When it comes to our own creations, we are eager to tell the whole world about them. There is nothing wrong with willing to deliver our own message to the targeted audience in the most effective and influential way. In fact, it’s an essential part of building brand identity and establishing relationships with your community.
There are a lot of cases when businesses first create a product and then try to build their brand around it. There also plenty of examples when businesses first gain the audience and then launch their products.
Whatever path is yours, there is no other way to build your brand awareness than by creating engaging and valuable content. That’s the message you can find all over the web. Write compelling content, and you’ll be fine.
Compelling equals promotional
How do you define which content is valuable for both your business and your audience? Have you ever tried to come up to a random guy in the street and start talking about SEO services and how cool they are and what he can do if he gets optimized for SEO in 2019?
You should insist that if that guy doesn’t buy your SEO services now, he will be penalized by Google’s next algorithm.
The guy would probably flee and would be interested in psychotherapist services rather than yours. All other people seeing what’s happened would probably stay away from you. Because they’d think you’re crazy.
The problem here is that you hadn’t even tried to know who you’re talking to. You didn’t learn anything about the person and failed to align your business goals with their interests. In other words, you didn’t have a clue what the guy needed, and you started selling your services to him. He might have even needed them. But you had no chance to find out because you didn’t know what SEO services he needed exactly.
Know your client first, and then you can start reaching out to him and eventually to others who have the same issue. It’s not about you being a world advisor it’s about identifying the problems of your clients and then offering a solution.
Now, let’s look at a more realistic example. You launch a product. No doubts that you want the whole world to know about your product immediately. We have been in this situation where we were writing overly promotional articles. The result? A massive drop in traffic and audience loss.
Imagine yourself going to your work thinking about your things, throwing random looks here and there at ads, people, cars, etc. Suddenly, you’re handed an ad leaflet from a promoter. You get stressed, and your brain immediately ignores the promoter.
From my own observations, people have worked out an immune system to most types of ads from leaflets and ad melodies to full-screen banners and various pop-ups on the websites. Any promotional word or phrase will simply be ignored.
Aggressively promotional content doesn’t work. In fact, it kills your online presence.
What content is compelling?
Depending on your business model whether it’s B2B or B2C your content strategy will be different. However, there is one universal thing that works for any business model.
You need to create content that solves that actual problem of your users. A live projection of that would be something like that.
For example, my water pipe has just cracked, and now there is a leak. The first thing I do, I google the issue and the ways to fix it. My question will be “How to fix a water pipe leak myself.” Then I’ll probably need to replace the pipe, and I’ll be looking for “Buy a water pipe”. I’ll read the reviews about that thing and if it actually helped to eliminate the water leak and how it works in general.
The compelling content is the one that brings you money and traffic when you solve other people problems.
Content mix as the best content strategy
Depending on your business model the content strategy may vary. If you’re B2C than you need to concentrate on establishing an emotional connection with your audience. The best way to gain trust and respect from people is to build your brand around a person or team. This is how a lot of video bloggers managed to build relationships with their audience.
If you’re B2B than you gain trust and respect in a different way. You need data and reviews to support your authority.
Educational + how-to content
A great way to build relationships with your audience is to start a blog where you can be informing people about what’s going on in your niche on the one hand. On the other hand, you should be solving your client problems by writing in-depth how-to articles.
Let’s say you’ve informed your clients about the importance of meta tags and meta descriptions on their website. The next thing your client wants to do is they will check their website if their meta tags and meta descriptions are empty. If so, they will probably want to fill them themselves. For that thing, you need how-to content.
If a client finds that they can’t make it themselves because it’s too complicated or tricky only then you should propose them your services. In this case, your clients completely understand what’s going on and what’s being fixed. Your business is transparent and serves your clients perfectly.
For these types of content use infographics, pictures and videos to improve your content performance. Only Infographics themselves can increase your web traffic by up to 12%, according to a Hubspot article.
For B2B, the best way to gain authority and increase brand awareness in to try to rank for featured snippets and appear in knowledge graphs or carousels. In fact, today featured snippets are killing the CTR on mobiles, so check this article to stay on the safe side.
Video content
Video content works best for B2C type of business model. We have already said that this type of content is perfect for personalizing your business and gaining respect.
Also, videos are good for educating your audience on how to use your platform or tools, how it operates, what strategies can be leveraged, etc.
Video marketers achieve a 54% increase in brand awareness, according to Optimonster. 83% of those using video think it gives them a good ROI; 82% think it’s a key part of their strategy.
Social media content
Social media content can be using a combination of all the above-mentioned things such as imagery, videos, infographics, everything except for long-reads. Social media users do not have that much time to read a 1500 words article. A good tactic may be to chunk your article into smaller consumable pieces and distribute as separate content.
I have seen this happening on YouTube which is a little bit different from Facebook or Twitter. For example, you have a 1-hour webinar that has been recorded. You have probably touched several points in your webinar and described them in details. Upload those points separately up to 10-min videos, and you’ll be fine.
Chopping the article is a good strategy for creating short-reads for social media. Clear structure and motivating CTA can boost your traffic pretty quickly.
Conclusions
B2C and B2B content strategies are not that different. Both need great written content with imagery and clear CTAs, a touch of videos and infographics. No matter what type of business model you’re in concentrate on getting good reviews and creating testimonials. Whether you’re providing services or selling products, people will read reviews before making a purchase.
In case, you get a negative review do not ever try to ignore it, reply to it even if a client is wrong.
The difference between the types of content is only that B2C content is about gaining respect and building your online presence through establishing an emotional connection with your audience. While B2B is about supporting your content, opinions and company’s capabilities with data and facts since they are most necessary for making cold and clear calculations.