8 Ways to Grow Your Brand Through Effective Content Marketing

Competition in digital marketing has never been fairer, thanks to the equal opportunities created by modern content marketing strategies. Regardless of your business size, you can now compete on an almost level playing ground with established industry gurus by effectively applying the principles of content marketing. However, the challenge remains of how businesses can leverage these principles to improve their brands and outsmart competition. No matter your business size, here are eight top ways to boost your brand through content marketing and compete effectively for a long time.

Know Exactly What You Want Your Content to Achieve

Every piece of content you create has a distinct purpose for which you create it. You may create content to gain traffic to your website, improve customer engagement, or promote a specific product or service. Regardless of the reason, you must define the purpose of each content creation project early and discuss possible ROI before launching it.

Doing this helps you know which strategies to pursue and which ones to hold onto for later so you can put your money where it can bring in returns. For your active content strategies, you can check out how they’re performing by tracking these metrics:

• Sales:  Check out the content directly leading into sales and find out why it’s working so you can replicate it.
• Increased social media visibility: Track the number of retweets, shares, total reach, and other metrics to see how a piece of content performs on social media.
• Leads: Find out how your content influenced email opt-ins, social media click-throughs, and contact form submissions.

Keeping track of your metrics and analytics will help you determine your marketing direction and whether your content is achieving its primary, intended purpose. Content that doesn’t bring in the intended results should be replaced for better brand awareness.

Leverage SEO

Optimizing your content for search engines is a great way to promote your brand and improve sales. However, not all SEO tactics work the same for every brand. In fact, your content should primarily focus on users first, followed by SEO. A user-focused content strategy that is optimized for search engines will always outperform content that’s just optimized for search engines.

For instance, if you’re in the auto repair industry, you’d want to create helpful content for auto repair clients and then optimize it for search engines to reach them easily. You might do it in-house, which will take longer to execute, or hire a specialist marketing team in the auto niche like Webtamin to handle it.

Regardless of your industry and how you approach SEO (in-house or outsourced), you can never downplay the importance of search engines. The more optimized your content is, the higher your chances of reaching your audience at their point of need.

Embrace Storytelling

Writing compelling and engaging content starts with mastering effective storytelling skills. Readers are more likely to resonate with content in story form than hard facts and statistics presented in a stale, boring style. Since stories create an emotional bond between readers and the product or business, they’re important for building brand awareness.

Instead of talking about how your organization is experienced in offering the solutions you offer, tell personal stories or case studies of how your product solved a problem. You can also share client stories to show how your solutions impacted their lives, lifting challenges from their shoulders and giving them a long-term reprieve.

Create a Practical Style Guide

Whether your business is still in its infancy stages of growth or you’re already established in your industry, you need a robust content strategy to remain consistent. Larger companies may have established content marketing departments responsible for creating style guides for content production. On the other hand, smaller businesses often outsource their content creation to freelancers.

Regardless of your content production approach, there is a high chance that different people will create your content simultaneously. This means a content production manual or a style guide is needed for consistency in grammar, formatting, and voice across the content production team.  While there’s no universal formula for creating content, a good style guide includes the following important elements:

• When and how to use various punctuations such as Oxford commas, semicolons, and brackets.
• A clear linking policy on how you want your writers to insert internal and external links. Highlight the rules for choosing anchor texts and authority sites for external links.
• A list of industry terms to be hyphenated so there’s no disparity in how certain words are spelt across the content team.
• The specific voices and tones writers should adopt for different types of content.
• A guide on the type and number of images writers should include in each piece of content and the attribution rules around image use.

Accompany Your Copy With Relevant Infographics

Excellently created infographics will enhance your written content, ensuring your message is well-articulated for easy grasp. This is especially important if you’re creating long-form content that might become overwhelming to read. While creating the right infographics for your content takes extra effort and time, the accompanying benefits are worth the sacrifice.

In the long run, these infographics help keep readers on the respective pages much longer, potentially increasing the average time your users spend on your website. You can also use infographics to repurpose existing content to improve engagement on those pages and position your marketing in a new light.

Invest in Influencer Marketing

Whether it’s through TikTok’s short video format, Instagram’s influencer’s comfort zone, or old but gold YouTube, investing in influencer marketing is a sure way to upgrade your content marketing game. Going by the overly positive influencers’ influence, you can almost always count on them to take your business to the next level of growth.

The first key to a successful influencer marketing campaign is understanding which platform to target with the campaign. If your target audience hangs around TikTok more than on Instagram, using TikTok influencers and vice versa is beneficial. You don’t have to partner with influencers on every social media channel unless you’re targeting different audiences for different product categories in your business.

Invest in Content Distribution

After spending a fortune on content creation, your content may fail to attract the necessary traffic and bring the expected return on investment. Many business owners overlook the need to invest in effective content distribution, hence having content barely reaching its target audience. Investing in content distribution puts your content directly in front of your target audience for optimal engagement and conversion. Some of the distribution channels you can use include:

• Guest posts
• Your email lists
• Social media
• Social bookmarking sites like Reddit
• RSS subscribers

Regardless of the channels you use, ensure you allocate considerable resources to content distribution to match up your content creation efforts for optimal ROI.

Leverage Data

Tracking how previous content strategies performed and using that data to make new decisions can help improve your content performance. You can invest more in content that performs best while evaluating options for improvement for content that didn’t perform so well previously.  Consider hiring a data firm that invests full-time in tracking your content performance data to keep you in the loop in case any improvements are needed.

Every content strategy you employ should aim to boost conversions by meeting your target audience’s pain points and convincing them to take action. Since audience needs and interests keep changing, it’s important to keep improving your content marketing strategies. This will help to align with those expectations and improve your brand positioning in front of your target audience.