Content marketing is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When carried out with the right know-how, creating valuable brand resources can be an incredibly useful way to fulfil your brand objectives. 

But how exactly does this work?

Today we’re exploring exactly that, detailing 6 ways you can utilise your business’s content to drive results. 

With an innate understanding of content purpose, style and form, you can begin adapting your content to meet short-term and long-term goals. 

Allow us to demonstrate… 

Improve brand awareness

Brand awareness is a core brand objective – but isn’t something that happens overnight. 

That’s because it’s about more than consumers simply recognising your logo – true brand awareness means that your audience understands your brand and what it represents. 

How do you get this across to consumers? Content!

Look to regularly produce topical content relevant within your industry and relevant to your target audience. Of course, you also need to ensure this content is suitably branded in order to accurately project your brand image and successfully drive your brand objectives.

Ask yourself: 

• Is this written in the brand tone of voice?
• Is this topic relevant to brand and audience? 
• Does it reflect who you are and what you’re about?

If you answer yes to all the above, you’re onto a winner. Keep creating content and resources in a similar manner to steadily assert your brand within your field. 

Build trust and credibility

Brand awareness and brand credibility often go hand-in-hand. 

But while creating well-branded content in itself will help you build awareness, it’s creating high-value content that will help you build trust. 

So how do you create high-value content that emphasises the credibility of your brand? Demonstrate your expertise. 

From case studies and testimonials to how-to guides and industry insights, there’s a whole host of avenues for you to explore here. Champion the mantra of ‘show not tell’ to demonstrate this most effectively.

Anyone can declare themselves to be ‘industry leaders’ or ‘industry experts’, meaning consumers won’t trust you on claims alone. To fulfil your brand objective, prove it through the creation of in-depth, high-value content that provides genuine value and demonstrates authentic knowledge.  

Where possible, look to include unique expert insight too – supplying customers with valuable information that can’t be sourced elsewhere is a sure-fire way to quickly build your brand’s credibility and subsequent trust. 

Stand out from the crowd

We hate to break it to you, but you’re not the only brand creating content. 

You’d be forgiven for assuming, then, that with so many resources out there, the practice of content marketing for your brand will quickly become obsolete. 

But that doesn’t have to be the case. 

If your competitors are steps ahead of you in content production, all is not lost. Instead, ask yourself what you can do differently – making standing out from the crowd one of your business objectives. 

For example, perhaps you’ve identified a topic that’s important to your audience. But whilst conducting your research, you notice a competitor has already covered it… and covered it well, too. This isn’t the red flag you may think it is, though. 

Rather than finding a new topic or simply replicating what’s available elsewhere, don your creative cap and think about how you can bring a fresh approach to an old topic. 

By championing unique and, where possible, entertaining content, you’re more likely to stand out from the crowd – and more likely to drive better engagement as a result. 

Nurture leads

With the right strategic approach, content and resource production can be a powerful tool in fulfilling brand objectives for nurturing leads.

Doing this successfully relies on one fundamental aspect: understanding your audience. 

If you haven’t already, look to conduct comprehensive audience research. Dive into the data you have at your disposal, creating audience personas around your common demographics. 

It’s important not to skip the detail in this step. Knowing your audience entails more than simply knowing their age bracket, gender and location. In addition to these core elements, look to ask yourself:

• What are their habits and behaviours?
• What are their common pain points? 
• How will they interact with my product or service?

This will then enable you to begin tailoring the content you produce – in particular, targeting customers at the ‘top of the funnel’. 

Through some simple reverse engineering, your audience research will allow you to track common customer journeys back to the initial point of interest. From here, create content that aligns with this point in a customer journey. 

The thinking here is simple: become a customer’s go-to source of information from the off, and continue to create relevant content for every step of their journey. Do so successfully, and by the time a customer is ready to make a purchase, your brand has already done most of the leg work.

Increase sales

This brings us nicely to another purpose of content production and undoubtedly the most common of brand objectives: increasing sales. 

If you’ve nurtured your leads through the creation of relevant resources for each step of their journey, then this is the final piece of the puzzle. 

It’s important to note here that this isn’t a case of simply creating sales-driven content. On the contrary, resources that are overtly sales-focused in nature actually tend to drive customers away – it’s why there’s been such a surge in transparent marketing in recent years. 

Instead, once more place the focus on value. Again paying close attention to the sales funnel, create content that aligns with the last stage of the customer journey. 

This is where a powerful and strategic call-to-action comes into play. Think carefully about your word choice and link destinations – in many ways, this is your last chance to pitch. Ensure it isn’t an in-your-face sales approach, but instead a logical and natural path that a user wants to follow after engaging with your content. 

Build your community

If you’re creating resources specifically for the audience that matters to you, you’re well on your way to building a brand community. 

If your brand is the heart of your community, then your content is its body. Well-crafted resources will help generate, nurture and grow a community around your brand – this should be a brand objective of any business. 

So what constitutes a well-crafted resource? Well, wherever possible you want to keep the conversation open – this means creating content that interests, inspires, educates and engages. 

Content thoughtfully created for your audience with these elements in mind will keep them coming back for more, steadily growing a community as a result. 

The benefits of this speak for themselves. From customer service to product development, brand communities are a hugely valuable asset to businesses big and small – which means getting your content right is key. 

As brand community experts, we wanted to ensure businesses were able to share their content to better inform, educate and entertain their community. That’s why the Six Circles platform includes a handy ‘resources’ feature that enables a quick and easy solution to purpose-driven community engagement. Get in touch to find out more and request your free demo today.