Raising awareness for your brand can be difficult at any stage of your business’ life. So how do you increase your profile and engage potential customers? With well-executed marketing content.
Great content can give a brand identity, personality and emotion — this gets your audience’s attention. For example, posting a quirky photo on social media that matches your brand’s quirky identity makes sense to those who see it. The flip side of this would be an established, trusted superannuation fund using images of a crazed cat to promote their reputation! Sure it would be attention grabbing, but for the wrong reasons. Of course, there’s more to marketing content than social media posts. Yet, this channel can form a small piece of your strategy that, when delivered with other content, can make a real impact.
What can marketing content do for your business?
Content can increase revenue for your business, position you as a thought leader, and inject your brand with credibility and appeal. Marketing content works when it’s on brand and on channel. This means understanding what you’re trying to say, and then saying it well on the channels your audience uses every day.
How to start thinking about marketing content ideas
Identify exactly what you want to achieve with your content. Think beyond an immediate boost in customers and revenue. Ask yourself, what’s your long-term plan for your business? How is it unique? What does your business need right now that marketing content can help it achieve? For example, will the content you create be evergreen, or will it feel dated in three months’ time? Leveraging the latest viral trend (who remembers planking?) to promote your brand can create a quick buzz. But will be that piece of content be re-usable over the next two years?
What channels to use
We live in an age of choice. There are so many ways we can reach our target market, including social media platforms, email, search engines, online communities, real world communities, radio, television, print. But don’t get too excited and blitz every channel! Not only can this be expensive, but it can weaken your impact and dilute all your hard work. Focus on where your audience lives. What channels do they use to find information and connect with like-minded people? Keep your content contained to the channels where your audience spends the most amount of time.
Take a health and fitness professional as an example: If they want to build their brand as an expert trainer in mobility and functional movement, they might choose YouTube as their primary channel. Why? Because customers can see what it would be like to train with them.
Their secondary channel could be a blog. This channel allows them to display their knowledge by deep diving on a particular topic – or scribing an opinion piece on a current trend in a tone, style and rhythm that resonates with their audience. They could also link to their video content from that blog.
This combination of YouTube and blog page is only one example. Your brand, business model, industry and audience may need a different mix of channels. Think about your audience, and where they live online and in the physical world. How you can most effectively connect with them? From there, consider how you can bring them into your sales funnel and keep them coming back.
How to execute it on a budget
You don’t need to have a huge budget to run an effective marketing campaign. Check out Shuttle Rocket’s affordable packages. That’s where our specialist team of hardworking copywriters come in. With years of experience and know-how, we can craft a message that will get your audience engaged.