How to use content marketing for building brand awareness

Brand awareness is a critical factor in the life of every business, from small companies to large international enterprises. It’s the brand awareness that impacts how many customers you acquire and whether they are happy. Developing your brand awareness is a long-term process, but it’s one of the goals you should have for in mind for your business.

Brand awareness is more than a logo.

When your target audience recognizes your brand, it also identifies your company vision, mission, and values. That’s important because consumers are now facing a broad range of options and they will only purchase from brands they recognize and trust.

To put it simply, a strong brand gives you a considerable competitive advantage.

And one of the best ways to build brand awareness is with the help of content marketing.

Why content marketing?

Sharing quality content with your target audience allows you to show yourself and tell your customers who you are and what your brand represents.

Thanks to various forms of content available to brands today, you can make sure to communicate qualities that make you unique and create a distinction with competitors. Highlight what sets you apart and share details about your company that make your mission, vision, and values clear.

But how do you use content marketing to your advantage?

Here are some essential tips to make the most of content marketing for branding:

• Understand your audience — that’s is the first step to any successful marketing strategy. It’s your audience that you need to connect with and cater to their needs. Learn who your audience is, what their preferences are, what they need, and what kind of problems they’re experiencing. If you can provide them with solutions and answers to their questions, you’ll be on your way to creating valuable content.
• Develop a content strategy — once you have a solid understanding of your audience, you’re ready to create a plan that will help you reach them. Your company’s story is a high starting point for boosting brand awareness with content marketing. Promote your brand by sharing how you started, what were crucial milestones in your development, what the secret behind your success is and what your values are.
• Pick the best channels for the job — there are many different communication channels you can choose from, for example, your website, a company blog, video, infographics, webinars or other types of guides where you share advice that corresponds to the kind of expertise your company represents.
• Schedule your content — creating a publication schedule is a great idea because it will help keep your plan on track. It will serve as a roadmap for your content marketing activities, making sure that you never forget to publish new content. Branding only works if supported by consistency so make sure to apply that in the frequency of your blog posts or other content formats.
• Produce unique content — remember that your target audience is always in search of new information. Still, posting the exact same type of content as your competitors won’t help you stand out. To help consumers consider you as a unique brand, you also need to produce exclusive content. It’s hard to come up with innovative topics, but putting in some effort in this area is bound to pay off. For example, you can consider a subject everyone writes about, break it down into smaller chunks and focus on those that are often underestimated or even ignored.
• Check what your competitors are posting — you should never copy content ideas, but it’s a good move to check what your direct competitors are writing about and what their general content marketing strategy looks like. For example, check what kind formats they use and how they play out concerning popularity. You can use similar forms but to present different topics or discuss different ideas.
• Analyze and monitor your campaign — you will never know whether you’re moving in the right direction if you fail to take that data into account. For example, have a look at Google Analytics to understand whether your content is working in line with your strategy and which pieces are bringing you the most traffic. Use that information to plan future content and invest in formats that bring you the most significant ROI.

And…

Use smart tools

Content marketing can be quite a challenging endeavor if you aim to secure sponsored publications on high authority websites. Fortunately, there are tools at your disposal that help get in touch with the publishers you need.

An example of such a tool is marketin9, a platform that allows connecting marketers to publishers. You can order publications or if you’ve got your own content ready, search for the appropriate website out of the thousands of sites listed and quickly get in touch with the publisher.

The good thing about marketin9 is that it allows making bulk orders that result in significant price reductions — we’re talking even up to 50% of discount on publications in comparison to contacting the publisher directly on their website.

If you’ve been considering to launch your own content marketing campaign but never had the courage for it, right now the best time.

Have you got any questions about making content marketing campaigns work? Give us a shout out in comments, we’re always happy to help out organizations in sharing the best content possible and building their brand awareness.