The current global situation has brought marketing to the next level. As customers spend more time browsing online to get information or make transactions, brands have fine tuned their digital marketing efforts to continue engaging with their audience.
One thing remains, though—content provides brands with the fuel for their digital marketing strategies. With customers looking for a trusted source of information, it’s the brands with quality content that garners the attention.
How do you incorporate quality content as part of your digital branding strategy?
1. Deliver Content Targeting Your Buyer Personas.
A successful branding strategy starts with identifying your buyer personas. These are fictional representation of your customers, detailing their age, location, professional profile, pain points, and motivations.
By making a content strategy centered around your buyer personas, you’re not just publishing great content; you’re actually writing to help your audience solve their problems. Your topics are more aligned to what they’re searching for, providing your brand with a more laser-focused approach to content marketing.
A persona-based content strategy helps brand become a go-to source for their audience. Because you’re able to provide the answers to their problems, you strengthen your brand’s authority in that specific area.
2. Provide Value in Different Content Formats.
A common misconception is that content only comes in the form of blog posts, leaving businesses to invest in guest posting as the sole strategy to increase brand authority.
But in the digital space, you need to adjust your content based on where you’re going to publish and who you’re going to post it for. That’s why every business should have a brand strategy that incorporates different content formats.
New Age Digital, for example, advocates the use of videos and creative content to help brands thrive in the digital space. It gives them more breathing room to engage with customers while delivering value through different channels.
If you want to give your brand an elevated content strategy, develop a library of content assets that you can use – from blog posts and videos, to infographics and white papers.
Pro-tip: You don’t have to create content from scratch to promote your brand every time. You can repurpose content into different formats. For instance, you can turn a blog post int a video, or vice-versa. However, make sure the topic is relevant for your audience.
3. Build Authenticity.
Every brand has a story to tell. Content makes your story more authentic.
How you present your content reflects the brand that you’re trying to build and resonates with your audience. In turn, this creates trust between your brand and your customers. The more they trust you, the more they’ll buy from you.
But trust can be a brittle thing in the digital world, and you need to consistently solidify this so your customers continue to advocate your business.
Here are a few ways to build authenticity through content:
- Write about a topic you’re an expert at.
- Don’t sell—present a solution.
- Show stories of how you began your business.
The important thing is you provide your audience with snippets that allow them to connect with your brand. This not only helps in making your brand authentic, but it also helps in eliciting a stronger emotional response from them.
4. Always Be Prepared – Your Content Calendar is a Must.
You need more than great writing skills to pull off effective content; planning takes up a chunk of your content marketing efforts. This is where having a content editorial calendar becomes useful.
Preparing a calendar makes your entire strategy less random. Every piece of content you publish fits your entire branding puzzle and delivers a purpose. More than that, it allows you to have visibility over your content creation process and determine if what you’re putting out there is adding to your results.
If you have a calendar, it’s easier to adjust your content marketing strategy for the next period so it aligns with your branding efforts.
Final Thoughts
Quality content serves as an asset for every business – only if you know how to use it. Plan your branding strategy alongside your content marketing efforts to forge a strong identity for your business. Use this as a way to continuously engage and deliver value, while cutting through the noise in the digital landscape.