How to Elevate Your Brand With Content Marketing by @successharbor

by Monika Beck | Featured Contributor

Are you searching for an effective way to greater brand awareness?

If you’re a new brand or business, you may be struggling to build a customer base or to gain brand awareness. As a result, you could be facing a lack of funding, early losses, or unstable cash flow. One solution to this problem is through content marketing. This article is designed to provide you with some effective content marketing tips to help you get customers, make sales and earn a profit.

Design a strategy

Before you do anything else, you must create a content marketing strategy. Define your objectives, both short and long-term. Lay out the steps to be taken to achieve those goals. Explain the techniques you will use to defeat your competitors. Identify the metrics you will employ to measure your success. This strategy is the foundation of your content marketing campaign.

Knowledge is power

It is vitally important to know and understand the three important players in the game: your target audience, your competition, and yourself.

1. Know your audience.

Do some in depth research into your target audience before you begin creating any content. You need to understand who your target audience is, what their interests are, and what will truly influence them to buy.

Once you have a solid profile of your target, then you can craft appealing blog posts, eye-catching images, and interesting videos that your audience will love. Remember, content marketing is about them, not you.

2. Know your competition.

It is important for your content to be the best in your field or industry. That starts by knowing who your competition is and what they are doing. Search for competitors in your industry and geographic region. Once you find them, look at the content on their websites, social media, and audience interactions. Use that information to create your own stellar content. Remember, the goal is to stand out and be the best.

3. Know yourself.

Take stock of your own business. Analyze yourself, your team, and your brand. What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? Leverage that knowledge to your advantage for your content marketing campaign. For example, if you are an expert in a particular field, maximize that authority by writing articles or producing videos to highlight that strength.

Sharpen your tools

Make sure you are using your tools of the trade in the most effective way.

1. Fine-tune your website and landing pages.

Your website is a necessary tool for implementing a content marketing campaign. Keep your website fast, clean, and mobile-friendly. Make sure you are giving your visitors and positive user experience. Additionally, you shouldn’t neglect your landing pages. These are the places where you will invite and bring customers from various places on the net. You should optimize your landing pages in such a way that they ensure you will make the sale or trigger the desired action.

2. Elevate your blog posts.

The goal of blogging is to create targeted and interesting content that will rank high on search engines and go viral on social media. When you do so, you increase your brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and build your audience.

How do you make the most of your blog posts? Think beyond the written word and use media such as images, videos, and infographics. Work on crafting eye-catching headlines and descriptions. Highlight sharing buttons and calls to action in order to get your readers to spread the word. Write high-quality content to match your headlines. Encourage reader discussion and comments.

3. Utilize paid ads.

If you feel confident in the quality of your content, why not get the most out of it. You can reach a wider audience and earn more engagements on Facebook with Facebook Ads. Also, you can gain more relevant visitors to your landing pages through Google Ads. Reap the rewards by wisely investing in paid advertising.

Go the extra mile

After you have developed your plan, done your research, and made the most of your tools, take the next steps to really make the most of your content marketing campaign.

1. Add conversation to your content.

Put forth some effort to start conversations for your content, landing pages, blog posts, and social media posts. How do you get started? Reply to comments on your posts and respond to customer inquiries. Be sure that you are prompt, friendly, and that you use the right tone of voice.

2. Develop and foster relationships.

Getting the conversation started is really just the first step. If you want to see results you need to build meaningful and lasting relationships with your audience. When you create a real relationship with a customer, you are really creating loyalty.

3. Dig through the attic.

Take stock of all of your unused content and see if you can repurpose it for your content marketing campaign. Perhaps you have company slideshow presentations or videos that were created for training or recruitment purposes. Those can be uploaded and shared on sites like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram to reach an even wider audience and show a different side of your organization.

Analyze and Update

Once you have implemented your content marketing campaign, don’t make the mistake of just walking away and assuming it will take care of itself.

You need to ensure that you are regularly monitoring and analyzing the condition, performance, and progress of the campaign. Are you reaching your goals? Are you connecting with your target audience? Are you getting conversions? Take advantage of free tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to make sure you are being effective.

Finally, take heart that you may have to go through some trial error to find the right campaign for you. This is an ever-changing environment and you will likely have to re-evaluate and update your goals and strategy to fit with new demands.

Remember that these content marketing tips are here to help you design the most effective campaign to suit your needs. By implementing them, you should bring content to your target audience, attract new customers, retain your existing customers, increase your sales, and gain stability and profitability.

photo credit: Going up?

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Savvy web designer with a twist – Monika Beck with Webene – San Diego, CA.

Monika Beck is passionate about website design, web programming, ecommerce, and building businesses. She is a serial entrepreneur and the cofounder of Success Harbor a website dedicated to help entrepreneurs succeed. Success Harbor interviews successful entrepreneurs and publishes topics relevant to business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs. Monika started Success Harbor with her cofounder in order to ease the life of entrepreneurs through original research, tips and unique content. Monika is also cofounder of Webene, a website design and online marketing firm based in San Diego, CA. Webene specializes in mobile-friendly responsive websites built on the WordPress platform. Monika loves playing classical music on the piano.

Monika Beck

Savvy web designer with a twist – Monika Beck with Webene – San Diego, CA.

Monika BeckMonika Beck is passionate about website design, web programming, ecommerce, and building businesses. She is a serial entrepreneur and the cofounder of Success Harbor a website dedicated to help entrepreneurs succeed. Success Harbor interviews successful entrepreneurs and publishes topics relevant to business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs. Monika started Success Harbor with her cofounder in order to ease the life of entrepreneurs through original research, tips and unique content. Monika is also a web designer and cofounder of Webene, a website design and online marketing firm based in San Diego, CA. Webene specializes in mobile-friendly responsive websites built on the WordPress platform. Monika loves playing classical music on the piano.