Turning to content marketing to increase brand awareness

Everyone is looking for ways to increase brand awareness. While it would be ideal to have a quick fix, it’s an objective that communication teams need to strategically work towards, namely through content marketing.

In this article, we'll outline how content marketing can be used to reach wider audiences and increase brand awareness.

What content marketing is

Content marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses content to attract and engage customers. It involves creating relevant and valuable content with the goal of driving customer loyalty, boosting visibility, and increasing sales.

It’s a communications tool used to build trust between brands and consumers by providing useful information that resonates with their target audience. By leveraging creative tactics like visual storytelling and shareable content, businesses can create an engaging experience for their customers while building brand awareness.

Content marketing content can include a range of forms, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more. Robust content marketing strategies are effective because they reach broad audiences by appealing to a wide selection of media preferences. For example, videos, blog posts, and success stories were identified as the top-performing content types in recent surveys.

How content marketing can help increase brand awareness

First, it can serve as a new opportunity to drive organic traffic that can improve sales outcomes and aid in lead generation, but it is also effective for helping businesses cast a wider net. Four tips can help businesses leverage content marketing to increase brand awareness:

• Broaden your horizons: Content marketing is the perfect tool to use if you are looking to cast a wider marketing net. The ability to be flexible in the marketing content that is created makes it possible for you to reach markets that extend beyond your primary target audience.

For example, while your primary audience may be more likely to engage with long reads and blog posts, you can convert this content into social media carousels to appeal to a different segment of a similar market. The more varied your content is, the more likely you are to engage with different audiences.

• Bump up your SEO game: Certain content marketing strategies, like blogs and digital editorials, have the potential to be strong search engine optimization (SEO) tools. Strong SEO translates into your web content appearing first in web searches, making it more likely to be engaged with.

Start by identifying relevant keywords that your target audience engages with on search engines and then build content that features these keywords in headings and text body. This is an excellent opportunity to simultaneously build thought leadership in an industry.

• Develop partnerships where appropriate: Anchoring your brand to relevant partners is an excellent way to increase brand awareness. Collaborative content marketing efforts between partners create symbiotic relationships that allow communication teams to reach multiple channels with one messaging strategy.

Today, this approach can be much more informal than a traditional branding partnership. It can include anything from social media partnerships that involve the creation of blogs, tutorial videos, and sponsored content. Likewise, more formal strategies, like case studies, are also equally effective.

• Leverage trends when you can: The most effective marketing content should be relevant and engaging. This means that staying on top of digital trends can prove to be highly beneficial.

So, get creative! Experiment with new marketing opportunities by hopping on viral trends and creating exciting digital content. Be sure to showcase it all on a visually compelling website that supports animations and custom design strategies.

Tools that can help you increase brand awareness through content marketing

Accompanying your content marketing strategy with the right tools to get it off the ground can help you see and maintain the results of your brand awareness efforts.

Three key tools can help here, each working in conjunction with the other.

• Social media: Leveraging social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook is a great way to share content with broad markets. Use infographics, videos, and carousels to keep things exciting.
• Content creation tools: The right content creation tools should give you the creative room to create content on your own terms, with no design limitations. Look for a robust design tool like Readymag, which features hundreds of typefaces, makes it easy to create web pages that tell visual stories, and allows users to create visual students with animated content.
• Analytics tools: Tracking and measuring the success of your content marketing campaigns is crucial. This is what allows you to identify potential gaps in your communication strategy that negatively impact brand awareness. Web and social media analytic tools offer insight into which users are engaging with your content, what content they engage with, and how they are most likely to use it. If you’re struggling to increase brand awareness, you’re not alone. Though there is no one size fits all approach to doing this, Readymag’s team is here to help you find creative solutions and meet your marketing goals.