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Use content to build your brand

Here is a quick guide to help get your content strategy off the ground and build a powerful brand.

4 min read

Marketing Strategy

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Content is what enables your company to set itself apart from everyone else. Brands and agencies agree that regardless of which medium is used – social media, mobile, email, out-of-home, direct, etc. – content is an extremely valuable factor that makes up an effective marketing mix.

According to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional techniques and generates three times as many leads.

The harsh truth is that the environment of digital marketing is getting more competitive by the hour. Therefore, it is more important than ever to build a brand that people can trust. Users today are exposed to more information than they know what to do with. That being said, producing captivating brand content is crucial in capturing attention and engaging consumers.

Here is a quick guide to help get your strategy off the ground and build a powerful brand.

Plan

Building your brand involves planning your content strategy in accordance with the conversion funnel. This defines the steps your potential customers take to become first-time and repeat buyers. Typical conversion funnels are comprised of five phases.

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Engagement
  4. Conversion
  5. Retention

Each piece of content you produce must be properly tailored to each phase in order to maximize your return on investment.

Create

So you know what type of content you should produce in relation to the conversion funnel. But how do you know what will really captivate the audience?

Although it is good practice to crank out content on frequent basis, you are not doing anyone any favors by producing subpar material. Always ask yourself and have a clear answer for what value each piece brings to the viewer.

If you want to gain insights into what is making your target audience tick, a great strategy is to use social media monitoring tools to see exactly what users are looking for in brands, or even industries as a whole. With this information, you can gear your content based on users’ needs and concerns.

Content creation can be done in many ways based on the nature of your target audience and what they desire. The most important thing you should aim to do in your production is improve the lives of the content consumers. That makes the actual creation part a lot more complex: You need coordination between copywriters, sales team, social media managers and support staff to provide value to your audience. A scheduling and collaboration tool will allow you to manage interdepartmental communication and manage multichannel marketing campaigns.

And yes, there’s no compulsion to create all the content yourself. A lot of brands are making user-generated content fundamental to their content strategies. In fact, 72% of brands believe that user-generated content helps them engage their audience more effectively.

Distribute

Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of content marking is knowing how to distribute it effectively. Each demographic consumes content differently.

Market research will help you have a clear picture of your target audiences’ interests. For instance, if you are a brand marketing chiefly to millennials, a prime place to release your material would be on social media.

The name of the game is knowing your brand’s audience down to a tee and distributing content to fit their lifestyles.

Track

Building a brand with content is a constant work-in-progress. You must learn more about the audience and create material that suits them on an ongoing basis. To gain deeper insight, each piece of content you produce needs to be tracked and analyzed. With every result, there is a new lesson on how to build your brand further.

Implementing a couple of commonly used freemium analytics tools is the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t. With this information, you can get a good idea of how your material affects the viewers. Are some pieces getting shared more than others? What are those posts doing right? Which ones aren’t getting the attention you want? What are they doing wrong and how can you alter future posts?

Content marketing can be a successful venture at every stage of your customer life cycle, provided you create quality content that works to provide timeless value to them and keep them engaged for the long haul.

Avinash Nair is a digital marketer at E2M, India’s premium digital marketing agency. He specializes in social media marketing and content marketing services. Follow him on Twitter.