A large part of your company’s success is due to effective marketing. It’s how your potential customers become aware of your business and learn your brand. Effective content marketing also builds a loyal customer base: people who actively engage with your brand and who choose your company when they need products or services in your industry. While there are many different methods for marketing, especially on the internet, content marketing offers several benefits. Here are reasons you may want to pursue content marketing to build your brand’s audience.
Understanding How Content Marketing Works
Content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable and relevant content on a consistent basis. One key to a successful content marketing campaign is having a clearly-defined target audience for your content. Ideally, this target audience should correlate with your potential customer base. For example, if your company makes baby products, you could start a blog with parenting tips and advice to reach your target audience of young parents. Once you have a loyal audience of people who trust your brand, you can be confident that audience will form a large part of your customer base.
It’s also essential to understand how your brand is competing with thousands of other brands in a saturated environment. The internet is full of content of all kinds and to build an audience you need to make sure your content stands out from the field. One part of this is publishing valuable and useful content that shows respect for your audience. If all your blog posts are merely sales pitches, you will quickly lose your audience’s trust, and your brand’s following will drastically decrease.
Creating the Right Content
Blog posts aren’t the only kind of content. You can find lots of information on companies that make content marketing work, and you’ll notice that there are many different strategies. You need to think about your target audience and decide what kind of content is most likely to interest and engage that demographic. For example, wordy technical blog posts may work well for a financial company with a target audience of experts in the field. However, long technical posts would probably not work well for a financial company seeking to sell a money management app to young professionals.
Frequency and Consistency
One of the most important things to understand about content marketing is that it’s a continual process. Your company must continue to create and publish valuable and relevant content to keep your audience engaged and interested. You should be posting new content at least once a week, though more frequently is often better. Content should be consistently focused on the message you want to convey to your target audience, without sounding repetitive or salesy.
When you publish your content consistently, you give your audience a reason to follow your blog, page or channel. For example, if you publish a new video every Monday, your audience will learn to visit your page every Monday, or use a subscribe feature to have the content delivered. This automatically means your audience is consistently and frequently seeing your brand and learning more about your company and the services or products you offer.
Diversity
Content marketing doesn’t have to be limited to a single platform or type of content. In fact, the most successful companies often have several different methods of content marketing either to advertise several products or services, or to reach a different target audience. You could consider having both a blog and a YouTube channel. You may also want to keep an active profile on one or more social media platforms. Publishing different types of content can help your brand stand out from the competition.
HamptonCreek is a good example of this. Their YouTube channel includes videos that focus on the brand’s history and goals for improving the food production system. They also publish short, brightly-colored cooking demonstration videos showing how their products can be used in a variety of recipes. Each type of video demonstrates a different facet of the company and will engage a different audience. However, all content serves to improve brand recognition and encourage people to buy Hampton Creek products.
With the right strategy, content marketing can be extremely beneficial to your business. Once you understand how it works and know the particulars of your target audience, you can create and publish customized content to engage that audience. There are many different types of content and you can experiment to figure out which ones work well for your industry and client base. Posting valuable content frequently keeps your audience engaged. You can also post content that’s geared toward different sections of your audience to increase your brand awareness.