Using Content Marketing to Increase Brand Awareness

Customers can’t buy from you if they don’t know your business exists. Content marketing can help you increase brand awareness and grow your customer base. But there are some things to consider to get the best results from your content marketing efforts. This post is your primer on using content marketing to increase brand awareness.

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is whether customers recognize and recall your brand. It’s a measure of how familiar your audience is with your business. Have they heard of your business? Do they know what you do, sell, or provide? If not, they aren’t “aware” of your brand. 

Brand awareness happens in stages. You go from being a random company on a feed to a company someone remembers seeing and then a household name. 

Brand awareness matters because you can’t get sales without it. 

Content marketing works to help your brand stand out online and make people aware of it. Your audience will search for something they need, and your website will appear. 

Why is Brand Awareness Important?

Brand awareness is critical because people can’t purchase your brand if they don’t know it exists. Once they know your brand exists, brand awareness brings additional benefits. 

Brand Awareness Helps Develop Reputation

Brand reputation separates a new, unknown product from a trustworthy and desirable brand. Your brand’s reputation could be that it’s the highest quality, most accessible, has the best customer service, or has the most potential for customization. Whatever sets your brand apart should be the baseline for your reputation. Once people know your brand, your reputation begins developing with them.

Brand Awareness Creates a Foundation for Education

Brand awareness is when your audience learns about your product or service. When you’re building awareness around your brand, it’s the ideal time to educate customers about what your product or service can do for them. In your educational content, include some background about your business, what sets your product or service apart, and what the consumer can expect when doing business with you. 

Brand Awareness Grows Your Business

When you focus on generating brand awareness, that means more people are learning about your business. The more people who know about your business, the more potential customers you have. Therefore, brand awareness helps grow your business by enlarging your potential customer pool. All you need is a plan for converting them from awareness to customers. 

Brand Awareness Creates Opportunities

Awareness creates opportunities for your brand to outperform competitors. Newcomers or lesser-known brands often shake up the industry and take customers away from existing brands. It’s because they do things differently. This could include better customer service, swiftly addressing needs and desires, building excitement around their product, and more. If you’re entering an already saturated market, competitor research is vital. 

How Content Marketing Benefits Brand Awareness

Content marketing uses online media, like email campaigns, blogs, and social media, to make people aware of and stimulate interest in a business without necessarily explicitly promoting it. Since content marketing is a way for people to discover your business, it’s directly tied to brand awareness and has multiple associated benefits.

Content marketing improves brand awareness by:

• Exposing Your Audience to Your Values and Mission. Content marketing allows you to highlight where your brand originates and what it stands for. These components of your brand include things like the mission statement, company history, and values. 
• Showcasing Your Brand’s Personality. Content marketing is where your brand’s personality shines. Your product or service category may not be unique, but your brand’s personality differentiates it.
• Building Community. Successful content marketing fosters conversations with your customers, which helps build a community around your brand. Build community by discussing industry news, reviewing products, taking suggestions for improvements, and more.
• Demonstrating Experience and Authority. Successful content marketing can help position your brand as an industry authority. Building authority often includes informational blog posts, tutorials, and FAQs. By writing knowledgeably about relevant industry topics, you demonstrate experience and generate trust with your audience.
• Offering the Opportunity for Relatability. Often, delivering relatable content to your readers and making a connection is much more valuable than speaking about the latest industry news. Consumers want to feel connected with brands, so showing that you understand the consumer — their needs, wants, and concerns — can go a long way. 
• Building Relationships. If the content you create can help answer a customer’s question, they’re more likely to come to you with more questions in the future. Once customers are ready to take the next step and purchase, they already have that relationship and are more likely to choose your brand.
• Growing Trust and Loyalty. Using content marketing to increase the number of interactions a customer has with your brand helps develop trust and loyalty. This trust intensifies if you consistently deliver quality content that informs, educates, and is valuable to your customers. 
• Spreading Your Brand’s Reach. The benefits of content marketing really start to take off when customers start talking about your content. It brings in new customers and develops hype about your product. Asking customers to share your information or leave a comment with their thoughts can help spread the word to potential customers.
• Driving Organic Website Traffic. Good and effective content marketing can help drive website traffic from search engines and help you reach new customers as a result. The key here is to consider the questions and concerns of your target audience and respond to them clearly and concisely.
• Generating Backlinks. Backlinks from websites that rank high in search engine results lend their credibility and their customer base to you. Backlinks can be pivotal in helping you establish trust with potential customers.

Using Content Marketing to Increase Brand Awareness

Success in content marketing comes down to delivering high-value content that educates your audience, establishes you as an industry expert, and builds trust that your brand can meet or exceed their needs. 

Some of the best ways to use content marketing for brand awareness include:

• Serve Your Audience. When you understand your audience, you know their pain points and what they might search for online. This knowledge allows them to find you through search engines and helps you better serve them through your content.
• Analyze Audience Engagement. Take a moment to look at the type of engagement you’re already receiving across channels. Take stock of what’s working and build on that. Look at areas that need improvement and make adjustments as necessary.
• Create Quality Content that People Will Share. Focus on creating content that your target audience will find valuable, not just for themselves but for their friends, family members, and coworkers too. The more they share your content, the greater your reach.
• Display Your Brand’s Voice. Every brand has a voice… or at least it should! A brand’s voice is a consistent tone and personality in all brand communication. People look for brands with voices they relate to. Once you expose your audience to your brand’s voice, they associate it with your products and services. 
• Create a Content Marketing Strategy. There are plenty of resources available to help you plan out your strategy. Content mapping is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal when jumping into content strategy. Just make sure to keep your objectives in mind as you plan. 
• Understand Audience Search Intent. If you want to create content your audience will find through online searches and relate to, it’s important to write with their search intent in mind. Search intent is categorized into informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational. What is your audience trying to do when they use Google? Write content to fit that desire.
• Implement SEO and Keyword Research. Doing the necessary SEO and keyword research is one of the most important pieces of developing a good content strategy. You may have the highest quality content out there, but if people don’t come across it naturally, it won’t do you or your brand any good. 
• Participate in the Community You Build. Participating in discussions, sharing industry news, and promptly responding to customer inquiries are great ways to participate in and grow the community around your brand. Feel free to get creative and have fun with it.
• Be Authentic and Transparent. Customers relate strongly to honesty and authenticity, so strive for this when creating your content. 
• Diversify Platforms and Deliverables. Diversifying your platforms and deliverables can help you get the most from your content marketing efforts and stay relevant. Our first research study found that content mix is critical to content marketing success.
• Make Content Shareable. Let readers who love your content share it far and wide for increased exposure and potential new customers. To do this, make your content shareable. You never know when your business will cross the feed of someone looking for exactly what you offer.
• Analyze Results and Revise. As with any other marketing approach, reviewing the results and adjusting strategy are integral to long-term success.

Let Content Journey Help

If you’re interested in increasing your brand awareness through SEO content marketing services and giving your business potential for growth, Content Journey is here to help. We have a team of marketing professionals available to guide you every step of the way as you start your content marketing journey. Contact us today.