What is the secret to creating branded content that is relevant to your readers? If you have considered using branded content in your marketing mix, and wondering how to create it, this article is for you!
In the event that you’re promoting your services or selling digital products, understanding your existing buyers and eventual customers is paramount to your marketing success. It is important to be aware of their needs and wants.
This knowledge will aid you in creating content that connects with each audience segment. The content you produce based on audience insight will quickly convert users to paying customers. It can make all the difference to the success of your content marketing strategy.
Most impressive is that marketers have all the data and technology to create branded content—a content tailored to existing customers and would-be consumers. But before we move forward, let us interpret branded content.
What Is Branded Content?
Branded content is custom content you create to inform and engage existing consumers. It is content you produce entirely for communicating with current customers. Thus, branded content (also known as custom content) is aimed at existing consumers.
However, there is an overlap between branded content and content marketing. Both marketing strategies depend on informative materials to establish bonds with customers. But there is an essential difference between them.
Branded Content vs. Content Marketing (What Is the Difference?)
As highlighted above, branded content focuses on current customers. And that means creating content pieces that engage your existing consumers. Although branded content can also attract new readers, it is primarily for present buyers.
However, content marketing, on the other hand, is designed for consumers at every stage of the buyer journey. It means producing valuable content that will help attract new readers and potential clients. This type of content (content marketing) is SEO-friendly content that aids in improving SEO and boosts Google search rankings.
But you may ask; since content marketing is about creating content that attracts and retain consumers, why producing branded content? Let us address the importance of branded content.
Why You Need Branded Content in Your Business
Content marketing is the most vital digital marketing asset for your business. But as the competition gets intense, it is challenging for some marketers to smash the competition. That is why you need branded content.
So regardless of having a B2B or B2C business, you need branded content to help solidify your brand image and establish relationships that will translate into buyers.
Branded content is the future of marketing, the secret source of your digital marketing success. So let us define the major advantages of using branded content in your marketing mix:
A. Branded Content Offers Essential Help to Current Customers
For your business to succeed, you should provide needed help to consumers and be the go-to resource for their problems. In this way, you establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
And as a result, not only will you build strong bonds with existing customers, but you will also fascinate new prospects. Therefore, start creating branded content pieces that address customer issues. It will help influence their buying decision.
B. Branded Content Improves Brand Visibility
As content marketing is for attracting new prospects and building brand awareness, branded content will reinforce customer relationships and improve your brand visibility. In the section above, you learn that it offers needed help to consumers, which results in satisfied customers.
And perhaps, you know that customer satisfaction is a Google ranking factor. So producing branded content that satisfies buyer needs will increase your brand profile across marketing channels, including social media. How?
When you publish helpful branded content, your readers are more likely to share it with friends and followers. Their friends will also share with their friends, and the circle continues. In fact, it is common knowledge that a satisfied buyer will become a brand advocate for your business.
He will recommend your business to his followers. And you agree that customer advocacyーword of mouth is an effective marketing strategy.
That is why:
- 74% of consumers pinpoint word of mouth marketing as the major influencer in their buying decisions
- 81% of satisfied customers will do business with you again after a positive experience with your brand.
- Small business owners declared that 85% of their leads come from word of mouth marketing.
And when your customers are satisfied, you will quickly retain them and make more revenue. For this, Bain & Co noted that a 5% increase in customer retention can skyrocket profits by 75%. In addition, as your content gains momentum across social media networking sites, it signals Google that your posts are valuable to readers.
This practice will improve your search engine visibility and Google rankings.
Other benefits include:
- Strengthens your brand image
- Branded content nurtures a loyal community
- Enhance customer loyalty
- Conveys the values of your products or services
- It distinguishes your business from the competition
So let us identify the tips for producing branded content.
4 Proven Ways to Create Branded Content That Will Produce a Better User Experience (UX) for Your Readers and Customers
The exciting thing about branded content is that it makes your audience feel good. It is like giving someone a gift that connects with a need. That person will always remember that feeling—the sentiments that you have his interest are heart.
So how can you create branded content your readers and clients will love? Here are four simple steps to follow.
1. Understand Buyer Persona
The first step for me is to gather critical data about your audience. And since branded content focuses on existing consumers, you need to understand customer persona. Note that a buyer persona is a depiction of the traits of your ideal buyers.
Marketers have different terms for addressing buyer persona, including a marketing persona and customer persona. But understanding your buyer persona will aid you in offering consumers added value through the sales and content marketing funnel.
Thus, the result of this approach is a better user experience (UX) and sales.
How to Understand Your Buyer Persona
An understanding of customer persona is a practice that involves examining content performance through marketing analytics. Your analytics dashboard will show you useful data that will let you understand user patterns and behavior.
From studying your marketing persona, you can quickly define:
- Where they’re coming from (demographics)
- Their buying patterns and behavior
- Needs
- Interests
- Challenges
- Objectives
- Ambition
You can also apply questions through surveys, polls, and interviews to understand your audience better. With the information you gather, you can comfortably develop a viable website user experience. You will also be able to create outstanding branded content that engages your audience.
Therefore, develop a marketing persona according to the audience segment for an easy marketing strategy. However, if it’s challenging for you to create personas, OptinMonster has some fantastic buyer persona templates you can steal:
Source image via Optinmonster
From the visual, you can see all the essential information you need to create magnetic branded content according to the buyer journey.
2. Offer Users Unpredicted Branded Content
Unanticipated content pieces always come with a memorable feeling. It could be any content format that is:
The idea is to spark belief and trust in your brand, products, or services. The best way to accomplish this is to frequently read your competitors’ blogs. Also, study their social media marketing strategy to get an idea of what posts and content formats are generating the most engagements.
So ask yourself, are you subscribed to your competitor’s email newsletters? I have a long list of blogs I’m following through newsletters, such as:
- Neal Schaffer
- Adamenfroy
- Backlinko
- Shane Barker
- Content Marketing Institute
That’s only a few I could mention at the moment. Subscribing to their newsletter allows you to stay up-to-date with their latest blog posts and other content types they publish. Then pick the posts that perform well for them and create your version of branded content in a unique voice.
3. Use Targeted Customer-Oriented Keywords in Your Copy
Although content marketing is to draw new website users to create brand awareness, it also works well in improving SEO and organic search ranking position. But a content marketing strategy without proper search engine optimization is a slow-death.
That is why you should use customer-oriented keywords to strengthen your content materials. It will help your target customers to find your content on search engine results. Moreover, when you optimize with customer-targeted keywords, you increase your chances of attracting more quality leads.
That is because over 90% of all digital marketing activities start with a search.
Source image via Blue Corona
For this, Blue Corona stated that 60% of digital marketers confirmed that improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing focus. Also, 57% of B2B marketers hinted that they generate more leads through SEO than any other marketing strategy.
Therefore, when creating branded content for your customers, find and use the best keywords your customers are searching on Google. It should be able to provide real-time benefits to the reader.
4. Personalize Your Content
What is personalized content, anyway? It is a content marketing tactic that depends heavily on consumer data to produce the most relevant content that addresses user interests. However, it is not a one-size-fits-all, meaning that your personalized content could be:
- A landing page
- Email newsletters
- Calls-to-action
You can tailor these marketing and content marketing tools as persona-based personalization or according to the buyer journey. The concept is to create personalized content pieces for each stage of the sales circle. So, to produce personalized content, you should develop buyer personas, access customer needs, and map out your content in ways that’d meet each segment of your audience.
When you segment your readers and customers, they’ll understand that you care about their problems. Thus, personalization is essential because it is a major part of an outstanding customer experience that increases ROIs.
Wrapping Up How to Create Branded Content
Since branded content makes consumers feel good about your brand, it should be an element of your content marketing strategy. However, by ignoring this marketing tool, you will not achieve the optimal rewards of your content strategy.
Given this, strategize top ways to boost your content marketing efforts with branded content. In that way, existing customers will benefit greatly, and you will also attract new consumers and leads.
Apply the tips above and create content pieces exclusive to your customers for optimal content marketing ROIs.
What other points would you like to add to this article? Please, we will love to hear from you!
Learn more about the many different types of branded content you can create, in this amazingly comprehensive infographic from Feldman Creative.
