A successful marketing campaign needs to have a strong customer base, and for a small business to build a brand, it becomes difficult to compete against industry giants, and ultimately they miss the mark. However, the challenges faced by them can be overcome with proper planning and strategizing in the right direction.
With content marketing tactics you can bridge this gap to create a brand identity with much ease.
There are number of ways a business can use content marketing to improve its brand awareness.
Ways to market your content for brand awareness
Low barrier to entry
This is particularly beneficial to small businesses without enough money to run complex marketing campaigns. Content marketing, therefore, remains the only cheap and yet effective strategy to improve the brand awareness. With a bit of proper planning, content marketing is a savior for businesses looking to boost their brand cost-effectively.
Sharing experiences content
You have the opportunity of sharing content around your values and core beliefs. Indeed, you can inspire others by sharing a lesson learned over time. In the process also raise awareness of your products or services.
Develop content focused on core themes
You must plan your content message. They must be focused on certain themes otherwise your messages will be irrelevant. The articles must have the desired outcome. If you invest time to develop the core message based on pillars of content, then the content will serve you and your brand. For instance, the healthcare industry uses visual content to share the core message effectively than by just putting in words.
Host the content
Sometimes businesses can choose a third party to host the content, however, hosting your content is desirable to mitigate shut down or unavailability of your vendor. Hosting your content doesn’t mean you can’t outsource. The more mediums you open for sending out your messages, the more the audience.
Steps to creating an effective content marketing strategy
- Define the content marketing objectives
Your business will not benefit if it does have marketing objectives. Therefore, creating great content should be part and parcel of your goals. Secondly, know what you are creating and what you will be achieving once you create the content. Content marketing can be a complex undertaking if you have not defined the goals. Get utmost clarity on your content goals before embarking on content strategy.
There this is how you define content marketing objectives
a) Know the purpose of your content
b) Create an action plan- it should be detailed
c) Always have a backup plan in place.
Don’t compromise defining objectives with content quality. Therefore, you should carefully craft and execute this marketing strategy.
- Know the target audience
Defining your target audience set is the most critical phase of planning without a defined audience your message will not make any meaningful impact. So, here’s what you need to focus on:
a) Best customer first – If you focus on the wrong audience at first, you might lose your best customers. Choose a segment of customers that are most likely consumers, therefore enabling yourself to create the appropriate buyer persona.
b) Get to know what your customers care about – It’s very advantageous to know more about your customer. You won’t connect with them if you don’t know what they care about, or what their feeling are. Making certain assumptions about them won’t help your cause. Look for their motivations, dreams, and pain points
c) Have conversion goals – Knowing and understanding your customer’s requirement is important. You need to mould your content to attract customers and your goal should be to convert these prospects into sales. For instance, Ford in its product page focuses on content depicting on latest technologies and advance safety factors that a customer is looking. This helps in converting and retaining customers.
Create content for every business objective
Indeed, your business has many targets. Therefore, your content should be based on your overall marketing objectives. One piece of content can’t address all you objectives. The content should help you convert and retain customers, but it should also help your business to grow as a brand. Don’t create content because it’s needed on the website but generate content with the solid intention of achieving a certain benchmark.
Therefore, create content that:
a) Generate awareness and interest – Awareness is the first step towards building a strong relationship with your customers. Your audience must be informed about your presence otherwise it will be a futile effort. Therefore, you need to create informational content around topics or keywords.
b) Demonstrate expertise – Showing your expertise of the service or product and how it satisfies your customers’ needs is most important. Therefore, create educative and instructional content so that it can help them realize what they have been missing in their lives. Woe unto you if you don’t teach and educate, the prospects will start comparing you with your competitors.
c) Get referrals- Referrals work magic; you won’t grow without being given credible references from your customers. Any time you engage with the customers you have the chance to integrate referral content during the interaction. The referral program helps to create a positive image. Customers will start to feel referrals are a way to help people within their networks.
Benefits of content marketing to businesses
By consistently delivering the quality content with the effective content marketing strategy you can have the following benefits:
- Better returns on the investment – time, and monetary wise.
- Funneling your website visitors into leads and sales.
- You will have an advantage over the competitors.
- Create a long-term relationship.
- Connecting with your audience through your brand.
- Creating a consistent website traffic.
- Building a massive exposure to your products and services.
- Positioning yourself as an expert and an authority in the services you offer thus creating trust.
Content marketing is an essential part of any marketing campaign and following these strategies can engage your audience to have an honest relationship and in turn, build your small business as a brand. No matter, if you are a small business or an industry giant, effective content marketing can play a significant role in marketing success.
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