Content marketing has built many brands from the ground up. No reason why it can’t build yours.
In this post, I am going to take a look at examples of brands that did content marketing right.
I’ll offer you tips to grow your own brand with content marketing.
Decide Your Core Value Proposition
To get started, in a nutshell, follow this advice.
Write down what you believe in, so you can talk about it in your content. This is the best way to showcase who you are and what you stand for.
This single idea should be the fountainhead of everything you cover on your blog.
This is also the only way you’ll be able to attract the people you’re aiming to. Before you pen a single piece of content understand who it is you’re writing for.
How to do this?
1. Determine your target persona:
This person is the primary target. What is her biggest problem right now, and what does she struggle with most? What will change in the future?
Don’t underestimate the importance of this step.
To accurately identify the type of person you’re trying to target, you need to answer a few questions.
* Who is your target persona?
* What problems are they experiencing?
* How do you solve those problems?
2. Determine the pain points:
In other words, what are your customer’s struggles? What problems does your product solve, and what pain points are addressed throughout the customer cycle?
To determine pain points you need to talk to your customers. Here’s how you can do this:
* Surveys: You can use surveys to find your customers’ common problems. You can use questionnaires to learn what they’re struggling with. You can also use surveys.
* Forums: Find forums and discussion boards about your customers’ problems. You can use them to dig deeper into where they’re from or where they want to be.
* Reddit: Reddit is a great place to find the pain points of your customers. They’re also great for customer research because Redditors are open to sharing their struggles in real-time.
* Q&A: This is a great way to tap into your customers’ frustration. You’ll typically find questions that are specific to your product. Look for questions in places like Quora, Answerthepublic and other similar sites.
* Create a customer journey map: A journey map is a simple process that outlines the steps customers take to solve their problem. It helps customers visualize the results of their problem-solving. It also helps you understand where your product is going to be in the future. Based on what you understand about customers, make a diagram that outlines the steps a customer must take to solve their problem.
By addressing pain points, your blog becomes a go-to authority that attracts tons of links. This also catapults your status as a brand authority.
Here’s an example:
FreshDesk’s blog is a great example of content marketing done right. Glancing through the blog, I am struck by the diversity of topics. They talk about customer centers, about emerging trends in the form of data-driven customer support and socially driven customer support and so on.
They figured out their target audience and what he wants to read. Through their blog, they address all concerns and desires their target audience has.
By talking to customers you also figure out what kind of content formats they like best? Be it podcasts, videos, infographics and so on.
So how do you build a brand?
“Content marketing is the ultimate way to grow a brand in 2019. Brands can build personas of their core audience, and through content mapping and keyword research build out very specific clusters of content that have search volume and help answer core questions those target audiences have. From there, you can craft a specific CTA for each friction point depending on where in the funnel a user might be, and nurture them throughout the buyer’s journey through product content marketing, email marketing, retargeting ads and more.”– 2ndKitchen.
It’s a lot of hard work, and it’s worth the effort.
How To Build A Brand With Content Marketing
I’ll explain.
Step 1 Create a unique personality: Some blogs have a more concrete personality than others. A personality type is, for all intents and purposes, the way you present your blog and its ideas. To be successful with your brand, you need to have a personality that is different from that of the average competitor.
Buffer’s Open blog is a great example. They built the blog on values of transparency and honesty. It’s a simple strategy. And it works. They detail everything on their blog. They show you how you can do the same things they do. This value speaks to readers who come to their blogs. There’s a lot of juicy info. There are practical examples and in-depth advice that people can’t get enough of.
The best way to create a unique personality is to think about what it is you stand for. What do you do that makes you special? What do you do that makes you different?
Step 2 Build your brand identity: This is where you’re going to create your unique personality.
The way you should build your branding identity is to create or use a style of identity that connects with your audience.
A good example of this is Birchbox. BirchBox is a subscription box service that sends soaps and beauty boxes to you.
Their branding style is fun and playful and makes you laugh. Content marketing efforts from social media posts to blog posts all align with this unique voice.
By taking their content marketing efforts outside their blog, Birchbox is able to establish its brand identity in all important places.
Step 3 Create a personality around your goals: Just like you created your personality, you’re going to need a personality that’s going to match your goals.
Now that you know what your goals are, you’re going to need to create a personality that’s going to help you achieve those goals.
For example, let’s say you run a web design company. You might find out that most of your customers are losing their customers because no one is using responsive web design. You can then use this information to build a content strategy that is focused on responsive design. With this content that shows the pitfalls of offering one-size-fits-all model, you stand to generate valuable leads for your own business.
Ultimately, create a personality that’s different from your competition
Step 4 Identify your competition:
How is your competition doing, with a focus on traffic and rankings?
You need to compare and contrast the features and functions of your competition’s product with your own. The way this features into their content marketing strategy. That’s how you get new avenues to explore.
How are they tackling content marketing to address customer issues? Since you can’t be expected to know all about all the struggles your customers are going through make a list of targeted content you can offer by competitor analysis.
For example, if I run my competitor’s site through a competitor intelligence tool I can find all about his top-ranking pages and keywords.
This gives me a handful of ideas to explore and think about.
In the above section, I talked about the importance of surveying your customers to uncover key issues. That’s not the only way surveys can help you. If you’re struggling to think about what’s important to your customers, here’s what else you can use surveys and forms for:
Identify Key Issues
Now that you know what your customers are struggling with, it’s time to use this information to propel your content marketing efforts. Here are some of the main issues your customers may be struggling with.
* Poor quality images: Poor quality images can cause customers to believe that your product is not the best available. Make sure to use high-quality images.
Go Pro has 7.94 million subscribers on YouTube and over 16.3 million followers on Instagram. The reason? The way they put out great visuals in the form of videos and pictures. Customers love them for it. And this content marketing has grown its blog.
* Lack of trust: Customers don’t trust their personal information to sites that look shady. Make sure your website is trustworthy enough by sporting trust badges, user-generated content, and testimonials.
So it’s important that you add trust elements and quality images to your site to fix those problems. You can uncover all these issues by talking to your customers.
Conclusion
To create a successful content strategy, you need to be focused on your customer’s pain points. Figure out what’s bothering your customers, and then figure out how you can put yourself in their shoes.
Start by identifying your customers’ pain points. This will help you understand what they’re struggling with and what solutions they’re using to deal with this problem.
You’ll also learn more about what’s preventing your customers from solving their problems.
Now it’s your turn to start creating a content strategy that will resonate with your customers, and create a content strategy that’s based on your customers’ pain points.
What’s your process for creating a content strategy that resonates with your customers?
