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Tag: brand growth

  • How to Build a Successful Content Marketing Campaign

    Creating great content starts with interesting your audience. Building great content marketing campaigns takes it a step further. Not only are you getting folks interested in your product/service offerings, but you’re also building relationships. Let’s examine how to build a successful content marketing campaign from the ground up! 

    Strategy

    a cartoon rendering of a woman sitting on a stack of papers next to a computer showing social media SEO.

    The first part of developing a successful content marketing campaign is figuring out who the content is for. Define your audience and their needs. What are they looking for? Once you know who you’re trying to reach, it’s time to figure out how to reach them. That means selecting a format or medium for your main lead magnet. What’s going to attract people and make them want to be a part of your brand?

    Another way of looking at your content marketing strategy is through three rings inside one another. The outside ring refers to what your brand does. Inside that ring is a smaller ring; that refers to how your brand does what it does differently than everyone else. At the center is the most important ring–the ring that defines why you do what you do differently than everyone else. That’s where the heart of your content marketing campaign strategy comes from. 

    With your lead magnet and audience needs in mind, come up with a strategic and useful content plan to get people interested. Once you’ve got your content marketing campaign all planned out, it’s time to execute. 

    Execution

    Planning and mapping out content is one thing–executing it is another. The best way to execute a successful content marketing campaign is through devoted landing pages. Think of your content as a magnet that attracts people to that landing page. If additional content can inspire them to want/need your product or service, that’s as good as a cross-sell/upsell! 

    a robot and a human, symbolizing automated marketing

    Great execution starts with great research, organization, and copywriting. You have to really know what your audience is looking for. If you want to move folks through the funnel, your content has to be organized properly. In other words, each piece of content should have a specific function, whether it’s to raise awareness, drive interest, convert, solicit feedback, or something else. Finally, your copywriting needs to be on-point. Keep things direct, personal, and interesting!

    Each piece of your digital presence plays an important function in any successful content marketing campaign. For instance, your social media–a preferred channel for content–complements your website, which is subsequently complemented by email marketing, and so on and so forth. The more you take advantage of each channel, the more likely you’ll be to inspire customers to jump on the funnel! 

    Follow Up

    a customer giving digital feedback as part of online reputation management

    Content marketing is essentially a way to put your content to work as a salesperson. Since the customer isn’t being overtly sold to, he or she is more likely to pay attention to the content, and in turn, go through the sales funnel. Like a sales pitch, content marketing needs to follow up with the prospect. 

    However, unlike a sales pitch, your content marketing followup doesn’t involve knocking on the prospect’s door, calling them, or asking for the sale. Instead, the content itself moves them through the funnel. In other words, your follow up typically consists of more content–albeit with a sense of urgency. Let your content tell customers they need to act now. Keep the salespeople at home!

    Content Marketing is an Ongoing Process

    Though a content marketing campaign might be finite, content marketing is an ongoing process. That means one campaign should follow another. To that end, part of what makes content marketing successful is data and analytics. At the conclusion of a campaign, review all available data. What worked? Were you able to get enough leads? How many of those leads were you able to convert?

    As with any successful part of marketing, the more honest feedback you get from your audience, the better. While you can’t directly ask a customer what pieces of content were the most useful in helping them make a purchase, you can review engagement and interaction metrics. Which pieces of content drove the most traffic to your website? Was there a particular medium (text/audio/video/infographic, etc) that got more engagement?

    The most successful content marketing campaigns are data-driven. They take the data from past campaigns and then leverage it to create more effective content in subsequent campaigns. Whether you’re promoting a new product or building brand awareness, the principle is the same: content marketing works!

  • Plant the Seeds of Brand Growth with These Strategies

    Building a brand can be downright overwhelming. Between establishing who you are, what you do, and how you do it differently, a challenge presents itself: why should your audience care? If you can excel in three key areas right off the bat, you can plant the seeds of brand growth and watch your business blossom! So what are those three key areas? Let’s take a look!

    Brand Growth Starts With Trust

    Trust is instrumental to brand growth. The more customers trust you, the more they’ll think of you as the go-to when they need your product or service. At the same time, how can you earn customers’ trust while you’re just starting out?

    The most surefire way to build trust is to create a great product. If your customers come to trust what you have to offer, they’ll associate that trust with not just the product or service in question but your brand as a whole. 

    two people making a business transaction

    Remember, brand growth is built around relationships. Customers have to care about the message behind the brand, not just what they can find on the shelves. Be transparent with your brand values and back up your words with actions. If your brand purports to care about a social issue, show your customers you care about it–don’t tell them. 

    While the bottom line is most important–especially in the early stages of branding–never put a sale before a customer. Offering a “money-back guarantee” shows customers two things: you stand behind your product/service and customer satisfaction is paramount. Be a brand you would want to do business with and start building your brand growth around trust. 

    What Do You Do Differently?

    What will really ignite brand growth is showcasing what your brand does differently. Let’s face it, if you don’t have competition, you probably don’t need much marketing to begin with–you’ve got the market cornered. For everyone else, why should a customer do business with you versus one of any number of competitors? 

    The answer is your point of differentiation. Whether it’s lower prices, better customer service, faster delivery, or a combination of attractive elements, show your customers what you can do that no one else can. 

    an infographic displaying customer feedback in digital marketing.

    Your point of differentiation doesn’t have to be limited to your product or service offerings. If you can create content or value that no one else can, that can work as a point of differentiation! For example, if you sell a product that comes with a “how-to” manual or other valuable literature, customers will have more incentive to buy from you than from your competitors. 

    Listen to your customers. Find out what parts of the customer journey they enjoy and which parts make them apprehensive. Focus on minimizing their pain points, providing value from start to finish, and reinforcing their decisions with confidence. 

    Brand Growth and Content Marketing

    a robot and a human, symbolizing automated marketing

    Brand growth can only happen with increased brand awareness. In other words, your brand can only grow if more and more people become aware of not only your brand’s existence but why other people are so keen on doing business with you. What better way to foster more brand awareness than through content marketing?

    If folks are liking, sharing, and engaging your content, more and more people are seeing it. Try to create content other people aren’t creating, find insights others aren’t finding, and do what others aren’t doing. 

    Creating valuable content doesn’t just help plant the seeds for brand growth, it’s a crucial part of search engine optimization. People can’t find your brand online if you have no content–or if your content is poorly configured for SEO purposes. The more your content helps solves problems and adds value, the more highly it’ll rank on search engine algorithms, meaning the more likely folks will find you when they search for relevant queries. 

    Start Planting the Seeds of Brand Growth!

    You don’t build a brand overnight. The most successful brands today got where they are through an efficient approach to delivering excellence on all fronts. At the same time, there are a few common links between the most successful, renowned brands: we trust them, they do something unique, and their marketing is consistently on-point. If you can deliver on these fronts, you can start seeing more brand growth!