Content is becoming an integral part of a marketing strategy over the past years, and more brands are eager to explore how they can make the most of it. Content marketing has started evolving into a powerful machine for awareness, engagement, and lead generation.
As content marketing matures, more companies understand its potential. What makes it special is the fact that it can serve multiple goals through one strategy. That’s why a sophisticated content marketing strategy can help you meet both the marketing and the sales objectives.
The power of content marketing
According to CMI’s B2B Content Marketing report, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing this year.
Moreover, more than 70% of the respondents indicate that content marketing has increased audience engagement and lead generation for their company.
What makes content marketing powerful is the fact it can be useful in multiple ways:
- It can make it easier to reach a new audience
- It can turn your prospects into clients
- It can help everyone in the team understand the importance of an organized content strategy to reach key objectives
- It can lead to successful marketing and sales goals
Most of these goals have to do with the association between content marketing and meeting the set KPIs. It’s proof that content marketing can leverage marketing and sales funnel to help a business explore new opportunities.
However, what if you want to make a case for the importance of content marketing in improving your brand awareness?
Five ways content marketing can assist your brand’s success
Content marketing has been praised for its ability to monetize content for meaningful goals. What’s interesting, though, is that it can also have wider benefits for your brand.
When it comes to brand awareness, it’s not enough to provide an overview of how content creation can be powerful. In order to convince everyone in your company about the additional value of content marketing for your brand, you need to showcase all the different ways it can be helpful.
Think of how a content marketing strategy can align with your brand and what you want to make from it.
Here are five ways that content marketing can enhance your brand’s success.
1. Showcase your authority in your niche
A great way to use content marketing is to build your authority in your niche audience. It allows you to establish your name as an expert and improve the opportunities that come along with it.
The more you write about the content that is relevant to your business, the higher the chances of building trust with your readers. Whether they already know about your services or they discover them through your content, there is a great opportunity for your brand to be genuinely useful and build a reputation that comes straight through the power of your content marketing strategy.
Moreover, this can also help your SEO efforts, as the improved authority in a topic can affect your search rankings.
Thus, this is a case where your brand can help your business in practical ways by convincing more people in your team to explore how content marketing fits their business needs.
For example, a good start is to involve several team members in your content creation process to give them the opportunity to show their authority in the field. As more people create content, you are able to prove that you’re surrounded by a group of experts, which makes it easier for a potential customer to contact you for further questions about a topic.
2. Reach the right audience with the right content
One of the most important reasons to invest in content marketing is to reach your target audience through genuinely valuable content. It’s not easy nowadays to find success strictly through advertising or cold calls. Content can help you fill the gap between consideration and future purchases.
It can help you remain relevant and start conversations with the people that matter the most to your business.
What’s useful is to analyze the personas you want to target to make sure that your content is as relevant as possible.
This should make it easier to meet your objectives and create content that speaks to them, their needs, and their pain points.
A good way to do this is to think like your readers. Once you create the personas, you need to create content that will be helpful to them. Your content needs to answer their questions, and your content calendar should be a mix of answers to your objectives and your personas’ problems.
3. Improve engagement by mixing content types
Your content can be the key to increased engagement between your brand and your target audience. Whether it’s a new blog post, a long-form article, a narrative on social media, or a video, there are many different content types that can boost your engagement.
A modern approach to content marketing requires a diverse mix of content types to ensure that your branding is consistent without being boring.
It’s not enough anymore to create blog posts to consider your content marketing strategy successful. It’s time to explore different content types and formats to see what works better for your brand.
A/B testing can be really helpful in this case, as you will be able to understand which content types resonate with your target audience.
Even if you assume which formats can be more successful, you may end up being surprised in the end.
4. Seal key partnerships with influencers
If you’re interested in building key partnerships in your sector but don’t know where to start, content marketing can give you a helping hand. It’s challenging sometimes to start some important conversations, especially when it involves influencers.
Your content can be a good start to show your voice, your experience, and what makes you unique.
A good way to build your brand while developing important relationships is to invest in guest posts, content collaborations, and curated content.
If you want to test different content ideas while focusing on relationship building, you can reach influencers to suggest a content contribution to your blog. You’d be able to gain great exposure to their connections while they’re able to prove once again why they serve as influencers.
This is turning out to be a good tactic when building your brand, but it’s useful to make the ask at the right time. If you’ve just started with content marketing and haven’t engaged with influencers in the past, you probably won’t see a positive response. However, if you focus on nurturing a relationship while also building your own strategy, then you have increased chances of success.
5. Create different content for different purposes
Another advantage of content marketing is the flexibility it can offer when it comes to planning the different ways it can help a business.
If the first step is to build a brand’s reputation, this doesn’t mean that it can’t generate new leads, improved engagement, or even new PR opportunities.
That’s why marketers need to be agile enough to welcome new opportunities for their business. Even though it’s vital to set your objectives along with your strategy, it’s still useful to be open to new paths to success.
The challenge comes to the marketers to be able to spot emerging opportunities while measuring the results of their work.
Your content marketing strategy can be a useful ally in improving your brand’s awareness, but it can simultaneously serve different objectives.
All you need is a keen eye for exploring how it can work for your brand and how it can be linked to all the set objectives.