How to use content marketing to promote your brand – Sidney Ogodo

Consumers are in continuous search of information that could provide solutions to their problems, relieve them of their pains, fears, and bring them happiness and comfort. They would gravitate towards brands, businesses that consistently provide them with meaningful and relevant information that could solve their problems, ease their pains, fears, bring them happiness and comfort, and might most likely patronise such brands, businesses because a trusting relationship had been build overtime. Therefore, brands, businesses desirous of building enduring relationships with their target market that is based on trust have adopted content marketing as an integral component of their overall marketing strategy.

Content marketing is a form of in-bound marketing that is used to attract, engage, and retain a target audience by creating, publishing, and distributing valuable, relevant, and meaningful content that resonates with the target audience. This form of marketing has the capability of presenting your brand, business as a subject-matter expert within a niche you operate, promotes brand awareness, builds loyalty and authority, and keeps your brand, business top of mind when it is time to buy what you offer. The consistent use of content marketing establishes and nurture relationships with existing and prospective customers.  When your audience thinks of your brand, business as a partner interested in their success and a valuable source of advice and guidance, they are most likely to patronise you when it is time to buy.

Benefits of Content Marketing to Your Brand, Business

• Increased visibility – content marketing can help to increase the visibility of your brand, business, especially when people are constantly looking for solutions to their pain points. Presenting educational and informative content about a topic they are interested in can help increase the visibility of your brand, business.
• Generate more Leads – Consistently educating customers and providing useful information build trust over time and help them feel comfortable purchasing from your business, thus generating more leads and developing relationship with potential customers.
• Boost loyalty – it is no gainsaying that loyalty is an essential ingredient in marketing because the more loyal your customers are, the more repeat purchase they will make. Offering content that provides valuable and meaningful content to your existing and prospective customers can help them begin to build trust with your brand, business and perceive you as a subject-matter expert. This will in turn build loyalty.
• Establish Authority – Creating, publishing, and distributing content is germane to building authority and becoming a thought leader in your market niche. This is because not only does content helps to build trust, but it can position your brand as the most authoritative on a particular topic.

How Content Marketing Works

For content marketing to achieve its intended purpose, first, you must be very clear about your goals, define the target audience you want to reach with your content, and develop and deliver the right content at each stage of the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel consists of the stages a prospect goes through to make a purchase.

• Setting Clear Goals – Your goals must align with your broader business objectives – Goals like increasing brand awareness, generate new leads, and grow revenue (sales) are worthwhile goals to set for your content marketing effort.
• Define your target audience – Your content marketing will deliver the right results when you are able to speak directly to your target audience in the language they use and understand. An excellent way to define your target audience is by developing personas. Personas are fictional, descriptive profiles of people who belong to your target audience. Creating a buyer persona involves looking at the demographic information of your potential customers (age range, location, occupation, income, etc), and their psychographic information (behaviours, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, interests, hobbies, etc). Also, be sure you include their needs, goals, and challenges because this information will inform the types of content to be created to help them attain their goals and resolve their challenges.

It should be restated that for content marketing to be effective, you will have to deliver the right content at each level of the marketing funnel, from awareness stage through interest, consideration, and purchase (conversion).

• Awareness Stage – At this stage of the marketing funnel, your content should focus on the top concern of your target audience. Providing content about their pain points, challenges and questions give you the best change of engaging with them. Content at the awareness stage should be educational and informative, “how to” advice. The best content for this stage includes blog posts, how- to videos, e-books, and articles. For example, one can write a blog post enumerating the benefits of purchasing a Health Insurance or a short video on how to choose an HMO.
• Interest Stage – The interest stage is the stage at which your prospects want to know more about what your brand, business can offer. The types of content at the Interest stage include FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), Case-studies, podcasts, etc.
• Consideration Stage – The content type at the consideration stage should be about your brand, business values, voice, etc, the features or functions to look for and how the various features address the needs of your target audience. The best content for this stage includes testimonials from satisfied users of your brand, how-to videos, case-studies. An example of content at this stage could be a User- Generated Content (UGC) extolling the excellent service a customer received from patronising your brand, business. But UGC must be genuine and authentic, not a make- believe stuff.
• Conversion Stage – Content marketing plays a pivotal role when a prospect is close to buying. At this stage, whilst you can deploy hard sell content that focuses on sale, you also want to re-assure your prospects at this point why you are the best choice rather than how great your products or services are. Your central message at this stage should be to show case your expertise, knowledge, and differentiating benefits of what your brand, business offer. Examples of content at this stage include Buyers’ Guides, User-Generated Content, Research report, and product videos.  

Conclusion

Content marketing can help promote your brand, business if it is properly conceived and executed. This involves clearing stating what you want content marketing to achieve for your brand, business, defining the target audience you want to reach with your content and creating and distributing the right content to your target audience at each stage of the customer journey.

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