How to improve a brand’s presence in the online world depends a lot on that engine that’s driving the entire web world crazy! And that engine is our very well-known search engine, the first two alphabets of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We also have understood by this time the theory that – it’s practically impossible to succeed in SEO without having great content strategy for your brand. I am sure we all have so many times looked and re-looked on how the campaigns that we were running for our brands and the tactics that we were using to promote it miserably failed to match the SEO rules. And by this time you may have also realized that doing SEO without legitimate and compelling content is only a half sided battle that you can never win. So, if you want to succeed in SEO and you plan on doing it the right way then follow the rules to develop the appropriate content strategy for your targeted audience.

A content strategy that engages your audiences attracts links and converts traffic into business leads can be crafted by just one person who has a good understanding of the prospective markets. Outlined below are the steps that 30TH FEB has used to leverage our associate brands as a brand agency to serve entrepreneurs, brand marketers, startups and other businesses worldwide to successfully improve their brand performance.

Your Brand’s Website is your Brand’s Identity

A brand’s presence or identity is the image of a specific product or service that consumers connect with by identifying the name, logo, and tagline, tonality of the brand or design of the company who owns that exact image. In short, it’s the persona that a brand sets for its offerings so it can differentiate them from generic or competing products or services in the market. That formula is applied in SEO marketing also. The brand’s spirit should be tangible in every asset you create for consumer consumption. The writing style, the visual design and the themes of your content are all important elements where branding can be infused. When trying to understand a website’s business and brand identity, you can look at the following areas to get a quick feel of what you want to offer and make sure it comes out strongly.

Propose your brand’s value – Give a strong reason to the customer as to why should they buy your product or use your service. The value proposition must be very clear so the prospective buyer understands what he or she is about to pay for and why this is all worth it.

Have a Personality– There is a saying, “Beauty get the attention, personality gets the heart”, the same goes true to the brands – online & offline as well. Is the website’s tone formal or is it more casual? Does its visual design suggest a more business like environment or a more social one? The words that you choose, the manner of message delivery, along with the look and feel of your website will ultimately decide its personality.

Watch out your Audience – Creating a brands personality or proposing your brand’s value – all this is done for one person i.e. your target audience. Therefore, know who your target audience is and know what are their needs and wants. Assess their online behaviors and thereby know them very well – it is for them we generating the content. And accordingly if your branding is bang on, your products are easy to connect & recall and the offering resonates with the needs and wants of your audience, you will reach out to them.

Have the right writer for your blog and other content

A brand marketing personal can provide you ample amount of data but your audience may end up reading jargons. Well-researched, grammatically correct and stylistically sound writing are skills that we can expect only from a well versed content writer/editor. A good writer can read facts, structure them into a clever piece and use a hook to help the composition provoke reader attention. Also he/she will take time and initiative to understand what the audience’s intent is so that he /she can cater it while staying true to your branding and intended messaging. Now how to choose that apt writer for your brand? My experience says that an in-house writer generally works better because he will have a sense of ownership on the things they write about. They are aware of the in & out of brand and whatever is been done to them. An in-house content expert will be aware of a company’s culture and will have a deeper understanding of the target audience’s nature. Team writers also tend to grow as the business grows. They usually carry the things they learned from one project to the next.

Follow a map for the flow of your content marketing campaigns

Now, let’s talk about as to how you will run content marketing campaigns with the help of your writer. Every three months, you need to run different content marketing campaigns to promote your site. The first step is to find a theme for the three-month period. Say for example if you are running a fashion retail and you want to promote something for the winter, you will have to figure out rare tips on how customers can save on expenses and make the best use of the sale/promotion. Now over the three month campaign you will have to figure out a way to publish as many as 15-18 blogs and interesting flash or videos on your website during the campaign period. All of these assets will talk about topics related to the central theme and they all have call to actions that will direct the audience towards your offerings. Though there are a lot of ways to map and structure topics that you need to cover but the key is to tailor-fit the structure to the intent of the customer that you want to attract.

Don’t flow through content marketing mainstream

As we have discussed so far, you must have got the idea that content marketing is more than just feed for SEO. As through your content you connect with your audience, it must be emotional, it should tell a story, and aim to impact consumers’ behavior, attitudes, or perception of your brand. And, while search is certainly important, your brand story encompasses much more than what you write on your blog or website. At the end of the day everything you do in marketing, online and offline, must align with your brand narrative. So, yes, blog content, videos, tweets, all are important. But so is the story you tell through your employees, customers, and partners as well as through your paid media initiatives. This is why you must develop your content strategy before you start marketing it.

It’s important for brand owners to explore how building their brands can catalyze their inbound marketing results, and how their content efforts can help achieve their brand goals. So if you want to achieve the same for your brand, get in touch with us(ask@30thfeb.com) and we will help you build the most impactful content strategy for your brand. Our Services include SEO, Blog Management, and Content Marketing for SMM.