This week’s guest post comes from Steve Piorro and discusses how to use content marketing to your brand’s advantage.
Branding experts agree that content is king! Want your brand to stand out above the rest? Create content that reflects your brand’s unique voice and tone. In the marketplace, portraying a consistent and persistent image can create the waves your company needs to stay in the game. Startups and even long-standing businesses must meet the challenges imposed on them by competitors, technological advancements, and the shifting customer audiences who drift towards or away from brands as their message resonates with them in lifestyle, goals, and opinions. In many cases, brands will go to no limits to reach their customers and satisfy their thirst for innovation and control to the detriment of the brand’s financial stability. Here are some of the rules content must satisfy in order to help a brand succeed:
Rule #1: Generating people-powered content for your brand
Every brand is different and therefore, has its unique voice and tone. Generating content that reflects the voice and tone of your brand in a personable way, will resonate best with consumers. You don’t want to sound be condescending or puff your brand up without any facts. Present your brand most intelligently by showing how it can help customers.
Furthermore, when your content shows how your brand can be helpful, necessary, desirable, or attainable to the customer base for which it was created, the chances of clicks and conversions increase exponentially. No one wants to waste time reading fluff that doesn’t apply to his or her situation or the needs that your brand fulfills in the marketplace. Get to the point, satisfy your customer’s curiosity, increase your customers knowledge-base, help them make informed decisions, and appeal to their sense of style, or lifestyle. That’s how content can become your brand’s best resource. Without content, your brand’s greatness will remain unknown and untapped. Only continuous and engaging content will help search engines find your brand and put it in front of your customers who see it when searching for what they want or need.
Rule #2: Find your brand’s voice
Taking sides is not necessary, after all, you are not at war with any competitor. What is more, being passive is also not conducive to establishing a strong presence in the marketplace. People want to know what your brand stands for, against, and why? However, of course, only about topics that pertain to the brand’s mission and vision. It matters! Your customers will engage in a meaningful way if you attract them with your brand’s positioning.
Your brand’s personality depends on its voice and tone. Craft it carefully and consistently. People don’t resonate with or respond well to wishy-washy tones and ambiguity. Define your brand with the right words, images, and hues before making the first Tweet or Facebook post. Generations of people exposed to advertisements that trick them into buying something have made them build metaphorical walls around them. Respect your customer base with content that they can relate to in a personal way and promotes their success, encourages them to take action, or benefits their economy. Convey ideas in a clear message, story, or video for an audience that is ready to receive it. Set the mood to enhance a little inspiration. People want to connect with other people, not with machines or material things. Just like people, organizations have beliefs, goals, values, and flaws.
Rule #3: Collaborate with influencers
Your brand is not alone in the landscape of brands in the marketplace. There are influencers among us that show the way for customers to follow. Know who they are and reach out to them. They can become your best brand ambassadors. There are millions of bloggers publishing segmented content in all areas of interest with niche-specific content. Partnering with bloggers and active social media users is termed “influencer marketing.” To find the right partnerships for your brand first make sure the content they post is relevant, engaging, frequent, and has a niche audience reach. With the right influencer, your brand can achieve the Word Of Mouth WOM effect every marketer knows is the most effective conversion maker. As a matter of fact, 40% of users buy goods tweeted about by influencers. What you should look for in a macro influencer is the size of their audience and their engagement with the audience. Local influencers can also help you boost your brand in the community where your presence is most important to attract new customers.
Rule #4: Go cross-channel to mine your other content
Cross, multi, or omnichannel marketing is all about engaging with your customers in every way you can use all of the digital channels available, like email and social media platforms. Every channel has its own way of attracting customers. Marketers tailor strategies and messages according to the medium. For example, affiliate marketing, websites, direct mail, email, mobile apps, and every social media platform each have a different structure and calls for a unique way of interacting with customers. A well-planned marketing campaign includes as many channels as appropriate for the product or products so that customers can engage with the product in various ways seamlessly across channels. It has been shown that consumers prefer an integrated marketing approach and are more responsive to one 70% of the time.
Furthermore, some channels work well together more than others. Computer and mobile, TV and mobile, computer and TV, Radio and Mobile, computer and radio are just some of the favorite ways marketers utilize channels to target an audience and gain customers. Multi-device activity is taking place in today’s world with almost every consumer. Moreover, capitalizing on these trends is what multichannel marketing is all about.
Rule #5: Customize to lifestyle
Customers have their favorite mediums, and knowing which mediums your customers are more likely to use is one way of going about creating content that reaches them when they are ready. Careful study of the audience’s lifestyle will allow marketers to know where the audience spends most of their time and why. For example, TV networks use Twitter hashtag campaigns since Nielsen reported that 1/3 of active Twitter users tweet about TV. Small order catalogs entice views to visit their website and offer discounts for doing so on their first mobile order. Google AdWords PPC ad extensions add a phone number to ads integrating PPC and mobile. The PPC Offer Extension allows advertisers to add coupons to a PPC ad. No matter what type of lifestyle your customers follow, there are ways of reaching them where ever they may and whatever they may be doing, whether they spend their days in front of a PC, between OR schedules, or on the go in a car.
Rule #6 Make your customer part of your brand
You customers’ likes, shares, tweets, retweets, and clicks show the types of content they react to. Being in the know about your customers’ values and opinions help marketers customize the content that includes stories pertinent to their customers to achieve higher levels of success. 81% of companies who provide excellent customer satisfaction experience do much better than their competitors according to the Customer Experience Maturity Monitor report offered by the Peppers and Rogers Group. Customer reviews and surveys are two ways of knowing how customers feel about a brand and how likely they are to recommend it. Powerful insights stemming from customer engagement and interactions with the brand can lead marketers to design specific content campaigns to meet customer needs and convert them into loyal brand users.
Steve writes on behalf of Consumer credit card relief and writes an article on credit card debt, debt consolidation, debt settlement, bankruptcy etc. Steve has been helping people to manage their finances in an easy and intelligent manner. Facebook. Twitter.