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Build Your Brand Using Content Marketing

brand-strategy

Building a brand starts and ends with content. Of course, face-to-face interaction is important in most industries, but more and more people are searching online for products and services that provide a solution to their problems, so you also need a comprehensive content marketing strategy. However, before you even start thinking about writing a blog post or making your first how-to video, you have to do make sure you have identified…

  • …your audience.
  • …your brand voice.
  • …the type of content your target audience wants to see.

Defining Your Audience

Many companies create buyer personas for each type of customer in their target market. If you do not take the time to define exactly who you are creating content for and how your content marketing efforts will sell your product to that consumer, you may end up wasting valuable time and resources making something that resonates with the wrong customer.

Brand-voiceCreating Your Brand Voice

After you define your audience, you should start thinking about the type of voice you want your brand to have. Look at your buyer personas and align your brand voice with those.

For example, if you have a trendy, organic makeup line and your ideal buyer is a 25-year-old woman in California your brand voice might be fun, light-hearted and maybe even a bit edgy at times. You will have to keep up with the language being used by your target market and create content that uses the same slang, hashtags, etc.

On the other hand, a commercial construction company in Ohio’s brand voice will be less flowery and use language that is known throughout their industry in a no-nonsense type of way.

This is probably one of the hardest things to maintain when it comes to content creation, but to effectively align your content with your brand, you must keep a consistent voice.

Creating Content That Your Target Market Wants

It is important to think about what kind of content your target market appreciates. We believe that every company should pump out a variety of content (we will get to that soon), but they shouldn’t waste their time on Snapchat creating hundreds of videos if their demographic is people older than 40.

Content Marketing and Brand Building Made Easy

Mix Things Up and Use a Variety of Content

We said we would get to this soon and we weren’t kidding. It is important to create a variety of great content that speaks to your brand and is in line with your brand voice. If you are racking your brain and trying to come up with the different types of content you can create, you can relax for a second; we have some suggestions for you. Note: There are more types of content, but the list below will give you the most bang for your buck (or time).

Audio/Video

  • Podcasts
  • Webinars
  • How-To Videos
  • Product Review Videos (related to your industry)
  • Client Testimonial Videos

Written On-Site Content

  • Blog Posts
  • Landing Page Content
  • Case Studies
  • Written Testimonials

Written Off-Site Content

This is content that is not directly on your website but can help you build trust with users (as well as Google).

  • Guest Blogs
  • Articles
  • Editorials
  • Reviews
  • Social Media Posts

Actionable Content

Actionable content is something that a user needs to download from your site or sign up for.

  • Email Newsletters
  • White Papers
  • Ebooks

2. Make Sure Content Is Relevant and Useful

Whatever combination of content you decide to use to build your brand, make sure the content is relevant and useful to users. This is extremely important. High-quality content that answers important questions that your audience or customers have is key to successfully building your company.

To find out what people are searching for you will need to perform some keyword research. There are a ton of tools out there to help you perform keyword research, and it is important to find one that works for you.

As you start creating content, always keep your brand voice in mind. If you deviate from that voice, you may lose the thing that makes your brand stand out from competitors and lose potential business.

3. Be Transparent and Try not to Sound Like a Robot

RobotYou always want to create content for the user, not Google and to be honest about your product or service. If you claim to make the best coffee cups ever, your coffee cups have better be just that or bad product reviews will start rolling in. On the other hand, your content is not the time to be humble. You took all of this time to build your business, go ahead and talk about how much research you have conducted and how well your product performs.

In addition to being honest, make sure your content sounds natural and not robotic no matter what industry you’re in. Make sure that you thoroughly explain complicated topics and throw in an anecdote or two about your personal experience with whatever you are writing about.

4. Optimize and Share Your Content

Now that you have created your content, you need to make sure it is optimized. If you do not optimize your content for search, then it won’t be seen. The internet is very competitive and doing things a certain way can give you a leg up on your competition. We have discussed how to optimize content here, and honestly, we could talk about it until we are blue in the face, but we will give you a quick recap.

  • Use your keywords naturally throughout your writing (this includes video and podcast descriptions) and in your titles
  • Organize long-form content with headings
  • Add internal and external links
  • Make sure all of your sources linked are reputable and correct
  • Add some graphics to large walls of text
  • Make sure your content is free from grammatical errors

After your content is optimized, you can now share it with the world via social networks, email, or your mother texting all of her friends to go read your blog post. One important thing to keep in mind when you are sharing content is image size, especially on social media. Click here to learn more about appropriate image sizes.

Consistently coming up with content that helps build your brand and is friendly to search engines can be tough. If you are having trouble navigating the world that is content marketing or simply have a question about blog posts, contact our experts today!

Joshua Schaper is a Content Specialist at RSM Marketing who focuses on blog strategy and production. He has worked at RSM since 2020 and is passionate about delivering high-quality, relevant search traffic to our clients. When he's not writing, Josh loves to play basketball, listen to hip-hop music, and play video games.

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