The Need for Authentic Content Marketing for Brands
To survive and thrive in the massively competitive ecosystem in the digital race of brands, the need for authentic content marketing has increased as well!
In the massively expanding marketing environment, techniques like targeted advertising, referrals, etc are getting cliched and even turning out to be annoying for the audience. Thus, not all brands, especially new ones in the market, get the fair advantage of establishing their brand image from the scratch in this competitive market. To counter these issues, the need for authentic content marketing occurs. To explain it in simple words, content marketing practices are done to help the audience in understanding the brand and these practices are optimized to tackle the customer base better by optimizing the content accordingly.
In this blog, we are discussing a few tips to consider while preparing the content marketing roadmap for businesses.
1. Appreciate customers and interact with them
With an increasing number of platforms from where you can target customers, you also have a great opportunity to get in touch with them directly. Thus, it is ideal to appreciate customers for being engaged in your businesses or appreciate them for feedback or reviews.
Once a customer approaches your business with a query, while resolving it, you can use the opportunity to suggest related products or content for them to explore. While creating authentic content for social media platforms, making it more engaging to attract interactions is also a wise step to boost relationships with your customers.
2. Use omnichannel marketing techniques
Marketing is not only limited to websites or social media. In fact, leveraging multiple platforms in a balance is known as one of the most effective methods to get the best results out of content performance marketing activities. Plenty of successful brands like Singapore Airlines, Target, Bank of America, and more use omnichannel in their authentic content marketing roadmaps.
3. Establish a brand voice and identity
To stand out from the crowd, you need to figure out a specific brand voice and identity to display to your target audience. Follow one tone across all your digital marketing content to ensure that as soon as your target audience comes across your brand content, it can recognize your authenticity. Marketing leaders also recommend keeping consistency in the brand voice across all websites or social media content marketing platforms.
4. Gather reviews and showoff
Another one of the top content marketing tips that you will come across is optimizing and attracting reviews and ratings from your client base. These reviews help build customer loyalty and thus, it is crucial to show them off at every opportunity. One of the leading practices followed and recommended by the best digital marketing companies is showing off reviews on the first page of your brand website for others to be able to find them easily. Additionally, you can partner with brands like Crunchbase, Clutch, Glassdoor, and more to establish a good reputation across multiple platforms.
5. Gather engagements across channels
Another top authentic marketing practice is gathering engagement through social media content. Engagements can be gathered through quizzes, games, giveaways, CTAs, and more. In addition, an effective digital marketing content strategy is to organize frequent conversations with the audience to gather more engagement and boost your social media presence. These engagements also influence the visibility of your account positively.
6. Create consistency in publishing the content
Another top tip to follow while creating authentic content is to maintain the consistency of publishing it across platforms. Find the best social media engagement time for each platform that you choose to be active on and maintain the consistency of publishing the content at that time.
The above social media key marketing strategies report by Hootsuite displays ideal post timings for TikTok in the US market. During these hours, most of the TikTok audience remains active and engages with the content. Relatively, brands can attract more and more engagement for their authentic marketing content by following these schedules to grow faster on TikTok.
Things to avoid in your authentic content marketing strategies
Your website and social media marketing strategies should avoid a few things that can annoy your audience and make them avoid the brand.
Furthermore, we are listing down these points that you should avoid while creating your brand content-
1. Avoid clickbait
One of the major pain points that readers across platforms face is clickbait. Click baits usually mislead the reader with some catchy headline or image and attract engagement just to disappoint the reader with either some irrelevant information or with something way less sensational than it was displayed first.
2. Avoid self-promotion
Another pain point that needs to be avoided while planning website or social media content marketing is to avoid self-promotions all the time. Especially on social media platforms, to gather engagement, it is critical to generate content that makes the audience stop and engage with the content. To do that effectively, brands are adopting the approach of generating entertaining content like memes, vines, and more.
3. Avoid creating content for yourself
Create content that target users can enjoy while also maintaining the brand identity and voice instead of creating content that users avoid. To understand what users want or like to see, it is ideal to observe the competitor content or content by already established brands of your genre. You can also try multiple varieties of content to observe and plan your social media strategies accordingly.
4. Avoid using just stock photos
Using stock photos without any modifications or publishing content without creating dedicated graphics can make the content look boring. Brands, to avoid this from happening, tweak their graphics to make them more brand-friendly and appealing even if they are using stock images. You can use platforms like Freepik, Shutter Stock, or Pinterest to find images that are usable for free and can be used in brands after tweaking.
Wrapping up
Well, these were a few common practices that need to be followed in order to establish an image as a brand with authentic content marketing strategies. However, it is also true that each brand has its own type of target audience. So, whether you are an established brand or a new one, the stage of experimentation will keep coming back as soon as marketing trends evolve. So, while applying these techniques to optimize your brand marketing strategy, keep experimenting as well to grow your brand.
In the end, we hope that apart from understanding the need for authentic content marketing practices, the above-mentioned information also helped you in getting answers to questions like what is authentic content and why does authenticity matters in your content marketing practices. Keep exploring MobileAppDaily’s Medium page to read more of such in-depth blogs.