Brands and individuals are relying heavily on content creation and distribution to increase brand awareness and build authority among their potential users and customers.
Content marketing is a powerful tool that can help you connect with your prospective and existing customers by creating high-powered content that adds value for them and helps them in some way.
Content is a great tool for building and maintaining relationships with your customers. If used properly, you can gain tons of value and build a website that not only generates traffic but also helps create and convert leads.
Let’s take a look at some examples of companies using content marketing effectively to understand this better:
Unacademy
Unacademy sponsored TVF Kota Factory, the highest ranked Indian web series. It was a huge success, and this massive success led to unprecedented growth in the number of subscribers for Unacademy in the IIT-JEE, and Medical sections. The success was so huge, that TVF and Unacademy have come together to launch another show called “ASPIRANTS”, which is aimed towards UPSC aspirants, and it’s a no brainer that many aspiring candidates and current candidates will watch this show. The hope is that some of them will percolate to becoming Paid users for Unacademy’s UPSC courses.
UpGrad
Upgrad partnered with BYN to create a series called “The Office Canteen”, a series that portrays office gossip in an office canteen. The series is humorous, and it’s clear that most of the consumers are office goers, who also are the prime customers for UpGrad’s courses on upskilling to become a better professional.
In the above cases, we note that 2 huge companies have exclusively partnered with premier content creators to showcase their products through these showing streaming on the Internet.
This is a classical example of collaborative marketing executed very well through content. People hate watching advertisements. And there are tons of ad blockers and other things keeping your ads from performing.
But those same people wouldn’t mind watching pre-planned product placements in the context of a movie or show that they thoroughly enjoy.
In fact, many wouldn’t even realize that they are watching or consuming ads, and since most of these products are being used by the protagonists in these shows, the likelihood of the viewers making a connection and adopting or using these products increases significantly.
This is the power of Content Marketing to create a strong brand presence, and in this article, we will explore the different ways in which individuals and brands can leverage the power of content to build authority and trust.
Table of Contents
What is Brand Authority?
Brand authority refers to the trust a brand has earned among customers and the degree to which the customers see a brand as a subject-matter expert. A variety of factors can influence authority, including robust and compelling content, an active online presence, and engagement over social media.
For example – Apple has developed a strong brand authority in technology, where-in a seamless connection between its hardware and software is achieved. If Apple launches a self-driving car in 2030, there are high chances people will trust Apple. But will people trust Apple if they launch Insurance products?
Building Brand Authority is not a simple process, and involves the cohesion of Marketing, Product, Sales, Post-Sales, and Operations to come together, and operate in a way that instills confidence in users, customers, and potential stakeholders who wish to engage with the brand in consideration.
With the increased competition in Digital Marketing, Content has come out to play a very significant role in helping a brand establish a solid brand identity and authority. Let’s explore how brands can leverage the power of content to create a strong and sustainable brand.
What is Content Marketing?
Any form of text, image, audio, video, or a combination of these can be termed as content. And as long as the content you create serves the purpose of helping people and building strong relationships, not just strictly selling, it becomes content marketing. With the explosion of the internet, creators are constantly uploading new pieces of content on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, their own blogs and other online spaces.
The good part of this is – “All the content that has ever been created, will stay online forever”, and at any point, in time there is a probability that someone may engage with the content.
The very possibility of the content being explored and engaged opens a wide range of possibilities where individuals and brands can create content to build a community, build brand presence, increase authority of their brand, or drive conversions in the form of downloads, or sales.
How to start creating Content?
Before we jump into the aspect of creating content, it’s advisable to do thorough research and conduct an audit of the current state of the online presence of a brand, listen to what the users are talking about, create a strategy, and then start creating content.
We can break this into 3 important steps:
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Content Audit
As the name suggests, here the goal is to analyze the existing content across all possible online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, your website, etc. You should also investigate your competitors and see what they are posting and how are people reacting to their content. This is a very important step since doing so gives a lot of valuable insights as to what’s working – and what isn’t.
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Create Customer Personas
This is very crucial before one starts creating content. It’s important to know who your potential customers or users are, and therefore creating a customer persona becomes an important step before one starts creating content. Here are a few things one can do:
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- Read comments by existing followers and users on various social media platforms
- Analyze questions asked on forums like Reddit, Quora or GrowthHackers
- Interview potential users and customers to identify their pain points, questions they may have, and other insights that can offer you a way to craft more targeting content
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Determine your brand goals
Before starting to create content, it’s very important for you to understand your business goals. If you’re looking to increase your sales, in such cases the content narrative would be to educate people about your product offerings and urge them to make a purchase.
However, if you’re looking to increase their brand presence online, in such cases you may try creating fun and relatable content that resonates with your potential users and customers.
Now that we’ve laid out the pre-requisites, we can head over towards the part of creating content.
What are the possible content marketing platforms?
The internet is full of so many online platforms and forums. You have a ton of options. First and foremost should be a focus on creating content for your website.
You can also create content for places like social media, forums and other digital spaces. Here are a few platforms to consider creating content for.
We have platforms like:
- Your website (WordPress recommend)
- YouTube
- Growthhackers.com
- TikTok, MX TakaTak, Chingari, etc.
- Quora
- Behance, Dribble, Deviant Art
- Medium
- …and the list goes on.
The million dollar question is – “How do you identify which platforms to create content for to target your audience effectively?”
Truth be told, it’s almost impossible to be active and stay relevant on all the possible platforms. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense to try since your audience isn’t EVERYWHERE. Therefore, it’s important for a brand to identify the platforms they would want to be active on based on where your audience hangs out. This way, you have a better chance of your content being picked up and earning you an ROI.
However, an interesting observation about content creation and distribution is that one can always re-hash or repurpose a content piece. You can reshape it to be posted on different platforms – for instance, a blog article becomes an infographic as well as a video.
Therefore, instead of focusing on platforms alone, we will focus on sharing content ideas that can be standalone, and can be later rehashed into content pieces that suit your choice of platform requirements.
Let’s get started.
Videos
By far one of the most engaging forms of content out there is video content. The good thing about video content is that one can create video content and distribute it very effectively using platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or IGTV.
The video content can also be rehashed and converted into smaller clips that can be further posted on platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. It can then be broken out into blog articles and other types of content.
How to create videos:
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- Identify opportunities to create video content by performing research on topics that are relevant to your desired audience. You can use Google, YouTube, and other platforms to do research.
- Creating videos does not necessarily mean shooting with a person in the frame, one can choose to create videos using text with some really cool tools.
- Publish content on all video platforms, and remember to break down the video into smaller bits such that they can be posted on other social media channels.
Podcasts
Spotify signed Joe Rogan for a $100M deal where his podcasts will now be exclusively available on Spotify. This is one example of audio formats of content becoming increasingly important.
Brands can leverage podcasts to launch educational content or interviews with important stakeholders in their respective fields to build trust and a loyal base for audiophiles.
Another interesting thing brands can do is rehash their video content to create podcasts, and launch them on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, or another platform.
Blogs & Guest Posts
SEO is one of the most powerful ways to drive highly engaged traffic with high intent to your websites or blogs.
Interestingly, this happens to also be one of the oldest forms of content marketing, where SEO experts, and content marketers have written high-quality content and generated backlinks through guest posts to increase the online presence of their websites.
The best way to go about doing SEO is:
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- Identify business opportunities in terms of keywords
- Create a list of keywords that are best suited for the desired business case
- Generate high-quality blogs for your site and guest blogs on sites in the same niche where you gain backlinks
- Optimize content for SEO by optimizing images, meta tags, and building internal linking
Customer Testimonials
This is perhaps the best and most guaranteed way to generate user trust, and it can be leveraged by a brand to grow its brand authority. Mainstream marketing involves using text-based testimonials, but if a brand or business can leverage videos to create customer testimonials, it can be re-populated on Youtube, and all other video networks and this is a great way to build brand authority.
Infographics, Images & Memes
With the rise of visual content, brands are constantly leveraging the power of images, and memes to grab attention, and believe it or not but memes are a great way to build brand authority.
The recent Evergreen ship that got stuck in the Suez canal caught the world’s attention, thanks to the memes. Netflix hires meme creators to create memes to increase the popularity of their shows. Images, and memes, and all other visual content can be posted on platforms like Pinterest, Behance, Dribble, Deviant Art, etc. to increase brand awareness, without much competition.
These image-first websites are underlying gold mines for opportunities to rank on Google, and other search engines for desired keywords, since the amount of competition here is very less.
Ebooks, Whitepapers, Research Paper, etc.
These forms of content are generally employed by B2B companies where they generate high-quality material to attract potential customers. Example – Hubspot is one of the most famous CRMs out there, and they are known for their content where they generate high-quality, well-researched reports that are actively downloaded by brand managers, marketing heads, and founders to learn ways, and tricks to grow and improve their businesses.
Although this is a time-taking process, businesses should spend their time to hire Freelancers, or expert content-writers to generate these forms of content, thereby increasing their chances of landing high-intent leads.
All in all, the above-mentioned ideas are just a speck of the possibilities in terms of content creation, and one should remember that it’s important for an individual or a brand to be able to identify what their business goals are before they start putting in the efforts to create, and distribute content.
Content Marketing if done correctly, can take a brand from rags to riches, and if performed poorly can be catastrophic.
The ideal steps to be followed before content creation are:
- Defining business goals
- Understanding desired Customer/User Persona
- Researching existing competitors for their digital and content strategies
- Listening to their users, interviewing prospects to truly understand their needs
- Strategizing content, and defining narratives for the different platforms
- Creating content, and distributing it
Good quality Content takes time, and effort to create, but they keep paying dividends like money invested in a Fixed Deposit. The only difference? The higher the quality of content, the better its dividends.
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- 6 Ways to Build Brand Authority With Content Marketing - May 11, 2021
This is one heck of a guide here. Guest blogging is still one of the best ways to expand brand awareness. I am just in the process of promoting all of the guest posts I have published along with promoting old blog posts of mine. People sometimes forget all the content they have that could be updated and promoted. Not only is this good for your brand it also boosts Google traffic.
Ryan