When you want insights about movies and fashion, whose advice would you consider? Vogue or ESPN?
Of course, you’d read Vogue, as the brand has established itself as a go-to place for fashion and movie knowledge. They know what is trending in the industry and what is popular right now.
When they write something, their audience will listen. This is due to the brand’s authority. They have been providing high-quality content and results for years, proving to the audience that they are industry experts.
Building brand authority through content marketing is all about writing with the kind of authority that earns your audience’s respect. To connect with your readers, focus on becoming a trusted voice by using a strategic approach and storytelling that captivates and engages.
Let’s explore how you can elevate your content and establish your expertise with our current guide to building brand authority.
What is brand authority in marketing?
Image Source: https://moz.com/learn/seo/brand-authority
A brand’s authority in marketing is measured by the number of people who visit its site. These visitors consider the brand as an industry expert or industry leader who can find answers to their questions.
Simply put, brand authority is the trust a brand has earned among customers and the degree to which customers see your brand as a subject-matter expert (SME).
A variety of things can influence the authority of a brand, including quality content and valuable inputs, an active online presence, and social media engagement. Consistent and high-quality interactions with your audience or customers help build an effective brand, enhancing overall credibility and trust.
Brand authority is also built by collaborating with industry experts, earning positive media coverage, and receiving positive customer feedback.
Brand authority helps make a good impression on both new and loyal customers, thereby making your brand their go-to guide. Nurturing your brand is highly important to maintain good brand authority.
How does content marketing contribute to brand authority?
In today’s digital age, establishing credibility is more crucial than ever. Audience engagement hinges on trust and authenticity. By focusing on providing valuable content and maintaining a consistent presence, you can build a loyal audience and solidify your reputation as a credible source.
Businesses charge premium prices because of their reputation or their brand’s authority in that industry. A business mainly communicates to its audiences via its written and video content on multiple platforms.
Optimizing content to keep the brand’s vision in mind can be game-changing for a business because they can craft a perception about their business in their customers’ heads.
Why content marketing matters
Content marketing refers to constantly updating your content on different channels and platforms such as blogs, websites, guides, help documents, FAQs, social media pages, YouTube channels, and more. By constantly updating your content on these platforms, the brand can demonstrate its expertise and stay top-of-mind with its audience. This ongoing dialogue not only keeps the audience informed but also creates a sense of community and trust.
- Moreover, content marketing lets a brand show off its expertise and solutions to common problems, reinforcing its status as an industry leader. When a brand consistently provides high-quality, relevant content, it becomes the go-to resource for information. This strategy helps attract new customers and retain existing ones by continuously adding value to their experience.
- Effective content marketing also involves leveraging SEO strategies to ensure the content reaches the right audience. By using targeted keywords and optimizing content for search engines, brands can increase their visibility and authority in their niche. High-ranking content in search results signals to users that the brand is a trustworthy and knowledgeable source, further strengthening its authority.
How to create content that builds customer trust
Image Source: https://motiongility.com/effectively-build-customer-trust/
You should keep five things in mind while creating your brand authority using content: Learning how to speak to your customer’s pain points, focusing on the content quality, offering unique insights, maintaining brand consistency, and showing expertise.
Let’s dive into each of these in more detail:
Tip #1: Speak to customer pain points
Addressing your audience’s pain points through your content can significantly build your brand’s authority.
An expert always knows what to write about. Learn your reader’s pain points and write in a way that solves their issues and makes you stand out from the others. You want people to see you as an industry expert with unmatchable insights and information that no one has shared before.
Tip #2: Prioritize Content Quality
There is a ton of average and repetitive content on the internet, so don’t become a part of the clutter. Readers can easily identify who has valuable content points and relevant content to share with them.
When one visitor reads your content for the first time, that person should come back to you again and recommend others around them to check out your content.
That kind of authority can only be achieved with premium quality content that no one in the industry provides. That is demonstrating expertise. Rather than generating more content, focus on being a thought leader. Drive the audience with your words, and develop an emotional connection with them.
Tip #3: Offer unique industry insights
Why would anyone come to you for advice? Just being knowledgeable isn’t enough. You need to prove your industry expertise by sharing valuable content again and again.
Becoming an industry leader doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and consistent effort to provide high-quality content that addresses your audience’s needs. Focus on understanding your target audience, writing for them, and creating content that turns potential customers into loyal ones.
Tip #4: Maintain brand consistency
If your in-house experts are saying one thing and your content is saying another thing in a blog post, people might feel the conflict in the brand’s voice. To prevent possible confusion, ensure the content marketing strategy is consistent through the channels.
Consistency is a nonnegotiable element when creating an authoritative brand. People searching for information are more likely to trust brands that provide authoritative content that answers their questions with solid evidence.
Regularly creating high-quality content helps maintain your brand’s authority and keeps your audience engaged.
Tip #5: Show expertise through thought leadership
To showcase expertise through thought leadership, create in-depth articles that address industry challenges and provide actionable insights. Develop comprehensive whitepapers with detailed analysis and expert opinions.
Conduct interviews with influential figures to share their unique insights and perspectives. Publish and promote your content across multiple channels to reach a wider audience. Also make sure to regularly update your content to reflect the latest trends, engage with your audience, and maintain relevance.
All these activities help your business or software build a strong brand authority.
Types of brand authority content
Now, let’s understand the top two types of brand authority content with some examples.
Image Source: https://www.ezoic.com/what-is-content-marketing-2023-with-examples/
1. Building brand authority internally
Newsletters, blog posts, social media, articles, podcasts, webinars, case studies, and more. Let’s discuss in depth how to leverage these things.
To give a boost to your organic search engine ranking, you can start by targeting relevant keywords for your website’s SEO. (But make sure you use the right number of keywords for your site.) When you publish relevant content, you can climb search engine results and drive more organic traffic to your site. Trust me, it’s all about relevance and strategy.
In-house experts can craft content that positions your brand as an authority. Here are a few types of content they can create:
Blog posts that showcase high-quality, data-driven insights and demonstrate expertise to your potential customers. And remember, it’s not just about educational content—you can also mix it up with engaging pieces that enhance your visitors’ overall experience.
Case Studies: Case studies are one of the most powerful tools that in-house content marketers can ace. Adding social proof through compelling case studies, you can effectively demonstrate your expertise and build trust with your audience.
Social media: High-quality social media-friendly content can enhance your brand’s authority and reach.
Webinars: Video content is becoming people’s favorite educational content to consume quickly. Due to the demand, many B2B businesses are making webinars as a part of their content marketing strategy. Once you identify your target audience for the webinars, you can start building brand authority by conducting insightful sessions.
SEO: Building brand authority using SEO is also a very good technique. However, there are some common challenges marketers face while doing it. One of them is driving more traffic.
Establishing brand authority using SEO will mean that you should focus on generating engaging content, creating valuable content pieces, and optimizing content that has become absurd on your website.
Apart from organic efforts, you can always use SEO help from either an in-house SEO team or improve it via an SEO agency.
2. Building brand authority externally
To become a trusted advisor, it’s essential to leverage positive reviews, address FAQs, and conduct surveys. If you do this, you show your audience that you’re genuinely interested in their feedback. Moving on, let’s explore how to use these tools to build trust and enhance your reputation as an expert.
You can build your brand authority outside by posting guest posts, creating a community on social platforms, and attending other podcasts.
Guest posting (guest blogging): Experts get the opportunity to write guest posts on other websites. Usually, high-quality backlinks to enhance your domain authority are also received from guest posts.
Your experts for the content team can write on topics where they can provide informative content for the user of that website. While writing for other websites, you should have a small section where, if possible, you can increase brand awareness on your domain.
How to promote content for maximum impact?
You now know how to give your customers valuable insights, but that’s not all yet. Ranking for organic traffic takes time.
Your content needs to reach your ideal audience so they can find you—also known as doing content marketing. You need to spread your brand awareness in the market to build brand authority with content marketing.
Promoting content in today’s world is easy since so many resources are available at our fingertips, from which social media posts are the most popular ones.
Even though resharing content on social media is a very useful tip, you should not limit your content to being published only on social media. Try guest posting, attending other people’s podcasts, and sharing your expertise and the content available in your product.
Try having multiple people from your internal team who have created a brand for themselves. They can also become mini pools where you can promote crucial content.
Measuring brand-building & content marketing success
It is crucial to monitor marketing investments as the market is constantly changing. You need to shift your content strategies accordingly or optimize content to match the current market trend. It would be best if you also decided where to put your money and get the desired return on investment (ROI).
There are a bunch of techniques you can use to measure the success of your content marketing strategies. But for starters, you can look at well-defined KPIs, the change in the traffic on your website, the leads you receive from the content, or simply by closely watching the conversation rates.
If that also looks overwhelming to start, just count how much you pay your content marketing team and look at how much conversation from their efforts is paying you. Simple.
Conclusion
A strong and constant content marketing strategy could be your powerhouse, as content can build your brand’s authority like no other.
Sometimes, companies find this effort overwhelming and need outside help to maintain and implement a strong content marketing strategy.
Omniscient Digital can solve all your content-related problems in one place. We master both organic and lead content growth strategies. With these strategies, your business can not only build authority but also generate leads.
Don’t let content challenges hold you back. Contact us today to discuss how we can support your content marketing needs, or download our free resource to get started on building a successful strategy.
