How to Leverage Content Marketing to Grow Your Small Business Brand.
We talk to a fair number of small business owners and entrepreneurs who don’t quite understand how the world of brand and marketing all fits together. Maybe you appreciate that having a strong brand is important, which you may not exactly know what that looks like, but there’s a disconnect in how that relates to marketing. Your brand is more than just a logo or a catchy tagline — it's the essence of who you are, what you stand for, and how you connect with your customers. One of the most effective ways to build and grow your brand is through content marketing. Here we’ll break down how content marketing can help you establish a powerful brand presence and provide you with actionable strategies to get started.
WhAT IS Content Marketing EXACTLY?
Content marketing involves consistently putting valuable and relevant information out into the market to attract and engage your ideal customers. Unlike traditional advertising (think ads in publications, TV commercials, etc), which often interrupts potential customers, content marketing’s goal is to provide helpful information that addresses the needs and interests of your target customer.
WHY CONTENT MARKETING IS ESSENTIAL FOR BRAND BUILDING
It Establishes Authority and Trust
By sharing your expertise and insights, you position your company as a thought leader in your industry. Sharing valuable and relevant information with your audience builds trust with your audience, making them more likely to choose your products or services.
It Increases Your Brand Visibility
Word-of-mouth marketing has long been considered marketing gold. Customers are far more likely to believe what a peer tells them about your company than what you tell them about your company. When you create high-quality content that resonates with your audience, it’s more likely to be shared by your audience. Increased sharing results in increased reach and visibility. This organic growth can significantly enhance your brand's presence online.
It Engages and Retains Customers
When a company consistently provides valuable content to its audience, it keeps them engaged and encourages them to return. the old adage about marketing remains — it takes a prospect 5-7 times of seeing/hearing from your brand before they buy. By creating an ongoing relationship through valuable content, you turn prospects into loyal customers.
It improves your SEO
We’ve seen SEO marketed as a panacea of sorts. While we don’t think it’s the be-all-end-all that she portray it as, it is important to your overall marketing strategy. The bottom line is that search engines reward websites that regularly publish relevant content. When you optimize your content for search engines with relevant content for your audience, you can improve your website's ranking and attract more organic traffic.
Key Content Marketing Strategies
Effectively executing on content marketing starts with a well-defined brand. A well-defined brand starts with a clear strategy.
UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE
Foundational to establishing a brand and a marketing strategy is knowing your audience. Think about it, how would you talk about anything that is of interest to someone if you didn’t understand what interested them? Take time to understand both the demographics and psychographics of your target audience. By developing personas to represent your customer, you can tailor content that addresses their specific needs and challenges.
Define Your Brand Voice and Message
Your brand voice and message should reflect your business's values, personality, and position. Because you’ve already defined your ideal customer, you can develop a brand voice and messaging that will resonate with them. Key to grand and marketing is consistency so having a clearly defined brand voice will support the consistent development of your content marketing.
Create Valuable and Relevant Content
Remember that your content should provide value to your audience. You’ll want to consider the topics to cover and the most appropriate channels to deliver them, from blog posts and articles to videos, podcasts and social media updates.
Develop a Content Calendar
Consistency, consistency, consistency — it’s the key in content marketing (and brand in general). Take the time to develop a content calendar to plan and schedule all of your content in advance. Not only do you benefit from batching your process around like tasks but you also have it taken care of for a month or more in advance. Make sure your content calendar covers a variety of topics and channels.
Optimize for SEO
You’ve likely heard of Search engine optimization (SEO) and it’s often touted as the key to your marketing. While we don’t think it’s everything, we do agree that it is essential for increasing your content's visibility. Focus on creating high-quality and informative content that meets search engine guidelines. Plan to do keyword research to identify the terms and phrases your audience is searching for. These key words should then be included in your content in a natural way — don’t forget to place keywords in titles, headings and meta descriptions.
Leverage Social Media
Love them or hate them, social media has to be part of your marketing ecosystem. Social media platforms have become powerful channels for distributing your content and engaging with your audience. This isn’t to say you need to be on ALL platforms but your target audience research should provide you insight into where you need to be showing up on social. The nature of social media is small bite-sized bit of content and used to build relationships, answer questions, and gather feedback.
Measure and Adjust
Key to any effective marketing is understanding the performance of what you’ve done. There’s no sense in creating a bunch of content if it’s not helping to attract new customers and build loyalty with existing ones. Key metrics you should regularly track include your website traffic, engagement and conversion rates. Once you understand what does and doesn’t work, you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Content marketing needs to be a key approach to your overall marketing strategy. When you consistently provide valuable and relevant content, you increase visibility, build trust, and foster lasting relationships with your customers.
Feel like you have some foundational brand work to do before you launch content marketing? Book a consultation with us to learn how we can help.
