application of AI and content to help customers across all Intuit products.

3. Leverage the Power of Intangible Assets

Content brings brands to life. Content composes much intellectual property, unique data, and thought leadership. Content shapes brand or organization reputation. In other words, content is the substance of the intangible assets that set high-growth companies apart.

Today most organizations are recognizing that these intangible assets are integral to the value they provide, and they’re taking it seriously. Even CFA Institute, which issues the highly rigorous Chartered Financial Analyst credential, acknowledges the trend:

“Intangible assets are increasingly critical to corporate value [even though] current accounting standards make it difficult to capture them in financial statements.”

Wise companies want digital transformation of their business to enhance the value from intangible assets in many ways. McKinsey, for instance, has uncovered a strong correlation between increasing value through intangible assets and business growth.

4. Let Content Benefits Compound

If your organization handles content well, the benefits are repeatable. And they compound.

What do I mean by compound? For financial assets like savings and investments, compound interest is when you earn interest on the money you’ve saved and on interest you’ve earned. Compound interest multiplies the value of your assets over time.

In the same way, effective content has compounding impact on key areas of intangible value, such as your organization’s brand and unique data. For example, the Content Science team and I worked with a large home improvement retailer to optimize its content to attract customers, such as articles and videos with project guides. We didn’t create any new content, simply improved the effectiveness of content they already had. After 6 months, the optimized content attracted 213% more visits through search engines and resulted in 244% more sales. After 12 months, the visits increased by 500% and the sales increased by 753%.

That’s the power of compounding content effectiveness.

5. Maximize ROI (Return on Investment) from Content + Ad Assets

When you better understand customers through their content interactions and feedback, you can better focus your content assets or advertising (or both) and, consequently, get more return from it. And you can make higher-quality decisions about content to make the content more effective.

Those content decisions might be strategic, such as investing in a new form of content, as REI did when it developed an original documentary series. Or those content decisions might be tactical, such as when Netflix tests the performance of three versions of art for a movie teaser. Both strategic and tactical content decisions can give you more return with the right approach.

Let’s consider a slightly different example of investing in scaling the impact of effective content. A prominent research university in the United Kingdom found itself with a wealth of high-performing content based on discoveries in cutting-edge topics such as microplastics, AI, and space innovation. The institution wanted to raise the visibility of that content with key audiences in the United States (U.S.). So, the Content Science team and I worked with the university to expand the reach through a native advertising campaign that garnered 500 million impressions in premium U.S. media such as Axios. Along the way, we tested different headlines and images to maximize those impressions.

So, the right content approach can give any organization a business advantage. Inspired by this list, you likely will start to see many more ways that’s true for your organization—and help your leaders and stakeholders see them, too.