How to increase brand visibility with cross-channel marketing
Any smart marketer knows that the key to a solid content marketing strategy is to promote your brand across multiple channels in order to increase your brand visibility and website traffic.
As a business owner, you have plenty to focus on and a lot of businesses leave their brand presence in the hands of the professional marketers. However, some companies aren’t big enough to afford a professional marketing agency to manage their content. This post is for you guys.
A few common questions that we get from business owners here at ContentCollective Marketing include:
- What is the importance of fresh brand content?
- What channels should I promote company content on?
- What type of content gets the most engagement?
- How can a small business create enough engaging content with limited resources (budget, staff, time, etc…)
What is the point of creating branded content?
Any solid marketing plan uses quality branded content to establish your business as the authority or thought leader in your industry. What exactly is branded content, you ask?
These days, it is not enough to just have a good product or service. In order to gain visibility in such a busy marketplace, businesses need to create original, unique, and entertaining packets of information.
Any piece of marketing material a company creates (original content) should have its brand image clearly displayed or, if your company curates (borrowed and shared content w/attribution) its content, then ensuring that you maintain attribution while also promoting your brand.
Think blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, infographics, etc…
Anything that you put out to gain visibility or attract attention is content. But, sometimes creating great content can be tough. What does your follower-base want to read and more importantly, what will they share with their friends and connections?
Content in a bubble is useless for gaining targeted traffic. In order to get your material in front of specific demographics of people, you have to have context. In other words, you need to know what your base wants to know more about, what they're struggling with, and offer effective and creative solutions to these pain points.
In order to attract an engaged following, businesses simply must know their targeted audience, where they hang out online, and what interests them. We find this information by creating buyer personas. Those semi-fictional representations of our ideal clients help us to know what content to create and where to put it.
Brand identity and viral content marketing
If I ask you to identify a can of Coca-cola, could you do it? How about the Ford Automotive logo?
Pretty easy, right?
Well, if I asked you to name the shade of blue that the Ford symbol is colored?
Ford Blue, as it’s called, is its own color. It is #1351d8 on the Hex Color Code.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, that blue has changed a few times over the years. But, just about every company you can think of, especially in the Auto Industry, has a very specific, detailed set of rules that define their brand identity.
A brand's identity incorporates any number of values that are defined to elicit consistency in advertising & marketing campaigns, such as
- Color scheme/Alternate color scheme
- Font style & weight of typeface
- Positioning of logo & text on product or media
These specific guidelines ensure that no matter what medium you see it in, Coca-cola is consistently written in the signature flowing cursive font against a red background (#fe001a Hex Color Code).
These brand guidelines are set so that our brain can easily identify one company from another. It’s not just the logo that affects our recognition, but the colors marketing designers choose to use have psychological significance as well.
They trigger certain responses from our sub-conscious mind. Just know this, nothing in brand marketing is coincidental.
OK, so we established our brand content guidelines & made our buyer personas. Now what?
Now that you know what sort of questions your visitors want we need to decide 3 more big things.
- What challenges our buyer personas are searching for answers to
- What type of content will best serve up our information in a way that’s easy to digest
- What social media format or channel to promote it on
Let’s answer these in that same order.
There are many types of content we can create and which to choose really depends on what you want to say, how much you have to say, and who you want to say it to.
For example, if you have a ton of numerical facts and statistics, in order to keep the info from boring your people to sleep, you might opt-in for a colorful or animated infographic instead of the traditional whitepapers or other long-form content. The colorful imagery & spacious flow is easier to absorb than a solid cloak of black type in a sea of white background.
If you have a bunch of quotes and findings from the leaders in your industry, you might choose a case study to promote your solutions and give your brand a face and voice.
If your perfect audience is a younger, more electronically-friendly crowd, then fast media formats like live video and mobile friendly, app-based delivery would be best.
As far as what channel our content will gain the most interaction? This is a tougher question to answer as there is sometimes no rhyme or reason to where your target audience will be or what time they will be there.
A quick overview of the different social media marketing channels out there
Twitter: Perhaps the fastest and most furious of social media channels. Tweets (posts) are literally flying across cyberspace at blinding speeds. Don’t blink or you’ll miss something. Each tweet is limited to 140 characters. 2016 saw Twitter changing their limits to 140 characters with or without pics, gifs, or quoted tweets (visual content used to count as a character reduction)Viva la Tweet!\
Facebook: Facebook is still one of the most widely used and also most user-friendly as far as learning. Brands can create business pages create and promote multi-media content, and promote it right through their accounts. Posts can be as long or short as a brand needs, though visual content seems to convert far better with the highest conversion rates and platform preference is given to video, especially live video.
LinkedIn: The executive's version of Facebook. With most profiles centered on professional accomplishments and the companies they work for or with, and most posts being of a business or industry theme. Brands hoping to establish themselves as industry leaders will do well to post and promote here. This is also the home of social selling and contains business tools to market, sell, recruit, and showcase their corporate culture and knowledge. Just do everyone a favor…No selfies, and keep it profesh. Capeesh?
Google Plus: Wait-What??!! You’re not using Google Plus to promote your content? I know, there’s mixed reviews about how effective it may or may not be as a platform. I urge you to take a second look! If nothing else, think of it this way: The world's most used search engine has its own social media platform-Ya think they might play favorites? Post to it, and often. BTW-Posting content and pages to Google Plus can help get them crawled by Google faster meaning your brand new content gets online and into the Search results faster. That’s pretty good SEO advice if you ask me.
Instagram: Originally the premier photo-based platform, users upload curated photo’s and now “stories” or short video clips to express what matters most. An influence-marketing dream come true, your brand’s best cheerleader and selling figure just might end up being a 14-year-old hipster girl with a heavily engaged following. Product showcasing & E-commerce work well here.
Pinterest: Once known as the housewife’s social media, brands and marketing experts have found success with this social channel. Users upload pics and infographics E-commerce brand’s can dominate here with a just a small learning curve.
Snapchat: Another photo/video based model highly popular with teens, tweens, and even millennials. Recently, marketers and brands have seen some success.
YouTube: The supreme mother of all video content sites. Owned by Google, brand's would do well to have plenty of video on their YouTube Brand Channels. Though live-content gets better SEO ranking, pre-recorded YouTube is still killer exposure and makes for great viral content.
Email Lists: By far the most engaging channel to promote your content. Email is also the highest interacting and converting channel in a marketer's arsenal. Best of all? YOU OWN IT! No algorithms to contend with, no pay-per-click shenanigans- an email list is all yours.
If you are an absolute beginner to content marketing, don’t sweat it!
Just think:
- Is your content quickly digestible? Or, will it take your audience more time to get through the details?
- Can you afford to chance audience targeting to the platforms? Or, is it best to send a well-timed, optimized and copy-written e-mail to your subscriber base?
If you still can’t figure out where to post your content, check your analytics.
- Where is the majority of your traffic coming from?
- Where is it being shared or retweeted most?
If you STILL can’t figure it out, post it to all of your social media platforms.
Just share the link far and wide, throw a little blurb at the top of your post telling people what it’s about, and what you’d like them to do with it when they’re done reading (share, retweet, sign up, dance a jig, etc…).
No matter where you post your content or how often, be sure to pay attention to the engagement and click-through rates for future reference on what worked and what didn’t.
If you don’t know which content format your audience likes best, perhaps try creating a few different types and running an A/B Split Tests then let your audience decide.
Content marketing is how brands find cross-channel success
No matter what industry you’re working in, and who you’re marketing to; if you aren’t creating value in the lives of your audience…Someone else will!
Those are your customers out there swimming in the big ole’ Internet-ocean…You’ve just got to figure out how to get them into YOUR BOAT. Content Marketing is the answer!
If you enjoyed this article, more so if you learned something from it then please show some love! Share it with your network. We’d love to know what’s working for you with your content marketing, feel free to comment below.
And if you have any questions for us, please Drop Us A Line!
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