How to Use Content Marketing to Build Brand Authority

Last Updated on April 12, 2021

It can be difficult to build brand authority though it may be more important now than ever. I am sure that you can think of at least one company jingle or a memorable commercial. How do you make your brand stand out with not only radio and TV commercials but also ads on websites and YouTube? Content marketing can be one such avenue if you consider the following suggestions. You may not be able to do them all so you should try to incorporate as many in your marketing strategy as you can. 

Pull Back the Curtain and Share Some Secrets 

Sometimes it is okay to show the man behind the curtain. You do not have to explain and show everything, but you can give some teasers. Help people see the value that you are offering them, especially if you offer services. You want to build the trust of your potential customers and showing off something that may otherwise be buried in your sales process. One great way to think of something to reveal is to look at your sales process and evaluate if there is some secret that you tell customers at a certain point in the process. This could even be something as simple as expressing the benefit or feature that you, and your competitors, offer that may be obvious to you, but not to them. 

A good image can do a lot to convey a little. Do a comparison chart about different materials and the costs associated with them or show the value of repairing a product versus replacing it. Tag the image correctly and your image may show up in a Google or Bing image search. There are a lot of little secrets that a company can share, so find one and test it out to see if you can get some traction. You may be surprised at how sharing a little secret can build the trust of your target audience and drive that traffic to your business. 

Find the Questions and Answer Them 

Your secret may even answer a question that your audience has, which leads us to my next suggestion. Find out what questions people are asking and start answering them. How do you find the questions that people are asking? There are various tools that you can use, but we will offer up Answer the Public as a good place to start. This site allows you to choose the country of choice as well which helps international businesses answer the questions of customers all over the world. 

When you answer your customers’ questions then you may get them to use your site instead of your competition. Those handling SEO services understand that search engines love when websites answer questions and there is a good chance that such pages will rank better, which means your site shows up when people ask the questions on their preferred search engine. By ranking these pages, you look authoritative as search engines, like Google do their best to not rank websites that do not have authority in a subject. 

One important thing to keep in mind when answering the questions is the search intent. Is someone asking the question because they only want information or are they asking with the intent to buy? Try to make your content reflect the best answer for the intent of your audience. One of the last things that you want to do is write content geared toward buying a product or service when the customer is only looking for information on them. 

Prove Your Expertise Through Reviews, Case Studies, And More 

What makes you stand out from the competition? Share that information with your audience. Maybe you found some questions that you can turn into an interesting study or report. Sometimes you may find some questions that only cursory relate to your business, but there is a value in compiling them and figuring out if you can create a study that answers them. Some people really love to look at data and journalists know this too. If you can put together an interesting study or report, you can send that to some media outlets and see if they’re interested in publishing them. You have probably read some of these kinds of studies and reports and subconsciously noted the company that put out the study or report. 

Show off those fantastic reviews and testimonies that your customers are giving you. People tend to read reviews that people leave for a company more than the other content on a company’s website. It can be helpful to add reviews or testimonies to different pages of your site where the voice matches of those reviews or testimonies match the voice of the page. Do you have a page that talks about the professionalism of your team? Match that with a review or testimony that talks about how professional the people they worked with are. You can even set up a few that scroll through to really get the point across. 

Do you have any case studies that show off the excellent work of your team? Those can be a really great way to draw attention to the expertise of your company. Show off some amazing reports that show the struggles of a company when they came to you and how you have turned them around. It can also be extremely beneficial to show how your team was able to keep a company afloat during an economic downturn. We have had a few of those in the last couple of decades including the recent pandemic of 2020. Showing off that your company can produce even during the most difficult times can be a real boon to your business. 

Lean on The Expertise of Your Team 

You have shown off those case studies, now show off your team. Sometimes you want to get the expertise of your team shown just as much in your company. Ask your team if anyone would be interested in creating a blog post about what they do. They should also reveal some tidbits about themselves to show the human side of your team to the readers. People get more invested with the people than they do with a faceless company. Find a few faces of your company that you can show off as authority in your company’s industry. You may even find that podcasts can be a great way to get your brand out there by having one of your experts be a guest on one. 

Conclusion 

Each of these suggestions can help you build your brand’s authority through content marketing. You may have realized by reading all this that content may not mean a blog or article on your page, but a review or testimony, an expert on a podcast, or some fascinating images and studies. Whether you share some secrets, answer your audience’s questions, show off your expertise and authority, or lean on the expertise of your team, your brand will benefit from these efforts. It takes time to build a brand’s authority, so what are you waiting for? Be the first, or at least the best, in your industry to go beyond the norm and you will find your brand name on the tongues of your customers.