In the first article in this series, we discussed the importance of defining your goals before creating content for your marketing campaign. In this article, we will delve more deeply into two specific goals, and how to generate content that is geared to meet those objectives.
Increasing brand awareness
When you think of brands, some common products might come to mind: Coca-Cola, Nike, and Maybelline are examples of brands that have achieved widespread awareness. When you think of these brands, you recall a very specific image of their products. And of course, a brand can also refer to a service, such as UPS or even a website, like Facebook.
Brand awareness sets your company apart from others that offer a similar product or service. When you set out to establish brand awareness, you are wanting to make an impact on the minds of consumers. You want them to understand what you offer, and how your brand is different from similar companies.
Keeping that goal in mind, what type of content should you produce? Think of ways to catch the attention of a lot of people. Your content should be relevant to a broad audience, and exciting enough to grab the spotlight.
When creating content to build your brand awareness, ask yourself these questions:
- Will this content make people take notice?
- Will people feel motivated to share this content?
- Does this content reflect my company’s values?
Examples of good content that will establish brand awareness include:
- Funny or interesting videos
- SlideShare decks about a topic relevant to your industry
- Co-branded content, such as an e-book or webinar, created in partnership with another industry organization
Of course, we never just create content, toss it into the wind, and hope for the best! Measuring the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your strategy will tell you whether your campaign is successful, or give you ideas on how to change your methods to get better results.
If your goal is to create brand awareness, remember to measure:
- Shares of your content on social media
- Total views and shares from partnership audiences
Remember, your KPI in this case is not the number of phone calls you receive, or clients walking through your door. Brand awareness is all about making an initial impact, so measure your success by the indicators listed above.
Driving traffic to your website
Think of marketing as a funnel. At the top, you gain the attention of a large number of people. Then they are directed through a series of steps to gradually increase their interactions with your company, and at the bottom of the funnel are your resulting customers.
Driving traffic to your website occurs near the top of the marketing funnel. Your content should motivate viewers to click through to visit your website. When you create content for this purpose, ask yourself these questions:
- Is this content optimized to drive viewers to my website?
- Will this content catch the attention of my target demographic?
- How should I measure the impact of my content? Are page view metric appropriate?
Specifically, the types of content that will drive traffic to your website include:
- Posts on social media which link to your site
- Informative, engaging blogs on topics of interest to your target audience
- A call to action, which offer viewers something in exchange for visiting your website. For example, you might direct them to clink a link in order to download material that is relevant to the needs or desires of your audience
The KPIs for this goal include measurements such as:
- Total number of website views per month
- Number of blog views per month
- What percentage of viewers are returning visitors?
- How long, on average, do viewers stay engaged with my website?
- Conversion rates on call-to-action content; How many people are clicking to download the free material I offered?
As you can see, the type of content produced for brand awareness differs greatly from the type of content you would use to drive traffic to your website. You will also observe different key performance indicators, depending upon the objectives you want to achieve. Hopefully, you’re starting to see how your goals should dictate each decision in the marketing process. In our next article in this series, we’ll explore how to create content in order to generate sales leads.
