Content Marketing – Build Your Brand Today

Establishing a name-brand is difficult.  There are hurdles to jump – milestones to reach.  What are the milestones and what are some highly effective methods to conquer each one?  What does it take to achieve branding success.  I’ll show how content marketing will get you there.  Content marketing isn’t just the wave of the future, it’s essential TODAY!

Let’s start with branding.  A brand is a permanent mark.  Mentally, it’s something that sticks in your mind.  So how can you achieve mental branding?  A dramatic event can be branded into memory.  Repeat occurrences can also brand into memory.  If the repeat occurrences are pleasing to you, you’ll watch for the next encounter with delight.

You probably consider your logo, your tagline, and your company name to be your brand.  But really, that’s just the branding iron that you’ve created.  It must be heated and then pressed into something in order to leave a mark.  To brand a lasting mark in the minds of your target audience, remain in repeat, consistent, and pleasing contact with them.  Or provide a dramatic event with a positive outcome!

Brand-building milestones

When you use a process to gain branding success – brand recognition – you must successfully conquer the following milestones:

1. Product appeal

Understanding what the public finds important or appealing is usually an underestimated hurdle.  Also, knowing what the public can generally afford or may be willing to sacrifice for is a science in itself.  Serious market research is a necessary prerequisite and an on-going action-item when launching a business or product.

What YOU think the public will want may not actually be the case.  Unless you’re an extraordinary visionary like Elon Musk, or the late Steve Jobs, don’t be stubborn about this.  Do the market research and trust the data, even if it goes against your thinking.  This will mitigate the risk, and ensure your product is appealing to your target audience.

For an in-depth guide to conducting market research, please read:

Effective Marketing Strategies

2. Brand familiarity

Customers typically interact with multiple points of contact when they deal with companies.  Your company must provide a consistent cross-channel customer experience for them.  Also, convey an attractive theme or tone at every contact point.  Consistency is key.

When your customers encounter various communication styles, an emotional confusion will occur.  Conflicting information from different contact points is even worse.  These experiences will prevent bonding with your customers.  Your competition will easily draw them away from you.

Having a consistent company theme and communication style throughout your organization will cause customers to become accustomed to your environment.  Familiarity can be achieved and that is very powerful!

3. Customer confidence

Customer confidence comes from the assurance you provide them.  Gain their trust.  New businesses don’t have brand recognition yet, and customers have no reason to trust them.  Products generally don’t sell themselves, so how do you gain trust from your target audience?

Start by showing off your credentials, certificates, and accolades.  Present your market research results to your target audience…your survey and focus group results.  Provide product samples…many samples.  Build a strong list of testimonials and customer feedback ratings, and post it online.

To really get the ball rolling, you need to have a grand opening which features something that will bring them in.  Free food.  Famous performer.  Contest.

Once you get your product into the hands of your target audience, show them just how awesome you are.  Provide stellar customer service along with a stellar product in order to stay on top of the customers mind.  Good memories don’t stick as well as bad ones do, so be honest and consistent and keep those good memories flowing!

For an exciting innovative approach, please take a look at:

Branding Experiment – Profound Innovation

4. Customer loyalty – branding achievement

One of the biggest strengths any company can posses is the ability to retain loyal customers.  When your clientele is out there promoting your company with word-of-mouth marketing, and they feel disgust whenever viewing an ad from your competitor, you’ve successfully driven the value of your brand deep into their hearts.

There is a strong bond that can be achieved with your customers when you provide them with repeated good memories – customer loyalty.  While customer confidence comes from the trust you establish with them, customer loyalty is the bond that keeps them coming back.

The majority of customers stop using companies due to poor customer service.  Product problems and competitor offerings come in at a distant second and third place.  Make customer service a top priority at your company and you will retain more customers longer – achieve customer loyalty.

To dive into the many facets of gaining customer loyalty, please see:

How to Gain Customer Loyalty

Now that I’ve covered the conventional milestones in the path to branding success, let’s look at content marketing – the most effective way to build your brand in today’s marketplace. It is assumed that you’ve conquered milestone number one. You’ve performed your market research, you’ve developed an appealing product, and you know everything there is to know about your target audience.

Content marketing

Content marketing has been around for over a century.  In 1891, August Oetker included free recipes with the packages of baking powder he sold.  Years later, in 1911, He published a cookbook which contained these recipes.  It was a huge success.   The Michelin Guide, which started in 1900, distributed the first edition for free – 35,000 copies.  Also, a huge success!  These examples show how effective content marketing can be.

One of the best ways to build a brand is to offer something valuable to your target audience, for free. That is why content marketing is so effective. By providing them with desirable content they will learn from, a high percentage of those that read it will become familiar with your brand very quickly. Do this frequently and their familiarity will grow into loyalty. As marketers already know…repeat contact builds trust…good feelings from the repeat contact generates loyalty.

To summarize, content marketing will bridge the gap between brand obscurity and brand familiarity.  Then it will bridge the gap to customer loyalty.  With content marketing, you may achieve this loyalty before you ever sell a thing.  Then you may sell to them with ease, over and over again.  Just don’t EVER break that trust!

Already selling?  Content marketing will provide quick growth – lasting growth.

Blogging

The benefits to having a company blog are great.  First and foremost, blogging provides a platform for your content marketing.  It also provides a way to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  Google and other search engines reward web sites that provide valuable content.  Tie the blog into social media and you will engage with your target audience socially.  Combine all of this valuable free content with social media engagement and then add the SEO advantages and you will truly succeed in building your brand!

Thank you for reading:
Content Marketing – Build Your Brand Today

Written By: Greg Hixon of RE-MEX-IMAGE and Hixonic Web Specialists

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