A Short Guide To Building Your Brand Authority Through Content Marketing

Content is an effective tool to demonstrate your expertise in your field, build trust, and increase your sales ultimately.

However, what every business needs to understand is that building brand authority does not occur overnight.

Continued marketing efforts are required to tell an authentic story and develop trust in prospective customers. It can make a huge impact when a person is trying to decide between two brands, and when it comes to B2B, it is even more important as these products or services are more likely to include higher costs.

In this blog, we are going to discuss how you can build your brand authority utilizing content marketing.

Assess your brand authority level

Do not presume that you already know how the audience perceives your brand. In fact, before jumping into any marketing strategies, review the data to get an insight into how you are being discerned.

You can find it out by answering these questions:

• Have your branded searches risen or sunk? What search terms are the audience associating with your brand?
• How are your leads or consumers discovering your brand? Is it from authentic interviews or through the content you published or any other way?
• Have you ever been mentioned in the media? If not already, then establish Google Alerts for your company name or any customer-facing employees.

Another interesting thing to consider is – Are you aware of all the authorities currently in your space?

You can find out by entering the keyword phrases you wish to rank for into Google search and see who all are ranking for them. Some might be the ones you were already aware of, but some might be new websites that have climbed the ladder of authority.

Moreover, you can also search for your topic area using some tools available in the market. You can find out where your target audience is going to acquire information. Some of these tools also let you see the list of famous publications, social channels, podcasts, etc. which your target audience has visited the most.

Now you need to see whether you are on this list or not. And if not, then why not? Why are the others on that list? What are they doing that you have missed out? Further, you can strive to get featured on these media outlets as you’ll know that your audience will find this appealing.

Acknowledge your audience’s questions

If you start acknowledging and responding to your audience’s queries, they will start trusting you more and discern you as a credible authority.

Although the concept seems to be simple and well, it is, but the execution is hard. The first question is, how will you find out their questions?

Below we have listed a few ways to solve this for you:

• You can use several tools to find out what type of questions people are asking based on the keywords you search.
• Researching keywords can disclose what challenges people are dealing with. Don’t just get lost in the keyword volume; spend some time clicking and reading ”People Also Ask.”
• Communicate with your sales department and ask them what type of questions are your consumers asking? Have these been answered calmly?
• Divide your audience into various segments based on their persona. Different segments have different problems; make sure you don’t end up neglecting anyone.

Once you have the list of questions your audience has, you can focus on answering them effectively.

Answering these questions with authentic content

Now that you know what you need to write about, the question arises – how do you make your content authentic?

The most important thing to keep in mind is your methodology. Conduct original research by yourself. Remember, content supported by data is naturally more reliable than content written based on opinions. However, if you are emphasizing opinion, ensure that it is written by someone capable of proving their expertise backed by their experience.

Next, you need to make sure that the content is written in a manner that demonstrates authority:

• No grammatical or spelling errors
• If the content is anyway time-sensitive, it needs a date so that the readers will know when it was written so that the audience can understand it in its right context.
• All the sources should be quoted.
• The design must be clean and easily readable.
• Facts and explanations must back all information
• If an expert writes your content, mention their name and bio.

As mentioned earlier, once you establish your brand as an authority, every other marketing aspect of yours will acquire adequate traction. We hope this information was useful for you. Let us know your thoughts about building your brand authority through content marketing in the comments below.