Ever heard of the phrase, “Content is King”? Well, if you’ve been in the digital marketing space, I’m sure you must have! Quality content can benefit your brand in numerous ways, from driving traffic to converting that traffic into a customer. Content marketing is one of the most impactful ways of marketing that can associate value with your brand and help you acquire new customers as well.
What is Content Marketing?
When you think of content marketing, the first few things that pop up in your head could be a Blog, a Twitter post, or maybe a viral YouTube video. Content marketing is all about delivering stories and value through your content, and thus,
Content Marketing is a marketing strategy for creating, distributing, and publishing consistent and relevant content on the web.
The key word here is “value.” It’s what differentiates content marketing from other forms of marketing or advertising. It primarily focuses on showing consumers who you are as a brand and what value your brand represents through its content.
Do you remember those fun comic books from your childhood?
It can be a perfect example of content marketing.
How content marketing impacts brand awareness?
Content marketing is closely related to Brand awareness and brand building which is a crucial part of online digital marketing. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s a crucial goal to keep in mind to build your brand.
Content marketing is essential for brand presence in the market that is recognizable, visible, and delivers excellent value, online and offline.
The top goals marketers achieve through content marketing are:
- Brand Awareness
- Educating Audience
- Building Trust and,
- Brand Advocacy
Brand awareness is not only limited to the name or tagline of a brand, but it’s about how well users understand the qualities that make your brand different from others. To achieve it, your content plays a huge role that sets your brand apart from your customers and gives voice and tone to your brand.
Here are 12 ways to grow your business through Content Marketing
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Find your niche
The first step is to find your niche, especially in creating content that deeply resonates with your audience, followed by researching your niche. It is important to be intimately aware of your target audience and their problems.
A brand must be able to differentiate between the mass and niche markets. The mass market is a marketing strategy focusing on the whole market, while the niche market focuses on market segments.
Think of it like a slice of a pie, a niche market within a mass market. A mass market is a skincare, and a niche market is sensitive skincare for women over 50’s. So, a niche market is all about who you are helping, women over 50s and how you are helping with sensitive skincare. It applies primarily to new business owners because when brands niche down, it helps us create relevant and engaging content and positions your brand away from competitors.
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Understand your audience
To create content that resonates with your audience, you must first get to know your audience. Research their needs, pains, pleasures, questions, and challenges.
Here’s how you can do it-
- Reddit forums
- Facebook Groups
- Ask your audience (live, poll, forms, questions)
- Pinterest boards and pins
- See what’s trending
- Book or Podcast reviews
- Quora commonly asked questions
- Youtube video comments
When you know your ideal audience, it is time to build your audience avatar. It covers the demographics, psychographics, behavior, pains, and pleasures.
- Demographics- Gender, Age, Ethnicity, job, income, education level
- Psychographics- values, beliefs, habits, hobbies, stages of life, attitude & motivators
- Behavioral- websites they spend their significant time, social channels, shopping behavior, and purchasing intent.
- Pain- What challenges are you facing? What is happening in their lives that our brand can fix?
- Pleasure- What are their dream and outcomes?
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Focus on Unbranded searchable web content
As this is the initial stage for your brand, and people might not know you as a brand, it is advisable to be available for non-branded search queries. It can drive traffic and make your brand visible.
Let’s take an example of a Salon.
Maybe you have a salon parlor that just opened in Chicago. It is possible that people may not be aware of the salon yet. You can use SEO to drive traffic and footfall to your salon.
You can target search terms like-
- haircut salon in Chicago (which has around 3600 searches per month)
- balayage colour salon in Chicago (which has around 170 searches per month)
You can easily optimize your web page content by looking at these search terms and driving new customers with a GMB listing.
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Publish your content on Third Party Websites
If you have a new website, there are chances that it lacks authority. To push your content to the top of the SERPs, you must use third-party websites to publish your content.
It has a lot to do with your domain authority, backlinks history and optimization of the content.
To deal with this, you can publish your content on other websites and rank your own.
Here’s how to do it-
- Research and create a list of websites related to your industry where you wish to publish your content.
- Reach out to the business owner or the publisher, asking if you can make your contribution to blog content regularly.
- If accepted, write articles/blogs on a niche your audience might be interested in. Make sure to talk about your USP without being self-promoting.
- Get your content shared on cross platforms.
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Ace with Influencer marketing
Find industry-related influencers and showcase your brand through them. You can reach a wider audience with a successful influencer marketing strategy.
You can find influencers easily through social media tools or apps and work with them in exchange for barter, incentives or even free products. It could be a hit for e-commerce brands, the apparel industry, technology, beauty etc.
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Let data drive your metrics.
Content marketing relies on insights and data. The success of content is defined through data that drive your content.
Having a plan and working on a content strategy is essential rather than the publish and pray method.
Here are a few tools which can help you track metrics and optimize your strategy
- Google Analytics- for insights, demographics, and behaviours
- Search Console- to optimize your content, understand what queries bring the user to the site
- SEMrush- for competitive analysis, competitive research, backlinks report etc.
Simply put, you can’t optimize it if you can’t track it!
Monitoring your insights weekly is crucial to see how your content performs online, what brings you the reach, and how users engage with your website.
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Use Social Listening Tools
We are curious to know what people talk about our brand, how they talk about it, and the takeaways from the brand, and that’s where social listening reaches between the lines.
Using machine learning to listen to what users are talking about your brand. It can bring a lot of value, as it comprehends you to see if your brand has a positive impact or not.
You can use tools like Hubspot and Sprout social to see what users have been buzzing about your brand.
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Keep transforming your content strategy
Your content strategy can make or break a business. Content strategy is critical to your marketing strategy, so you must keep it up to date. To keep up with your content strategy, you need to understand how to diversify your content strategy.
You may be aware of the importance of diversifying your content strategy, but it’s easy to forget that it’s essential to keep your content strategy fresh.
That’s where diversification comes in. You can also diversify your content on social media by videos, blog articles, podcasts, email newsletters, tutorials, events etc.
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Use videos!
Video content marketing is a great way to build brand awareness. You can use videos to increase your social media followers and create quality content to build engagement. To do this, you will need to meet a few requirements. The video must be engaging, it must have a good storyline, and it must be informative.
Video content is also highly sharable and can get your brand noticed by new audiences. Video content is the perfect vehicle for your brand to tell your story. You can create a video that captures your brand’s personality and tells your story in the most compelling way possible.
Here are a few tools that can help you create amazing videos-
- Invideo
- Biteable
- Clipchamp Create
10. Engage your audience with storytelling
Building engagement in your content is a crucial way to build brand awareness. It’s also a great way to increase your social following and highlight your brand’s personality. When writing to engage your audience, you’ll need to use storytelling. It is a technique used by many bestselling authors and can be used in any content marketing.
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Collaboration & Networking
Getting into the new business requires building close bonds and partnerships with other brands and their owners.
The power of referrals can take your brand from x to z.
Here are a few ways to use your content marketing strategy to build partnerships online
- Collaboration for Live- You can go live together to grow your following and engage with other audiences.
- Post value-driven informative content and mention your industry leaders.
- Launch a podcast- You can record a podcast sharing experiences and insights about the business
- Join groups with other industry leaders and professionals.
- Create the content on LinkedIn and form new connections.
12. Don’t forget to be consistent!
I’m sure you’ve heard that Consistency is the Key. Being up to date and consistent with your content can do wonders for your brand. Content marketing has been around for years and has recently seen a significant increase. To stay consistent, a company needs to have a plan. The plan should lay out the content marketing calendar month-wise. Companies can stay on track with a content marketing calendar and create a consistent message.
It is crucial to consistently show up as an expert and double down on what’s working for your brand.
Conclusion
It is no secret that building a brand is crucial if you want to be successful in business. This blog will help you see how to use content marketing to build brand awareness. With this article, we hope you will clearly understand the different ways you can use content marketing to build awareness for your brand. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at info@brandveda.in