How to Grow Your Brand through Content Marketing

Most online marketers have heard of content marketing, even if it is just in passing, but what does it actually mean? And, more importantly, how does it impact your business?

Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to increase traffic to a webpage through the content it releases. If a Call to Action (CTA) is strategically and successfully placed in a blog post, it can win over new customers. As traditional marketing becomes less and less effective, the release of content is what can make your business stand out from your competitors and draw the attention of potential customers and clients.

Some businesses have an internal content marketing team, but others need to outsource to an SEO marketing agency to get the results they want and need. Regardless of how it is written, releasing quality content is an effective way to improve the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your website and therefore improve the online visibility of your business.

For businesses that need a content marketing agency for their marketing strategy, Fly High Media offer a range of content marketing services to suit the needs of your company. Whether you need search engine optimisation or pay-per-click advertising (PPC), take a look and see how we can help you with your online marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

To put it simply, this type of marketing is about sharing online material that your business, or a content marketing agency on your behalf, creates. It is then used to increase the traffic to your webpage through organic searches. Content marketing utilises target keywords that your clients or customers are looking for and incorporates them into the content they are producing, making it more visible to potential clients.

Content marketing is an effective way to help a brand grow because of its increased visibility. The inclusion of keywords makes potential customers more likely to visit your website, therefore increasing the traffic. This expands your chances of prospects going forward.

As traditional marketing is becoming less effective, it is important to make useful content the focal point of your marketing, and a core element of your content marketing strategy. This can help to improve your business’ position on the search engine results pages (SERPs), which again will make you more visible to potential clients. If you are looking to market your company strategically, focus on the distribution and creation of quality and valuable content that is both consistent and relevant.

When SEO content writing services are offered by an agency or freelancer, they may have both content writing and copywriting available. Both serve different purposes, but they can be used in tandem to promote your business and the services and/or products you provide for your potential clients. For more information, we talked about copywriting vs content writing to explain the difference and how they can benefit your company.

Types of Content Marketing

When you use content marketing, there are an array of types that you can utilise to capture the attention of your clients in the way that is most beneficial to your business, and you can take advantage of the platforms that your target audience is more likely to use. 

Using a combination of content marketing types can help you to establish which channels reach the greatest portion of your target audience, allowing you to release your content with a greater chance of attracting customers or clients. 

Blogging

Blog content marketing can be considered copywriting or content writing, depending on the length of the blog. It enables you to cover a variety of topics related to your industry that you and your clients can find interesting or useful, and it can be used to highlight other relevant content, such as other blog posts or external sites. 

Blog content marketing also allows you to leave links to your business’ social media platforms for your readers to use, and the internal links contained within the content can make it easier for your audience to find other pages on your website, therefore improving on-site navigation. These blogs can contain a Call to Action to promote your services or products.

If you are publishing blogs as part of your content strategy, it must be done frequently and consistently. This can increase the organic traffic for your business and improve your search engine page rankings, which will provide you with more online visibility.

Email Marketing

A successful email campaign can increase sales for a business and is an inexpensive method of marketing. When done properly, it is known to be the cheapest way to promote your business because you don’t need to pay for printing or advertisement fees. This can include newsletters and welcome emails, such as when a customer first signs up for your services or makes an account to buy a product.

One way to increase a mailing list for email marketing is by using gated content. The premise of this style of content is to only allow access to the work if a person provides you with their details such as an email address via a contact form or some other sign of confirmation. For example, this could be ticking the box that says ‘send weekly offers and discounts’ during the checkout process on an ecommerce site. This can give you an audience for your articles and can give you the foundations of a DRIP campaign if your readers are interacting with your emails.

Infographics

Infographics are easy to share with your target audience, and they can be used as a method of attaining quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your industry. They may be interested in using your infographic, even if they are not currently looking for guest blogs, allowing you to build those links and possibly improve your search engine visibility.

Paid Advertising 

If you are wanting to reach a broader audience, paid ad content marketing can help you to become more visible online. These ads can be found on search engines and on social media to name a few, and they enable your website to gain traffic quickly.

This method of content marketing allows you to reach people who would otherwise be unaware of your brand. For example, Google Ads places their paid advertisements at the top of their search results page, making them instantly accessible to Google users. 

Podcasts

Instead of producing solely written content, a business can expand into other formats to reach a wider audience. Over 60 million people listen to podcasts, either through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. When Oxford University and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism did research into podcasts, they found that over 50% of people aged 25 years and over who listen to them are more likely to do so as a method of learning new information. This means podcasts have the platform to make more people aware of your brand and allows you to use it as a platform for informative content.

Social Media Marketing

When it comes to exposing your brand to the widest audience possible, it is important to take advantage of the abundance of social media platforms that are available. When creating social media content, do not post it on every platform you know about. Conduct research into which platforms your audience uses to make your content more likely to be effective and to ensure you have the best chances of reaching your target market. 

The social media platform you use will impact what sort of content you produce, such as images, videos, text or a combination of them. With how prevalent social media is in today’s society, it has become a crucial element of marketing campaigns.

Video Marketing

Videos can be released on various platforms, including social media such as YouTube and Instagram. Whilst it needs more resources and time to make, video content marketing provides an easy way to expose your business online by being able to share your content both on social media and web pages. This can also be more engaging for your audience than written blog content. Here at Fly High Media, we are keen on promoting our business via our own video content marketing. Check out an example of this below:

Optimising your video content will make it more likely to appear when your audience searches for the topic in question. For example, if you have published a video on YouTube, you can optimise the video description. You can also use keywords within your video title and video file title when uploading it onto the platform, or when adding subtitles to your video. When done correctly, video content marketing can be a great way to connect with your audience online and increase awareness about your brand.

Why is Content Marketing Important for SEO?

Now we’ve covered what content marketing is, we need to establish why it’s important. The importance of content marketing needs to be recognised when you are trying to build your brand so it can be properly implemented.

First and foremost, content marketing helps you to build trust between your brand and your audience, which in turn can make them more loyal to your company. The information you provide can answer the questions your customers have, especially if the content is consistent and of high quality, and this can develop a relationship between your brand and your audience. If you are writing the perfect blog post for your audience, it can lead to the content impacting the decisions your clients make and increase the number of conversions your website receives.

Online content marketing also improves your on-page SEO, which can make your website more visible on search engines. By improving your search engine results page ranking, your brand will be easier to access via these search engines as more people will see it as a potential answer for what they are searching for. They are therefore more likely to explore your website and access your products or services.

Benefits of Content Marketing 

1) It builds loyalty and trust in the brand

When promoting and growing your brand, you need to create something that your audience will trust and remain loyal to, otherwise, they may use other companies to gain the products or services they want or need. Content marketing provides a way for you to do this.

Content marketing allows you to interact with your audience and develop a relationship with them, especially if you use social media platforms, which in itself can help to build trust between them and you. Blogs enable you to publish quality content that inform your readers about topics that relate to them and can make you a more authoritative and reliable source of information on the subject.

Once you have gained loyal customers or clients, they also help you to grow your brand. If someone enjoys the products or services you have provided, they can suggest your company to friends and family, which in turn can grow your audience. These recommendations spread awareness of your brand, enabling it to grow simply by providing quality content for your audience.

2) Increases brand awareness

Producing content consistently and making sure it is relevant to your audience is a great way to increase the awareness people have of your brand.

We’ve mentioned how improving your ranking on search engines can increase brand awareness because a higher ranking means it appears closer to the first page of results. However, brand awareness is not limited to how highly you rank on search engines. It also encompasses interactions on social media and recommendations from family and friends. Whilst you cannot control who suggests your company to the people in their lives, you can create quality content that makes it more likely that audience members will interact with your brand or use your services or products. This will then increase the chances of your business being recommended by customers or clients and can widen your audience. This can, in turn, lead to more people using your products or services, and the cycle continues.

3) Improves online visibility

Quality and consistent content being released onto a webpage can, as previously mentioned, improve your ranking on search engines such as Google. Higher-ranking websites are thought to be more trustworthy and contain more expert advice or information, and they use some of the keywords their audience is searching for. By having a higher search engine results page ranking, a website gains more online visibility as it takes less time for someone to find that webpage.

If you are trying to increase how visible your website is, ensure you use white-hat SEO techniques to do so. 

What is White Hat SEO?

These techniques abide by the guidelines set out by the search engine and are more likely to have long-term impacts on a brand or business than black-hat techniques. 

What is Black Hat SEO?

These tactics can go against these guidelines to achieve the results they want, and whilst they can work for a time, they can lead to consequences if these tactics are detected. For example, black-hat SEO techniques can lead to penalties such as the removal of keyword ranking from different search engines. These techniques include: 

• Keyword stuffing – using unnecessary keywords within your content, or repeating keywords so it sounds unnatural or clunky to read, to try and improve search rankings
• Paid links – when you pay for a link to your website to be used on another site. This does not have to include money, e.g. getting your website link in exchange for sending a free gift without disclosing payment
• Content duplication – copy and paste content from other competitor websites to your own
• Blog comment spam – leaving the URL of your website in the comments section of low quality or irrelevant websites
• Cloaking – when the content the search engines can see is different from the content your audience can see. Making the content different for separate devices (such as having a different display for mobile devices and laptops but containing the same content) is acceptable

4) It can help to generate new leads

Generating new leads is when you obtain the contact information of people who are interested in the services or products that your brand offers. Whilst they initially remain as potential customers, generating these leads allows you to build a relationship with them and increase the likelihood that they will become paying customers or clients in the future.

Customers don’t always remain loyal to a brand for the rest of their lives, meaning you will naturally lose customers throughout your company’s life. Generating new leads allows you to gain clients to replace the ones that have been lost, as well as broaden the audience you have for your content.

Generating leads can come in an array of forms, including emails and gated content. How you use lead generation will depend on your industry, business and what you hope to achieve, but these leads can enable you to deliver your content to a wider audience and potentially gain sales once you have developed relationships with those leads.

5) Encourages engagement

Having a customer return to your business is one thing, but having them offer free advertising is the ideal situation for a business to be in. Interacting with your audience can increase awareness, trust and loyalty for a brand and can lead to this free advertising, and one way you can do this is through encouraging engagement between the company and the potential customer or client.  If you are using social media for this interaction, the engagement from your audience may be through sharing your content, following your brand on a social media platform and liking your posts to name a few.

You can also use engagement to establish how successful your content is by determining a way to measure how much your audience interacts with it. For example, you may record the number of views your page gets, or how many times someone likes or shares one of your social media posts. This can help you to figure out what elements of your content are successful, allowing you to adjust your content strategy accordingly to make your campaign more effective.

6) Helps understand the users’ needs

In content marketing, the needs of a customer are the reasons why they buy or access products and services. For example, being thirsty may prompt a customer to buy a cup of coffee, or redecorating the house can convince them to buy new paint for the walls. Some of the main needs include the reliability and functionality of products, and the fairness of services, but this list is not exhaustive.

You can gain some of this information from researching your competitors and keyword research, but you can also use your content as another way to discover the needs of your audience. If certain elements of your content work better than others, it may be because those pieces of content address the needs of your customers more thoroughly. Also, if people are engaging with particular social media posts, you may gain information about the customers’ needs through their comments. You can then tailor your content to reflect these needs, which can increase conversions for your brand.

7) Improves backlink profile

When you are monitoring how many links you have leading back to your website, as well as the quality of these links, this is called a backlink profile. Whilst this is a debatable measurement in the SEO community, it can potentially impact your website rankings in search engines. A good backlink profile can help to improve your search engine results page ranking, whereas a toxic backlink profile can have a negative impact on online visibility. You can use a tool such as SEMRush to see what type of content contains backlinks to the website, as well as the domain authority score that they have.

If you are wanting to improve your backlink profile, you can start by removing any links on your website that lead to spam pages or low-quality content. You can also make sure that any links you incorporate into your content come from reputable sources that carry authority in that industry or area. Valuable links can increase organic traffic to a specific webpage, and this can also help your keyword rankings in search engine results. 

8) An effective method to rank for specific keywords

Keywords enable webpages to rank in search engines, and using them effectively is a great white-hat SEO technique to improve your keyword rankings. It is important to include relevant keywords in your content, but avoid using them too frequently within your piece. Using keywords too often in content is called keyword stuffing, and it is considered a black-hat SEO technique.

Keyword research allows you to see which queries your audience searches for, enabling you to incorporate the phrases that are used in search engines into your content. The research can also inform you how many times those words are searched for and how difficult it will be to rank for said keywords. Use this information to prioritise which keywords you should use.

If you rank for keywords, more people will click on your website as it will be more visible through search engines such as Google. This will allow your brand to grow, especially if the keywords are included in relevant content, as more people will become aware of your company and the information you provide.

9) Increases the number of pages on a website

Creating content on a website gives you more pages for people on the internet to access. For example, instead of simply finding your homepage, they can also discover an array of blog posts, each with its own separate URL and target keywords. Blog posts can serve a range of purposes, such as to convert or to educate readers.

When increasing the number of pages on your website, it is important to incorporate an array of topics into your blogs to avoid repetition and keep your content interesting for your audience. One type of blog you can do is a list, such as 8 Tiktok Video Ideas For Small Businesses, which is the format of 30% of blogs. You can also create resources for your potential customers and how-to guides relating to an area within your industry.

Producing consistent content helps to increase the number of pages you have on your website, which enables you to include more links from trusted sources that search engines believe to be experts. This can make your website appear to have more authority on the subject at hand. Also, having more pages means you are more likely to appear at the top of search engines, especially if you include relevant keywords in your content. As previously mentioned, this will help to improve your keyword rankings in search engine results and therefore your online visibility for potential customers. Ultimately, this can increase the amount of organic traffic and conversions on your website.

10) Helps to maximise existing content

When you create more content and therefore have more pages on your website, you have more opportunities to link to other content you have written, such as products or services your brand offers. This encourages your audience to look at more of your content, which can help to develop trust between your potential customers and your brand. These are called internal links. 

Internal links can also be to another blog you have written that is relevant to the topic you are currently discussing. To properly maximise your content, you need to ensure any internal links are relevant, or your clients can be less likely to be interested in reading the linked content. When done correctly, this can lead to customers making a purchase whereas previously they may have only been accessing your site for information.

Content marketing is a great way to grow your brand, and Fly High Media are here to help. If you have any questions about content marketing or SEO, send your enquiry below. We offer a variety of services to help you increase website traffic and leads, so take a look and see how we can help your brand today.

Contact Us