Content marketing is often viewed as a method for generating more traffic. That’s definitely one of the perks of utilizing your content, but there is much more to gain, including a significant boost in brand awareness.
If you’ve yet to focus on brand awareness, just know that when recognition increases, consumers begin to gain an understanding of what you’re about as a company. As this familiarity grows, you gain more trust from consumers. Trust leads to purchases – and who doesn’t like seeing a boost in sales?
Types of Content
Content marketing isn’t often put in the same boat as material used as revenue-driving content, which is product descriptions and advertising. Content marketing seeks to separate itself from material like that because instead of building up a product, your content marketing seeks to build up your brand.
And while quality content will eventually lead to sales, being too “salesy” can be antithetical to building your brand. Consumers will absorb ads when they are already interested in a product, but it’s the content marketing that funnels them to the buy cycle.
Building a Following
As you structure your content, consider the various channels through which it will be available. For example, social media is a great tool for attracting a new audience or driving deeper connections with your current audience.
Content marketing can also be tailored to improve your organic ranking in search, build partnerships with other brands, retain customers and generate more traffic to your website via high-authority backlinks.
Top Tips to Follow
There’s no denying the power of quality content, but that’s difficult to do if you don’t know your target audience. Who is the ideal audience for what your business puts out? What are their specific needs and how does your company meet those needs? How do they prefer to be informed before making a purchase? Knowing this will help you build your content and distribute it to the right places.
Your approach will change as you go, but you must make fact-based decisions on how those changes will play out. You can do this by analyzing your data. Use tools like Google analytics, Hootsuite and Google Search Console to stay updated on keywords, performance insights, user behavior, backlink reports and an analysis of your competitors.
Don’t forget to continually define your brand’s selling proposition. This is what makes you unique and stick out in the crowd. Your unique selling proposition is prone to change, perhaps ever so slightly, which means you need to account for these changes in your content.
One of the most valuable tips you can follow is to partner with a content marketing professional. At SJC, we assist companies in a variety of industries with strategies that build up their brand, their following and their bottom line. Contact us and let’s discuss the value of making us part of your growth strategy.