What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a way to indirectly promote your brand through the use of blogs, social media posts and videos. It’s a great way to create brand awareness or in other words, interest in your brand’s products or services. Producing content that’s relevant and useful also helps build trust with your audience. Here are 5 simple tips for better content marketing.
Know Your Brand
You’ll need to know or decide on your brand’s attributes (physical, character and personality traits that define your brand) before you can start creating content that’s consistent with it. If your content isn’t consistent with your brand, your message can be really confusing to your audience.
It doesn’t matter if the brand you’re promoting is yours or someone else’s, it’s important to know every detail and attribute of the brand. The more you know, the easier it will be to represent that brand. It’s helpful to do some research by reviewing content that already exists for the brand (if possible) and to sit down with your client to ask a few questions to get a better idea about their tone, style and other brand attributes.
Even if your creating content for yourself, it’s helpful to write down the attributes of your brand.
- Is your brand serious or playful?
- Is your brand bright and colorful or does it reflect more somber colors?
- Does your brand have a theme?
Knowing this information will help you stay consistent with your brand’s personality throughout your messaging.
Worried that your brand will change and evolve later? That’s okay! Your content can change and evolve too.
Know Your Audience
Simply knowing your brand isn’t enough, you also need to know your audience. This means you’ll have to do some research into who your audience is.
- Are they younger?
- Are they older?
- Are they of a certain nationality or religion?
- Do they live in a certain geographic area?
- Are they of a certain ethnicity or culture?
The answers to all of these questions will need to be determined in order to craft the appropriate messages that resonate with your audience.
Avoid Sounding Too Salesy
It’s important to provide accurate and helpful information without sounding like just a sales pitch. This means that sometimes you may not even reference your product or service. For example, let’s pretend you’re selling Full Spectrum CBD oil. Creating a blog that describes the differences between Broad Spectrum, Full Spectrum and CBD Isolate is a great way to share information that’s relevant to your product but also helpful to your audience who may be trying to figure out which is the best for them. You’ll also be building trust with your audience and positioning yourself as the expert in the field.
Always Have a Call to Action (CTA)
I know I said not to sound to salesy but you do need a call to action (CTA). It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a blog or social media content, you need to tell your audience to do something after they’ve read your messaging. It might be to visit your website, or contact us, or click here for your free sample. Whatever it is, be sure it’s driving them to do something that ultimately helps you increase your conversions. In other words, turning your interested customer into a paying customer.
Enjoy It!
Content writing can be pretty fun, especially if you’re writing for your own brand. Remember to enjoy what you do and know why it’s impactful. Keeping this in mind can help make sure your passion stays just that, a passion, and not a tedious job.
C.A. Sullivan
The Illuminated Page 