Content Marketing: Does It Increase Brand Awareness?

Rising above the clutter in today’s challenging media environment is crucial — and difficult to attain. One of the most successful strategies is to provide what’s in high demand from editors and publishers: quality formatted content. Whether you are sharing ways to get a building permit or how to make a moist Thanksgiving turkey, there is likely an audience for it.

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One way to get your brand in front of the appropriate audiences in a positive way is to offer interesting, relatable content that websites, newspapers, and broadcast news outlets can use. This practice is known as content marketing.

What is content marketing? It’s a simple concept, and I like this definition provided by the Content Marketing Institute:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

In other words, if you’re reading this and sharing it with others, then content marketing is working. According to iMedia, 70 percent of marketers report that content marketing increased their brand awareness. I can tell you that fully 30% of my client prospects say they decided to contact me based on my blog or social media shares. Says a lot, doesn’t it?

Now, it’s still incumbent upon me to close the deal, but I like my odds. I love the fact that we can share or curate information I find interesting and it simultaneously becomes a method of prospecting for new business.

Content marketers can help you craft a story for your brand or product/service that appeals to editors. They then shape your message into a variety of formats, including full-page features, mat releases, product roundups, infographics, and more. Your project is distributed to networks of editors, who receive the content for free.

My clients count on me to create compelling, sharable, interesting content to attract customers. I submit that a public relations consultant or agency is the best answer, as we are experts at packaging information in a way that makes it compelling and useful to the news media and consumers.