Why Content Marketing?

After asking "What is content marketing?" the next question should be "why?"

Josh Steimle answers this question in a Forbes post about content marketing.

"First you need to understand the four steps of the typical buying cycle:

1. Awareness.
2. Research. 
3. Consideration. 
4. Buy. 

Traditional advertising and marketing is great when it comes to the second two steps, but after that it tends to trail off. Content marketing taps into the first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating consumers about a product they may have never considered before....

The return on investment for content marketing can be phenomenal....It provides additional content for social media marketing and contributes to SEO efforts by generating natural inbound links and building up good content on your website that gets found in search engines.

In fact, for many companies the bulk of their SEO efforts should be focused on content marketing."