Telling a brand story is a notoriously difficult thing to do. At every level of business, there is a conversation that needs to convey its purpose and its goals. The board of directors, shareholders, employees, and customers are in a position to be educated. As we get further from the company CEO, we see a greater degree of disconnect with the brand story. For marketers, this means that giving the right kind of information to the customer, and indeed potential customers, is vital.
Everyone in the SEO world knows that content makes the world go around. Your website has a duty to tell the aforementioned brand story, and site content is the way to take control of this story. Today, we are going to examine what content means in 2019 and how different industries can rely on specific mediums to get their customers excited.
The Food Industry
Eating is a sensory experience, and getting people excited about your product often requires more innovation in the food industry than any other. Manufacturers can only rely on giving out free samples to educate people on their product or offering, and this can come at a great expense while only targeting a small number of people.
The next best content medium food brands can use to get their audience’s attention is video. It should come as no surprise to learn that video content comes with the broadest scope for creativity and innovation. With social media, a viral video can give your brand massive coverage. The food industry is no stranger to video content, and the wealth of cookery channels on YouTube is a testament to this.
Food brands can go way beyond simply showing the product with video content. Depending on your offering, you can cover the manufacturing process, cookery, and a broad range of other ideas to whet the appetite of your customers. A look at Coca-Cola’s YouTube channel shows what you can do when your resources are virtually unlimited.
The Finance Industry
Trust is the letter of the law when it comes to building the awareness of a financial brand. The financial crash of 2008 left banks and building societies with a lot of work to do in rebuilding customer trust and managing their reputation. Reputation rebuilding also coincided with the rise of social media marketing, which helped big names to create a more personal, trustworthy relationship with their customers.
With Twitter in particular, large financial brands could circumvent the image of the overseas call centre and spending hours on hold for the simplest of answers. While the Twitter model isn’t perfect, it gives financial brands an opportunity to push content that gets in front of their users and reassures them that their money is in safe, reliable hands.
This conversation doesn’t only take place on social media. Looking at video content once again, we can see financial advisers like M&G using their Equities Perspective content to engage directly with their target audience and talk in their own language. This form of video content is different from what we see in the food industry – putting a human face on financial information helps to build an overall level of trust.
The Technology Industry
The internet has put power into the hands of the consumer to an unprecedented level. For home technology, anyone with internet access can get on reviews, specifications, and comparisons for any type of big-ticket tech item that they might be in the market for – i.e. a laptop, television, or white goods for the kitchen.
In this instance, people like the facts in a readable format. Price, dimensions, power consumption, etc. – these are all important in the research stage of the purchase. As you can see from this example, different types of content satisfy different parts of the full purchase process, so having long-form informational content on your products makes sense for the electronics and technology industry.
It’s important to anticipate what people want to know about your products, and a well-maintained site blog is the best way to go about this. From an SEO perspective, it’s a great thing to have because search engines favour sites that post regular, high-quality content.
Your information might also get pulled into an answer box result, which will increase the chances of someone landing on your site from Organic Search. In the case of tech companies, this is an ideal approach as you get the right information in front of your customers as easily as you can and move them further down the buying funnel.
As with all content, building trust is the aim of the game and knowing what people want to know from you as a brand will help you to create that vital story we mentioned at the beginning of this article. People consume information in a variety of different ways, so recognising what suits your business’s industry will increase the chances of increasing your customer base in the long-term.