40. Content Marketing as part of your Personal Brand Strategy
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing should be a key element in your online Marketing Strategy if you wish to develop and strengthen your Personal Brand and create a larger impact.
Content marketing is about generating free content of value for your audience, which is not directly promoting your brand, product or service, but rather stimulates interest and loyalty for it.
There are several reasons why you should be using content marketing:
Content Marketing will help you establish yourself as an authority in your area of expertise.
It will help you to become well known.
Helps gain the trust of your audience, they will get to know, like, and trust you even before they have ever worked with you.
Your audience will be more likely to want to work with you.
Content Marketing will allow you to increase your engagement and develop relationships.
It is great to improve the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your website, meaning that your audience is more likely to find you when looking in Google for a topic for which you are generating content in your website.
Before you even start working on a plan to create content, make sure to identify your target audience and understand what they need and how you can help them resolve this problem.
Content Marketing is free for you to create, of course it has an investment of time and I am not going to lie to you, until you get into a system it will be very time consuming, but the benefit it provides you in order to grow your brand is extremely relevant.
What type of content can you create for your strategy?
I would advise to pick one long format content platform and create a piece of content per week.
It is important to choose one form you feel most comfortable with, amongst the most widely used ones are: a blog, a podcast or a video.
Although it is good that you are comfortable creating content in this format, make sure your audience consumes the information in this form. Just to give you an example, I listen to a lot of podcasts, I learn and get inspired while doing other things like walking my dog, running or cooking. I don’t as much consume YouTube videos, unless it is something I specifically look up because I need to know how it’s done.. And these can be very random things. If I was your ideal audience, you would be better off with a podcast.
Where to host your content?
Although your content can always be published on Social Media, and I definitely recommend doing so, it is also very relevant to share your content in a platform that belongs to you, for example, your website.
Think about this:
Your Blog can be hosted on your website and it will definitely improve your SEO.
Your Podcast will have to be hosted on a platform of wide distribution (for example Anchor, etc…) that will distribute your Podcast to platforms like iTunes or Spotify. However, consider creating a section on your website where you can host the audios and your show notes as well, this will also improve your SEO.
If Video is your platform of choice, you can of course host them on YouTube for wider reach (or Vimeo) and link them back to your website.
Remember that online the process of knowing, liking and trusting someone takes time, BUT it allows you to reach a potentially larger audience.
One of the major concerns from entrepreneurs doing Content Marketing is on whether their audience will still buy from them, since they are sharing so much content.
Remember that pretty much all the information is already out there on the internet, if you have the time and patience to put it all together.
What people will buy from you is your expertise to implement, they will buy your knowledge to create a shortcut, they will buy your ability to guide them from where they are now to where they want to be.
They will buy from you, because they know you and trust you.
In understanding the role of yourself as a guide for your clients, read this very short article
Hi! I’m Blanca!
I’m a Brand Photographer and Personal Branding Coach, helping female entrepreneurs to create a Personal Brand online that STANDS OUT.
I bring your vision to life, help you come up with one and take you by the hand into the online World if you need me to.