7 Ways to Use Content Marketing To Grow Your Personal Brand

This article has been contributed by Mark Quadros.

Creating an effective content marketing strategy is crucial for your personal brand. Successful content improves brand visibility, increases trust and delivers your company values to both existing and potential customers.

Studies show that 82% of customers feel more optimistic about a brand after receiving customized content. Furthermore, 61% of buyers are more likely to purchase from you if you deliver unique content.

Thus, a content marketing strategy should be the top concern for your personal brand.

But what exactly is a personal brand?

What is a Personal Brand?

A personal brand is often confused with personal branding, and these two terms are often used interchangeably.

But fundamentally, they are different.

Essentially, your personal brand is who you are at the core.

While a personal brand is an objective, personal branding is the processes and strategies you employ to achieve the objective.

A personal brand is your company’s values and traits. It is the driving factor behind the actions you take, your interests, and even career choices. Your personal brand gets rooted in the minds of people in the market every time you interact with them.

To quote Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, “Your brand is what people talk about you when you are absent in the room. When you implement effective personal branding, you will stand out from the competition and gain the trust of your prospective employees or clients.”

How Content Can Boost Your Brand

Increasing your brand awareness is a long process but crucial for your business success. Content marketing is one of the best ways to boost your brand.

Undoubtedly, relevant content will let your customers know what your company represents at the core. Simply knowing the name of your brand isn’t enough. Your audience should understand the qualities that make your brand irreplaceable.

Creating content that highlights your core competencies and unique qualities that make your brand stand out against your competitors can help achieve this goal. It will make you more appealing to your potential customers.

According to a survey report by Demand Gen Report, 71% of a B2B respondent pool stated they reviewed a blog while on their buying journey.

Furthermore, about 60% of consumers say reading content motivates them to seek out a product.

Image source: demandmetric.com

These numbers clearly explain why content marketing can be a great way to promote your brand without being overly promotional.

Moreover, content marketing costs 62% less compared to traditional and outbound marketing strategies.

But unless you have plenty of time and are proficient in the area, it is best to hire or outsource your work to professional content writers who are experts in managing resources, connecting with your audience, and delivering targeted content.

To improve team collaboration and manage your content marketing process more efficiently, you can use numerous content marketing platforms. Such platforms make it easy to organize work and allow you to save plenty of time with automation.

7 Ways To Grow Your Personal Brand With Content Marketing

Here are seven strategies to create a content-focused branding strategy to boost your personal brand.

1. Write an eBook

eBooks are great for content-focused branding as they are downloadable and feel more like a real object of value to customers.

You can use eBooks to generate leads and showcase your authority on a particular subject matter to your audience at a deeper level than blog posts, emails and social media permit.

The main areas to focus on when creating your eBook are content and design.

In terms of content, before you write your eBook, carefully consider your buyer personas to assess what your customers want, need, and wish for.

It’s even better if you can relay something unique in your eBook. The good news is that you can use tools like Buzzsumo to come up with topics that your competitors haven’t covered yet.

Also, add a concise call to action at the end. If you look at emails, adding a single call-to-action boosts clicks by up to 371%, demonstrating the importance of strong copy that engages your audience.

As far as design goes, have a consistent brand style guide. It will give your eBook a professional, branded look, and increase the sense of credibility.

Furthermore, once you complete your eBook, you can create an SEO-optimized landing page on your website specifically for it. Here, you can further lead your customers into the funnel by asking them to provide simple contact details in exchange for your eBook.

2. Blog Consistently

Your blog can serve as a great content marketing channel and a gateway to drive traffic to your site.

If you post regularly and consistently, blogging can help you attract a following by acting as a platform to share your knowledge with the world and become a trusted voice in your industry.

To build your brand on your blog, create new and unique content in a timely manner. Most importantly, avoid posting the same information that your competitors are posting.

A good idea is to take a topic that you have already written about, break it down, and write in detail about the smaller components.

Likewise, you can take the most relevant chapters of your eBook and create blog posts around them. Just ensure that you tailor your content to fit the medium on which you will be posting. This will save you time compared to creating fresh content.

Cross promoting your eBook from your blog by repurposing its content increases your ROI on your eBook, which is always a positive outcome.

Additionally, it will expand your reach and build brand awareness.

When creating fresh content for your blog, remember to choose topics that your audience will be interested in. For instance, you can examine common questions and comments that your brand receives on social media, then tailor your blog posts accordingly.

Doing so will reveal that you have authority and knowledge on a topic your customers genuinely want to learn about.

You can even look at your competitors’ blog posts and assess which topics get the most engagement. Though you should certainly not copy the content, you can always rework general ideas that allow your competitors to connect with their audience.

Most importantly, keep SEO in mind while crafting your blog posts. Mastering your SEO skills is almost as essential as content itself when it comes to making your blog rank successfully in organic search engine results.

3. Be Active on Social Media

In 2020, nearly 3.81 billion people are actively using social media globally – an increase of 9.2% from the previous year. These impressive stats prove how social media can help you promote your brand-building content and reach a wider audience.

Since content is easily shareable, your target audience can increase your reach through word-of-mouth publicity on social media. And while they share your content, they are also sharing your brand with the world, acting as brand advocates in their own way.

What makes social media channels so useful for branding is the ability it grants users to share their comments and opinions. When users interact with your brand in this manner, you can respond to them positively and build relationships. They might end up becoming your buying customers.

Moreover, by posting valuable content on social media, you will be driving quality leads to your sites. You just need to learn how to curate valuable and engaging content while streamlining your social media and content marketing.

4. Get Visual

Let’s face it – appearance matters a lot – especially when you’re online.

If your audience likes the surface, they’ll definitely stick around long enough to see the real deal as well.

Hence the emphasis on making your content visually appealing.

For starters, you can repurpose your blog posts into video content. One of the best types of video content to create is brand stories. You can give your users a behind-the-scenes look at how your company functions. It will make them feel like they are a part of the family.

You might also want to create videos about your involvement in charities and CSR efforts as it will paint your brand in a favorable light.

According to statistics, promotional videos and brand storytelling are the most popular video content types among marketers.

Image source: hubspot.com

Plus, videos generate maximum engagement and attention among viewers.

Videos are shareable across social channels and have the potential to go viral. In fact, video content is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other content types.

On the whole, though it will need a more significant investment of time and capital than text content, visual marketing is highly beneficial.

Besides video content, you can leverage graphic design tools to create attractive graphics and share them on your blog, website, social media channels, etc.

5. Do Guest Posts and Interviews

Guest blogging is another great way to create brand awareness. Find sites that are related to your niche, using Google’s advanced search operators to discover relevant results.

But don’t contact every site on your list straight away. Look at their domain authority, quality of content, rankings, and viewership and decide if they are worth reaching out to.

What’s more, make sure to read their guest blogging guidelines thoroughly and existing blog posts to know about the type of content that resonates with their readers.

Guest blogging is great for building quality links, generating leads and organic traffic, and boosting your brand credibility. Remember that backlinks from other websites are among Google’s most crucial ranking factors.

Pro-tip: Invest time in following and connecting with influencers in your niche. You can interview them and publish the conversation or simply craft a high-quality article around their answers.

As the article goes live, contact them and request a backlink. They may even end up sharing it with their connections and link back to it without you asking.

6. Leverage Analytics

To succeed in your content marketing strategy for your personal brand, you need to understand and monitor your progress.

When you understand which strategies work and which don’t, it will be easier for you to improve your marketing tactics and scale your brand and business.

And this is where marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics come into play. They help you understand data and identify how your content is faring online.

For instance, you will come to know which type of content is fetching you the most traffic and the channels from which you get the most traffic. Plus, you can determine where your customers are visiting your site. Data can even tell you which pages your visitors are clicking on your website the most.

You can collect all these details and use them to determine the content types that are the most significant to your goals. You can also take a data-driven approach while picking new topics.

You can also choose other popular data analytics tools to get insights from the sea of data.

7. Create Quality Content

This goes without saying: You have to create quality content!

However, “quality content” is a very vague term.

What was considered high-quality content back in the day isn’t what Google looks for now when ranking your content or determining it as relevant to search queries. It isn’t only the content’s context or depth that need to be high-quality.

Google also takes into consideration the freshness of your content, which depends on factors like:

• The publication date of the content
• How often you update content
• The changes you make to the content’s core context
• The rate of inbound links growth to the content
• Traffic and engagement rates

If you are creating content for your business regularly, you’re generating a constant stream of fresh new material together with updates and new links that point to your old content pieces. It increases the chances of your content being picked by Google over your peers, while search engines are looking to show content to search users.

Pro-tip: If you are working with a remote team, invest in reliable content marketing and team management tools. Ensure that you don’t miss out on any crucial message sent by a team member because timing is a critical factor in content creation.

However, note that creating fresh content isn’t enough. You need to create content relevant to your audience and offer real value. If not, you run the risk of Google leaving you out and not getting found by your audience.

Are You Struggling to Create Brand Awareness?

Content marketing is a sure-fire way to create brand awareness. Though it will take time and effort, you will reap the benefits.

The tips mentioned in this comprehensive article can help you build a strong content marketing strategy to let your present and potential customers know about your brand’s values.

So, what are you waiting for? Gear up and get building on your personal brand!

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About the author: Mark Quadros is a SaaS content marketer who helps brands create and distribute rad content.  He loves content and contributes to several authoritative blogs like HubSpot Sales, CoSchedule and Foundr.

The post 7 Ways to Use Content Marketing To Grow Your Personal Brand first appeared on JUST™ Creative.