Building a reputable brand online takes time and perseverance. With an effective content marketing strategy, it can be less painful, though. A good online brand design must take into account content marketing.
Designing an online brand takes into account many factors. Some of those factors are social media presence, search engine optimization, and your website. Possibly the most important factor, though, is content marketing because everything relies on good content.
Content marketing helps you effectively reach your target audience in the places you’ve built your online brand. If you can reach your audience and offer them something helpful in your content, your brand gets a boost too.
Understanding what content marketing is and how it will help you build your online brand is essential to growing your business online.
What Content Marketing Is
Content marketing on the surface is exactly what it sounds like but unfortunately it’s not as easy as it sounds. Content marketing is a strategy that attracts your target audience to pursue your content because it is helpful,valuable, and timely. You can use a number of different types of content to do this including blog posts, white papers, eBooks, podcasts, etc.
Content marketing attracts your target audience by being helpful, valuable, and timely. Click To TweetUsing helpful content is a great way to give answers to questions your target audience is seeking. Google’s goal is to answer questions and if your website has the answer, they’ll send a lead to you. Content marketing is a great way to build trust first then nurture that trust and turn it into a lead.
Now that you have an idea of what content marketing is and why it’s beneficial to you, it’s time to take a look at online brand design.
What Online Brand Design Is
Online brand design is slightly more complex and isn’t as clear in the words as content marketing. A brand is more difficult to define even though I’ve covered it in many posts. If you know what a businesses brand is then you have a good idea what online brand design is also.
A brand is all the intricate parts behind how people see a business. It’s the story behind the business, the logo, the look and feel of anything designed by the business. Even an advertisement for a business is a small part of the brand.
Your brand is created by your business and customers interactions together and with others. Click To TweetOnline brand design is the brand, but online. It can include things like how the business Tweets (funny, serious, etc.) or even the look and feel of images on the business website.
A constant dance between the business and customer develops the businesses brand. A business wants to be seen by customers in a certain way. Customers have their own unique way of seeing a business and will make it known. The online brand is a combination of those two things and online brand design is the businesses best attempt at creating the brand.
While the online brand is in constant flux, online brand design helps design the brand in a way the business wants to be seen. Online brand design deals with the part of the online brand that is created by the business. It helps create the ideal way for customers to see your business. It also helps guide the story people create for your brand on social media and beyond.
With content marketing and online brand design better defined, it’s time to look at how they fit together.
How The Two Fit Together
Online brand design and content marketing go together well.
It’s difficult to effectively design a brand online without having at least some valuable content to answer visitors questions. The content developed for content marketing is also an effective way of building your brand. In fact, one of the goals of content marketing is to build trust with your target audience.
Each piece of quality content you develop for your content marketing strategy helps to create another brand touch point that tells your businesses brand story. You create a strong brand impression by answering your audience’s questions, helping them meet their goal, or do something better.
Content marketing is part of online brand design. Without content marketing there wouldn’t be much material for your business to build its brand with.
Your Brand Relies On Content
Without content, you don’t have much of a brand. People need a reason to hire you and content is a great way to make the case of why you are the most knowledgeable and should be hired. Not only are you trying to give them a reason to hire you, but before they can hire you they need to find you. If you want them to find you on a search engine then there needs to be something to find, great content on your website.
Great content on your website increases the chances your target audience will find you and therefore increases your chances of building brand awareness with your target audience. Not only do you need great content to attract your target audience but the content will also lead to links to your website (not to mention shares on social media!).
Your business has no brand without giving something of value to your customer. Click To TweetOne of Google’s biggest ranking factors for your website is external websites linking to it. This may conjure up memories of link building and link purchasing but that doesn’t work anymore. You need valuable content on your website in order for other websites to want to link to yours. In other words, you have to earn your links.
Content marketing is the best way to become a trusted brand with your target audience. It’s also the best way to build a relationship with complementary businesses which will then help build your brand for search engines.
Build Your Strategy
If you haven’t thought about ways you can build your business online more, a great starting point is with a good website design with purpose. Growing your online brand is a multi-step process and takes time. Creating an online brand that’s a hit is even more difficult.