It’s been over 25 years since Bill Gates wrote his essay titled “Content is King.”
In his work, Gates expressed a belief that the content, particularly in the form of the text, can determine the success or failure of a website. These three words later became a phrase that is especially well-known in the world of online marketing, search engine marketing, and content marketing.
Undoubtedly, content is what drives the internet as we know it. It’s everywhere, from social media platforms to blog posts, videos, and more. Furthermore, the content is constantly evolving, and its form largely depends on the current trends that can change in the blink of an eye.
The numbers also speak for themselves, as today, the average Internet user spends six hours and 58 minutes online per day. It is no surprise that most of this time is focused on consuming different types of content, from TikTok videos to online games, social media, podcasts, memes, or tweets.
Two decades later, Gates’s observations about the importance of content remain true. However, a lot has changed since 1996. With that being said, let’s look at the current situation and see how it applies to today’s marketing world.
Content Helps to Express Your Brand’s Personality
These days, having a defined and cohesive brand personality is essential. After all, that’s what makes you unique among your competitors and allows you to stand out from the crowd and flourish. This is crucial if you want to make money online.
Brand personality is the brand’s personification, meaning that just like a human being, every brand has its own voice, color, and numerous other attributes that bring out different emotions in its audience.
It’s the way people perceive the brand based on factors such as what it says or how it looks and acts. Your brand personality is how both new and existing customers perceive it.
By sharing and publishing content in the form of marketing materials such as official communication or blogs, email campaigns, and posts on social media, brands can express their brand personality while simultaneously showing off their focal products or the news and updates about their organization.
To further enhance your efforts in creating a cohesive brand personality, you can consider working with a professional media relations agency that will help your organization get noticed and cultivate a positive reputation among customers.
However, you also need to stay aware of how the content can allow you to show off what your brand is about.
Content Enables You to Connect and Work with Influencers
In this day and age, most brands cannot afford to underestimate the power of working with the right influencers.
In a nutshell, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers with a dedicated social following who are viewed as experts within their niche.
What makes influencer marketing particularly effective is the incredibly high amount of trust as well as the bond they share with their followers. Some social media influencers can easily make or even break a brand’s reputation.
When you decide to work with influencers, you need to ensure that your brand’s values are out there. If you don’t take the time and effort to make them clear and communicate them, the influencer might unknowingly step outside the message you’re trying to cultivate.
You can spend hours explaining what your brand is about, but in reality, it’s much easier to speak about your values through content.
You’ll reach more people and significantly increase your chances of getting through with the right message if you send influencers interesting infographics, work with them on short videos to add to their feed, or prepare a photo campaign instead of giving them a few dry words on a piece of paper.
Content Allows Your Brand to Offer Something Unique
Your unique value proposition is the statement that expresses to the potential customer your product or service’s distinct selling points. When you have no unique content to offer, people who become your customers are limited to repeating the experience they’ve already had with your products and services.
Creating unique content helps ensure that you have more UVP to offer and makes you stand out from the crowd of your competitors.
Remember that it should be much more than just a tagline or a catchy slogan – for instance, exciting and visually interesting graphics often make for one of the most effective ways to provide your customers with new content on virtually any social media platform you desire.
To make sure that you’re doing something different from the rest, study the content that your competitors are putting out as well as the audiences they target. Try to look for something they might have neglected and see if you can provide it to your customers.
Content Helps You Communicate with Your Audience Segments
Audience segmentation is the act of splitting up a vast audience into smaller chunks that are easier to manage.
The segmentation process depends on their personality and preferences. For example, if you’re a skincare company, you might segment people depending on their age to offer certain deals and promos on sets of anti-aging cosmetics or products created for young adults with problematic skin.
Getting into the mind of your audience segments will allow you to stay more updated on their unique needs and preferences and identify their online circles – for instance, what influencers they’re most likely to follow or what hashtags they use the most.
After gaining this knowledge, you’ll be able to curate your content in a way that will cover suitable topics while offering nuanced info and ideas. Identifying your audience segments is an excellent way to stay on top of the current trends and stand out as a brand.
Final Word
Today, content plays an important role in digital marketing. Even though some people still perceive it as a cheap tool, the facts speak for themselves – when respected and used in the right way, content can help you create a unique brand that gets people’s attention.
It’s essential to understand that your audience values their time. Therefore, your prospective and existing customers expect to be provided with high-quality content worth the minutes they will never get back.
The messages you put out help attract the right audience to your website, engage them, and work towards getting the user to take action. Don’t hesitate to go above and beyond to create something unique and exciting – your audience will repay you in their engagement.
