Tag Archives: Building Trust Through Content Marketing

June 3, 2016 · 2:05 pm

What are You Trying to Accomplish with Your Content Marketing?

Hand Drawing Content Flow Chart

Suppose someone were to ask you: What are your goals for your company’s content marketing campaign? What is it that you’re trying to accomplish?

You may wonder whether there’s a right answer to this question—but the truth is, there isn’t, except to say that it varies. Different businesses bring different initiatives to content marketing. They look to do different things. And that’s okay. There is room enough in content marketing to accommodate a wide range of strategies and goals.

What we recommend here at Grammar Chic is simply this: Think about what’s most important to you. Think about what you might accomplish through content marketing, and set your priorities. Then align both your execution and your reporting to reflect these goals. If you’re not sure about how to do any of this, you can always call us for a consultation.

Before setting your goals, though, it’s good to have a sense of what all content marketing can do. You might actually be surprised by this.  There are plenty of good and worthy achievements you can reach through your content marketing efforts, and knowing some of the options can help you to set lofty yet attainable goals.

Let us show you what we mean.

Content Marketing Goals to Consider

Here are just a few of the things you might set out to do with your content marketing efforts.

Brand awareness. People aren’t going to do business with you if they don’t know what you stand for, or are unaware that you even exist. Good, original content can address this problem. The idea is that a consumer might stumble upon your company blog post and like it so much they ask, Who wrote this?

Website traffic. A more conventional and easy-to-track metric, one thing content can do is send people to your site. Intrinsic to this is having a site that is ready to capture and convert leads—meaning good content on the site itself, forms and e-mail list to grab hold of people, etc.

Educated clients. Something else you can strive for: Preparing your clients to do business with you. Use content to inform them about your industry and products; to make them aware of problems and solutions. This can smooth your sales and customer services processes.

Retention and upsells. Good content can help you get customers, but it can also help you maintain them. Content marketing can be a form of ongoing product support or client involvement—keeping them tuned in to what your company does and letting them know of new products or services that they can use.

Trust. Content speaks to authority; when done right, it shows that you know what you’re doing. In an age of e-commerce, where many consumers are still just a little wary of doing business online, this is an important way to reassure potential clients and customers that you’re trustworthy.

We’ll ask again, then: What are you trying to accomplish with your content marketing? Let us help you though some of the possibilities, and figure out a way to turn your goals into realities. Contact Grammar Chic to learn more: www.grammarchic.net or 803-831-7444.

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January 31, 2014 · 10:45 am

Building Trust Through Content Marketing

Social-Media-Whiteboard

There’s no shortage of discussion about content marketing these days—but what is content marketing really all about? The conventional definition is that content marketing is about selling without selling—that is, telling the story of your brand in a way that’s not overly salesy or promotional. But if you’re investing in a marketing campaign that’s explicitly non-promotional, then what exactly are you trying to do?

The short answer: You’re trying to build trust among consumers, customers, and potential clients.

The sheer volume of content marketing out there makes trust key. Countless companies are getting involved on Facebook, on Twitter, and on blogs—to say nothing of the thousands of advertisements that consumers are exposed to on the Internet every single day. The way you make your content marketing stand out, then, is to make it really trustworthy—building a strong rapport with your readers.

The question is how.

5 Tips for Building Trust Through Content Marketing

  1. The first step is to define your audience. If you want to instill trust in your reader, you need to make it clear that you are writing expressly for that reader, taking his or her needs, questions, and problems in mind. Generic, one-size-fits-all content marketing always comes across as aggressive and promotional. Instead, define your audience and create content accordingly.
  2. Next, define the type of content you will deliver, the frequency of it, and the location. This will depend solely on your audience as defined in the first step. You may believe that your audience will be most accepting of e-mail newsletters; or else, that your audience is particularly hip to Twitter. You may feel like your audience needs multiple blog posts each week to know that you mean business; alternatively, you might suspect that too much content will seem too aggressive, and that you need to scale things back a bit.
  3. Share your content, but make sure you respect the line between promotion and spam. Promote your content on the social channels where your audience tends to be active, and curate content shrewdly, only sharing information that could be of real, practical use to your readers.
  4. Make it as easy as possible for people to receive your content updates and to connect with your brand through their phones, tablets, e-mail accounts, social media accounts, etc. Social media buttons, RSS feeds, bookmark buttons—all of these things should be readily accessible from your website and from every piece of content you produce.
  5. Finally, don’t forget that your analytics play an important part in the trust-building process. It’s only by looking at your content reports—and making the necessary tweaks—that you can get a feel for what’s working, what’s resonating with your readers, and what’s not.

If you’re not building trust with your content marketing, then you’re really just spinning your wheels; make sure that trust creation is the #1 goal in all of your content endeavors!

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