How to Develop your Branding through Content Strategy and its Effects on SEO

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How to Develop your Branding through Content Strategy and its Effects on SEO

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Seven Strategies For Maximizing Branded Content

When I spoke to multiple CMOs last year, they all mentioned one key challenge they faced: an inflating need for content. The creation of advertising and communication content has become a key issue for brands, with consumers spreading their attention across multiple offline and online channels, each of which offers multiple formats for engaging with different target groups. Consequently, brands have been forced to create more content pieces than ever to communicate with different target groups. Some companies are producing thousands of pieces of content every year to cover their most important channels and formats.

With these changes in media consumption and media formats comes the question: How can marketing teams deliver that much content in a cost-effective way? Let’s explore some innovative solutions that smart marketers should tap into in 2022.

User-generated content (UGC) is content that actual users of a product or service create. In my experience, people tend to perceive it as highly credible and trustworthy. Because customers are likely to trust the opinions and product recommendations of friends, family and acquaintances more than those of brands, they are more likely to consult UGC on social media or product review sites to make a purchase decision. Brands can encourage UGC production by reaching out to their actual customers, running contests, holding Instagram-worthy events, conducting product testing campaigns or turning their CRM system into an advocacy program.

Whether they’re paid or unpaid and nano or macro, influencers’ campaigns can generate high-quality and sometimes even high-quantity branded content. Professional macro and celebrity influencers often create high-quality content according to brand guidelines that is comparable to professional photo or video production. Collaborating with hundreds of nano- or micro-influencers, on the other hand, might not deliver the highest possible quality, but consumers may perceive them as more authentic, and I’ve found that they can really drive “FOMO” simply because of the quantity of content they can produce across multiple platforms. By using professional agency partners and contract templates, your brand can help ensure that it’s able to amplify the best content pieces or leverage them for its website, e-commerce stores or CRM programs.

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Your most passionate brand ambassadors are sometimes only a click—or a doorstep—away. They could be some of your existing customers, some of your key opinion partners or some employees, all of whom could create content to express their brand love. Brand ambassadors are passionate about your product or service and happy to develop emotional content that will resonate with other potential customers. Create a brand ambassador program to boost branded content, drive engagement and potentially increase sales. But you don’t need to stop there; your brand could also involve ambassadors in product development and co-creation or involve them in marketing decisions. You can find more insights and ideas about how to collaborate with brand lovers in one of my previous Forbes Communications Council articles.

A content factory is a centralized hub for planning and managing content production tasks, such as copywriting, video and photo production, editing or post-production tasks. This hub can enable brands to efficiently create large amounts of content within time, resource and budget constraints. Companies could set up their own in-house department or partner with a local, overseas or fully remote agency to accomplish this. It is advisable to select the type and location of the hub based on the company’s objectives and its need for control, effective communication and financial savings.

Investing in more upfront content planning and the right production setup is another strategy for sourcing more high-quality content within time and budget constraints, as it allows marketers to stay organized and know the number, concept and format of content pieces they’ll produce in advance. Content stacking, or the pyramid method, involves creating smaller pieces of content that marketers can use to form a much larger new content piece. For example, a team responsible for five product lines could create video and photo content for each and then stack them into one big story. Content repurposing, on the other hand, involves reusing or adapting one larger piece of content to create multiple smaller content formats. For example, marketers could cut one long-form YouTube video into photos, posts, stories, ads and reels for social media communication.

A consolidated SEO strategy is key to optimizing your brand’s position in Google search results and driving traffic to your website. I characterize high-performing, SEO-friendly content as written journalistic content of more than 500 words that is tailored to a brand’s audience and has appropriate structure, grammar and spelling. Brands can source written content from their content factory or third parties, such as content agencies, freelance editors or corporate publishers. When they’re planning an SEO and written content strategy, brands should conduct thorough research and analysis of search terms, keywords and user journey performance and should carefully steer their content writing accordingly.

Partnering with publishers such as offline and online magazines and blogs allows brands to leverage visual and written content, boost exposure and awareness and reach a broader audience. Being featured in an established publication with authentic and relevant content can also help generate word-of-mouth marketing, which can boost trust and emotional connection with the brand. Select publishers according to your brand’s objectives and consider various factors, such as your industry, target group, credentials, content style, and the channels and opportunities you’d like to pursue. Some publishers these days may even be willing to develop customized online or offline magazines that are fully tailored to the needs of the partner company.

With consumers spending a lot of time-consuming media and with companies continuing to launch sub-brands for more niche audiences, there is an exploding need for branded content creation that traditional agency setups may no longer be able to cover. Smart marketers should leverage some of the options described above to deliver thousands of powerful content pieces for different channels and formats within a reasonable budget.

Content Strategy is Giving Away Part of Yourself to your Target Audience

Brands stick when they give lasting value to a person – enabling the brand to touch the person’s emotional level and climb its way up to the person’s memory. Eventually, that brand will make the person’s ‘top-of-mind list’ and acquire word of mouth referrals. Consequently, if that person is a blogger or webmaster, the brand might be able to get word of mouth links. Lasting value means that you have to:

If you’re writing a tutorial, tell them what you did, how you did it and how they can do it too. If it includes cost, tell them, if you generated revenue out of it, tell them. People appreciate transparency – even in short talks with a stranger at the pet shop.

SEO Hacker has been very transparent in our tutorials. Check out our Content Strategy tutorial and our other free tutorials in SEO School – study how we dished out great, free and valuable tutorials with full transparency even to code-level.

Know what they want. Listen. Publish content that help your target audience. Give them value. Give them answers. Guide them. Educate them. You can’t tell them that it’s not your responsibility because it is if you want them to reciprocate your branding with their loyalty.

People won’t know who you are and what you stand for unless you tell them. They will know your products and services but they also want to know who you are (even if it doesn’t seem that way sometimes). People are always looking for a story. Stories are hardwired into our system as human beings. Tell them your story – it’s one of the main keys to effective branding.

This comes after trust and loyalty. This is the stage where they will nod their heads with just about anything you say – because they believe in you and they simply like who you are and what you do.

Once you have their patronage, it won’t be a tough job selling to them. Of course, don’t sell them anything that will harm that trust, loyalty and patronage you’ve worked so hard to build.

It doesn’t stop with a purchase, more often than not your target audience will remember you especially when another person approaches them and asks for help in the specific niche you’re involved with.

Evaluating the performance of brand content

As you know by now, brand content has a direct influence on your brand image. This means measuring its impact can be trickier than with content marketing, as the latter aims to convert rather than entertain.

Purchase intention among members of your target audience that have been exposed to your campaign. You could measure that by running a simple survey among your current prospects and customers. Just ask them whether they’ve seen your content and whether they are considering a purchase in the near future.Brand preference—here too, a survey would be the way to go to gather data.Social media engagement—just check how well social media posts featuring brand content have been performing in terms of likes, comments or shares.Backlinks—a successful brand content campaign should make people talk about it online, which is also beneficial for your SEO.

Keeping an eye on the numbers will help you identify your own best practices. After all, a successful brand content strategy implies constant improvements to find ways to increase your audience’s engagement and loyalty.

Tomás Curran | PlayPlay