Top 5 Ways to Build Brand Authority with Content Marketing

Every B2B marketer wants to build strong brand authority deploying content marketing at its very best. But the vital question is how to go about it? This blog post will tell you how you can provide an extraordinary stimulus to your content marketing endeavors to build brand authority.

A robust & engaging content strategy fuels sales by engaging the prospects, end-users & existing-customers.

According to DemandMetric, 80% of the CMOs affirm that hyper-personalized content is the future of marketing.

B2B content marketing is all about striking the emotional cord of the customers by addressing their pain-points & helping them to make a wise buying decision to suffice their requirements. This is where the role of strategic B2B content marketing becomes vital. Having a content strategy that is frequently analyzed, tested & optimized is a professional approach to engage with the customers. The more you understand your customers, the more useful content you can create to help them.

According to Kapost two-third of B2B marketers accede that content their multi-channel marketing strategy –including event marketing, social media marketing, demand generation campaigns & much more.

B2B brands must remember that their customers prefer to be treated from a place of empathy & therefore, should focus on the humanization of the brands.

Trust is an important pre-requisite to buying & the more of it the brands can infuse in their customers, the easier it becomes for them to make a buying decision.

What is the Brand Authority?

Businesses have to work their ways out for becoming an entity of humanization who prioritize the requirements of their customers & inspire trust in a way that encourages the potential customers to purchase from them; the process is termed brand authority.

The brand authority of an organization is the brand’s perceived authority & expertise within its niche. Brand authority implies the trust that has been earned by a brand among customers who consider the brand to be legitimate to a degree that reflects on the subject-matter-expertise possessed by the brand in addressing & resolving the pain-points of the customers. Brand authority is influenced by several factors such as compelling content, an active & influential online presence and pretty reasonable engagement on the social media platforms.

Conceptualizing brand authority is a lot easier than working towards it. Every B2B marketer understands that strong brand authority is highly desirable & inculcating & developing it will bolster their revenue bottom lines.

Now that we understand why brand authority is something worth striving for, let’s delve into ways to build brand authority with content marketing.

How to Build Brand Authority with Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is central to audience engagement. So much so that the famous author, speak & blogger Seth Godin describes it as the “only marketing left.” The quality content is important to execute an invincible multi-channel marketing strategy.

The most successful B2B brands have figured out ways to build brand authority with content marketing. Writing useful blogs referencing the pain-points of the customers, coming-up with landing pages with dynamic content & impactful CTAs & drafting newsletters are amongst numerous ways to build brand authority with content marketing.

According to the State of Inbound Report by HubSpot, the marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

Though the ROI of the content marketing endeavors is measured in different ways by different brands, selling should never be the prime area of focus, when framing a content strategy; helping customers should be.

Once, a strong brand authority is established, optimal sales revenue is something that automatically follows. It’s a repercussion not the stimulus for the content marketing endeavors.

It’s universally understood that building a strong brand authority can help resolve an array of marketing problems.

B2B marketers can use the following methods to build brand authority with content marketing:

1. Adopt a Data-Driven Strategy for Content Creation & Distribution:

The battleground of content marketing is fiercer than ever. Either you are highly relevant to your target audiences or you stand no ground to compete. With the January 2020 core update by Google, featuring on the first page of the SERPs for content is not as much as a game of keywords but an outcome of relevance.

Along with the organic stimulus, your content needs to be promoted in many ways in such a manner that it captivates the eyes of influencers, some of whom agree to vow for it or promote it preferably in ways more than one.

The social proliferation of the brands is often a cumulative result of competitive benchmarking, tracking & optimization of the outreach.

The most common mistake that a marketer makes in articulating content strategy on social media or otherwise, is prioritizing n number of vanity metrics or related metrics which serve as the vanity metrics.

When measuring content marketing ROI, the marketers need to understand that just including two or three most important metrics in enough. Ensure that those metrics are directly co-related with your key business KPIs. This makes the process of test-running & optimization much simpler.

In short, the less you complicate things, the less do they do wrong.

Explore several content marketing tools to distribute content on niche media platforms, social media platforms & paid media platforms.

Marketers can also integrate augmented analytics & predictive content strategy to optimize their content across multiple marketing platforms.

2. Employ User-Generated Content:

According to adweek.com, 85% of the customers accede that User Generated Content (UGC) is more influential than brand content.

Give the power to your customers. The more powerful your customers would be, the higher will be the brand success.

Engaging customers to create user-generated content is an impeccable strategy to get more visibility. User-generated content promotes brand authenticity, inspires trust & drives the customers’ purchase decisions.

User-generated content helps to build brand authority with content marketing as it is a repository amassed from the analysis of your prospects online which in turn is created either by the fans of the brans or prospects themselves.

User-generated content can be promoted in diverse forms such as text, videos, images, reviews, etc. Researching the keywords from the user-generated content & creating pieces of content using those can also be an impactful way to grab users’ attention & drive more conversions.

3. Create Innate Videos to grab the Centre Stage on Social Media:

According to Statista, video content is the second to ‘go-to’ content-type for marketers to build brand authority with content marketing.

Videos are trusted by 62% of the marketers to flare up their branding endeavors, following blog posts which are trusted by 80% of them for branding.

Videos keep your audiences engaged & make no mistake – your audiences expect videos from you. Also, videos are rated the best amongst all the engaging pieces of content.

According to a report by Live-stream, 80% of the participants in a survey preferred watching a video over reading a blog.

Videos crafted in the form of ‘know-how’ or ‘how-to’ videos reflect on your credibility, proficiency & competence, which is an excellent way to build brand authority with content marketing.

Once a powerful brand authority is established, it, in turn, fetches quality leads & snowcaps the revenue.

4. Create Case Studies:

Research is an excellent way for marketers to mirror on their expertise. Assimilate innate data from website analytics & your core marketing & sales research in the form of case studies gives you a chance to substantiate how you were able to resolve certain customer problems within your niche.

Remember, communicating your approach to problem-solving is most important within the B2B digital dominion.

According to Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder of Orbit Media, implementing original research in your content supersedes every other content marketing strategy.

Evidently, case studies can prove to be the most important way for marketers to bolster conversions through content & to build brand authority with content marketing.

5. Podcasting:

Edison Research published a Podcast Customer Report inferring that 22% of Americans listen to podcasts each week & that podcasting continues to proliferate the B2B marketing world as an unimpeachable means of audio story-telling.

According to Michelle Polk, Technical Marketing Strategist at UpBuild, LLC, podcasting holds immense potential for engaging audiences & is an excellent method for businesses looking to build brand authority with content marketing.

Furthermore, as podcasters, marketers establish themselves as ambassadors of their marketing niches. An expert deciphering marketing advice is something that grabs audiences’ attention & inspires an intrinsic trust for the brand in question.

Bringing It All Together

Branding is one of the prime objectives for all B2B marketers. It’s not an option but an essential requisite to a strong omnichannel reputation. To build brand authority with content marketing your content strategy needs to abide by the philosophy of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness). Integrate your content marketing endeavors, make them agile & implement the above-mentioned strategies.

Valasys Media leverages hyper-tailored B2B services namely lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services to drive meaningful results for the marketers in alignment with their core business bottom-lines.

Contact us for an efficient pipeline management framework to boost your sales revenue.

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