For businesses looking to build brand authority and cement their status as an industry leader, the power of content marketing is a powerful way to get there.
Brand authority plays a big role in helping consumers to trust a company, which is a critical component in acquiring and retaining customers. Having brand authority means that you’re an easily recognisable leader in your field or industry, but it also helps to ensure that consumers feel confident that you know what you’re doing, and that their money is well spent with your brand or business.
However, imagine Googling your own business name to find that a newer, up and coming competitor has taken out the top spot? Anyone who’s trying to make their mark online knows that the internet can be a ruthless and crowded arena to try and play in, and clawing your prized piece of real estate back is a lot harder than earning it in the first place. Thankfully, this is where the practice of content marketing can help.
How To Cement Your Brand Authority With Content Marketing
While brand authority might not make your business a household name overnight, it can go a long way in ensuring that your enterprise is the first a consumer associates with a particular industry or sector.
A variety of factors can influence brand authority, including robust and compelling content, an active online presence, and engagement over social media. You might have a world class product or service, but if you aren’t getting seen by the right people, in the digital age it all but counts for nothing. As such, a good content marketing strategy – and it’s execution – is often what separates a brand’s authority from the competition. If your content isn’t serving your customers, the simple fact of the matter is that you’re never going to earn recognition as an authority source – but where do you start?
Start Blogging – Consistent and quality efforts linked to your website’s blog should be your brand’s way of capturing the attention of the right audiences, building a relationship of sorts with them, and ideally then converting them into a happy, loyal customer. The aim of the game is to develop your brand’s website as a free resource, making your business a trusted industry go-to.
Get Social – As a means to further boost your content marketing efforts, be sure to properly distribute it as a way to maximise its impact. If you specialise in B2B type services, make your way over to LinkedIn. If e-commerce and product based sales are more your thing, visual platforms like Instagram may work better for boosting brand authority.
Build A Community – If your audiences are liking what you’re publishing on your blog and your social media accounts, there’s a good chance that they’ll either bring it up again with a friend, or even repost the link on their own social media channels. Soon enough, you’ll have your own fan base vouching for you and essentially promoting your business for free.
Apply For Awards – Winning an award from a trade group within your industry can help to raise the profile of your business. It’s easy to be perceived as an authority when you’ve already won official recognition for your work. So, display seals and badges from any awards you have won across your website, and boost these small wins through content marketing and social media.
Attract The Media – While effective content marketing forms the foundation of good brand authority, receiving extra attention from the media supercharges your efforts and can even help you to go viral. Digital publications and fellow websites who link to yours via backlinks are invaluable, so start small with resources like SourceBottle to encourage this.
In simple terms, content marketing is a form of advertising that focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online, such as SEO optimisation, blogs, videos and even social media posts – you’re making your own content, and you’re marketing that content. Even if you’re not looking to develop brand authority, content marketing is still an essential in surviving and thriving in the world of online trading.
However, when trying to wrap your head around content marketing, understanding the technical side of the process is often where ambitious brand owners come unstuck. A lack of time, energy or resources are often serial offenders as to why many brands ignore content marketing all together – but what if we told you that there was another way of making your mark online while minimising the workload?
Partner With The Professionals In Content Marketing
Now that you know why your website needs a solid content marketing strategy in order to succeed, it’s time to get moving. However, producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources – and you’re not alone if you can’t quite commit to that. Avoiding blogging for business altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice, but thankfully – investing in a solid content marketing strategy has never been easier.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times. It also means that because you have a monthly credit, you are going to want to make sure you use these up – and so do we – meaning that your digital content is always consistent.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
