How to Leverage Content Marketing to Attract More Customers

23 Feb How to Leverage Content Marketing to Attract More Customers

If you’re a marketer, boosting brand awareness should be one of your top goals. After all, many people won’t make a purchase after their first exposure to your brand. They need to engage with it consistently before becoming paying customers.

Whether that means sending your verified email list a regular newsletter with brand updates or encouraging customers to share photos of them interacting with your products on social media, shoppers are unlikely to complete a purchase if they don’t know or trust your brand. Additionally, if you offer several products and services, maintaining strong brand awareness among your existing customers helps you acquire more sales from them as well.

Luckily, focusing on content marketing is a simple way to achieve these goals. That’s essential because content helps you more clearly define your brand for consumers. For instance, perhaps your company is a Fintech startup aimed at helping young college graduates budget more effectively. Content such as informative videos explaining key financial topics while presenting the information in a funny, youthful manner establishes your brand as one associated with simplicity, education, and fun.

That said, it’s still necessary to do some planning before launching a content marketing campaign. To use content as a tool for increasing brand awareness, keep the following tips in mind.

Define the Audience

Knowing your audience is key to knowing what type of content you should offer. Using the example above, a marketer would know their audience consists of people who just graduated from college and may not be completely familiar with financial topics.

Additionally, because they’re young, they may be relatively digitally literate, using their devices to watch dynamic content such as videos. In fact, a recent study indicates young people watch an average of 22 hours worth of online video each week. Thus, your content wouldn’t be exclusively text-based, and it would be designed to appeal to people who like to have fun and need financial concepts simplified.

Take the time to define your audience before planning your content strategy. Doing so makes it easier to find out what type of content your ideal customer engages with already.

Tell a Story

Again, the goal is to use content marketing as a means of increasing brand awareness. That means your content strategy should be designed to represent your brand.

Telling a story about your company via content is an effective strategy. Your content should explain to leads how your business began, what core values it was founded on, and how it has grown since it was first launched. Incorporating information about who you are into your content helps you engage leads with your brand consistently.

Keep in mind, you need to fully understand your own vision and story before you can share it accurately with customers. Sit down and definite it clearly if you haven’t done so already.

Explore Various Channels

Digital marketing involves proactively tracking your campaigns’ performance. Different marketing channels are more effective for different businesses, and you need to monitor your campaigns to determine which channels deliver the strongest results for your company.

However, that doesn’t mean you should restrict your content to one channel. It’s smarter to experiment with several at first. Once you have a better sense of which channels help you achieve your goals, you can focus more on them.

For example, a blog can be an effective medium for content because it’s consistent (so long as you maintain a regular posting schedule), and it’s ideal for long-form content. Email remains one of the most valuable marketing channels because it lets you reach customers directly and guide them through a journey with your brand. Social media is also useful because it allows you to directly interact with followers. Again, you’ll get the best results when you experiment with all of these channels to find out which best serve your needs.

Offer Valuable Content

You can’t use content to tell customers a story about your brand if customers don’t engage with it. Thus, one of the most important steps of a content marketing campaign involves regularly creating unique content that offers genuine value. Customers don’t engage with your content to learn about your brand, they engage with it to be informed and/or entertained. Boosting brand awareness is just a side effect.

It’s also an important goal. In a distracting world, it’s easy for customers both new and old to forget about your business if they aren’t exposed to it often. Content marketing helps you guard against this.