Content Marketing Tips for Better Brand Awareness and Audience Engagement

Content marketing is one of the best ways to promote your business. Without it, you cannot expect to make many sales. But the challenge lies in picking your tactics and formulating a strategy. For the finest outcomes, you have to take the right approach when it comes to marketing your product. 

Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for increasing brand awareness. In this article, we will examine some methods to get acquainted with your audience and effectively engage them.

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Get to Know Your Buyer

Performing marketing research is essential. Learn who your potential customers are, what problem they need to solve and what it is that makes them click that 'buy now' button.

Just as professional essay writers for hire can write your essay for money, you can hire a marketing professional to do that research for you. But, obviously, all the expenses can add up to a pretty lump sum. At first, many businesses cannot afford to spend any extra money, even on essentials like market research. Opting to do it on your own is a viable option, too.

Identify Your Customer

Determine who your product is for and why they need to buy from you. Create a buyer persona—a generalized idea of your perfect customer. It can be a Gen-Z woman who is looking for an eco-conscious makeup brand or an elderly man who needs a universal pair of glasses.

Engage People Into Research

Use your personas as a guide and look for those people in real life. Approach your past customers or potential ones. You can find them among your competitors' social media following. For maximum depth of your market research, aim for people of different ages, income levels, genders and family statuses. This will give you the most diverse group, hence more data to work with. In exchange for their time, offer them a reward. It can be money or your products.

Prepare a Questionnaire

Thoroughly preparing the questions is half the success. You need to ask your participants open-ended questions that will allow for the most independent and unbiased answers. The tentative line of questioning should be as follows: 

• How and when did you realize you had a problem that needed to be solved?
• How did you research potential solutions?
• What influenced your decision to buy or leave the site/store?

Expand these to be more specific and relevant to your niche or brand. Once the questionnaire is finished, ensure that you thank your participants.

Research Your Competitors

Check your competitors' social media, website, and general online presence. Take note of whether they operate offline or not, i.e., if they have a physical store or an office. This will show you the full picture of what your potential customers expect. 

Look at their following-to-engagement ratio. Do they have many followers and few likes, or the opposite? Do they follow trends and post viral content? How can you make your content viral as well? 

Notice if they post more videos or more photos on their pages. Does that ratio change depending on the platform? How much product photography do they post, and does it get the same engagement?

Answer all these questions, and you can start building your own social media tactics. 

Brand Awareness

The initial stage of improving your brand awareness is developing a style. The style of your social media depends on your buyer persona.

For the sake of this blog post, we will assume that your customer is a Gen-Z woman. She's a student, works a part-time job and gets occasional support from her parents. She's conscious of ecology and interested in politics. She thrifts most of her clothes or buys from small brands. She likes things that are made to last but does occasionally buy fast fashion due to convenience. 

You can't resell AliExpress accessories and expect her to become your loyal customer. For her to become a repeat customer, she needs to see the manufacturing process and be sure you're not just another reseller.

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How to Develop a Style?

The key to being easily recognized by your followers is sticking to a creative copywriting strategy, aesthetic or vision. If you're posting product photography, make sure that it's identifiable by more than a label. Take pictures in nature on diverse models or put certain filters on all the images.

The viewer has to see your post and recognize your style before they see who posted it. This is what brand awareness is. 

Research keywords relevant to your brand on Pinterest to see what your audience wants to see. For our Gen-Z customer, you could try'slow fashion,' 'upcycling,' 'natural fabrics,' etc. Use your findings as references when developing your branding strategy.

Transparency is Key

Progress videos get lots of hits across most social media platforms. Artisans who make accessories, clothes or food from scratch get millions of followers. If you need Gen Z to interact with your content, you should show how your product is made.

If the product is mass-produced, it's important to have a transparent and clean sourcing process. Saying that you get your materials from a sustainable source but not having any proof of that just won't cut it anymore. Most people, and especially Gen Z, who have lots of buying power, care deeply about where their stuff comes from. This is why they are canceling brands for greenwashing and lack of transparency. Sure, they might indulge occasionally, like they do with Shein, but they are not loyal customers.

To foster loyalty, you have to build a personal rapport with your followers. Don't treat them as potential customers. Instead, try to have a relatable image. Show your everyday work processes and struggles, and talk about challenges openly. 

Put a Face Behind the Brand

One of the reasons why Rihanna's Fenty Beauty is so popular is obviously because she is Rihana. But another reason is that she appears in the brand's content regularly. She uses the products she advertises, which builds customer trust and loyalty. 

Most recent influencer scandals involve influencers not using advertised products. Followers perceive this behavior as a blatant lie and are less willing to trust that influencer in the future. This is why micro-influencers have such a wide reach these days. 

People with 10,000 followers or less are considered micro-influencers. Unlike those with a million followers or more, these micro-influencers have a tighter community of followers. The followers are usually more engaged and trust the creator more. They feel like a part of their lives since the creator interacts with the followers' comments. This builds trust between the creator and their community, and for advertisers, this is a goldmine. 

Offering your product, a discount code or an exclusive offer to a creator with a smaller audience can yield better results for a smaller price. Besides, influencers with a smaller following are usually more responsive, sometimes even more reliable and are easier to work with.

Use User-Generated Content

Motivate buyers to post content with your products. They can share a review or a video of them using your product or service. In return, you give them a discount for the next purchase. Having pinned stories with customer reviews on your Instagram also improves the trustworthiness of your brand. While browsing or researching to buy, someone will see how many customers have bought from you and trust you more. 

Reposting those reviews may also convince those people who follow you but are still on the fence about making a purchase. 

However, make sure to post user-generated content in moderation. Some people may follow you for the aesthetic value and will unfollow you if you post random people's selfies all the time.

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Engage With Your Followers

Interacting with your followers is paramount to building trust and a sense of community around your brand. Write questions in your posts to prompt people to comment. Reply to those comments and like them to make people feel seen.

If they criticize the branding, product quality or any other aspect, take it into consideration. They might have a point. And if you edit your product with people's comments in mind, they will be more inclined to buy from you.

On Instagram, you can post questions and polls or answer people's DMs publicly. This will paint a more reliable image of your brand. On TikTok, you can reply to comments with videos, which is also a very effective branding tool. 

Wrapping up

Developing proper branding is paramount in the current business environment. Without it, you will be just another brand that nobody cares about. But you must put your work into it to make the branding efficient. 

For that, perform thorough market research. Develop your buyer persona, conduct interviews with potential customers and analyze the results. Perform competitor research. See what they are doing well and what missteps you can avoid. Interact with your audience by posting user-generated content and replying to comments. Take feedback into account and use it for growth and development.