The world is at our fingertips with the advanced use of technology. The Internet has reshaped our lives, and for the better. All information is available at hand, and we can communicate, share and receive information and build a better life for ourselves all with the use of technology.
Many spend most of their day scrolling on the internet, doing various activities such as watching sports, binge-watching their favorite shows, and online shopping. With so much time being spent on the internet, we understand that in this global village, we all depend on each other — especially businesses and consumers.
Businesses have decided to move their operations from brick-and-mortar business models to online ones. And even physical companies have become mindful of their online presence. In today's world, a website is essential for every organization. A business without a website may miss out on many potential opportunities and customers.
If you want your business to grow, you need to understand that enterprises accomplish a lot with various digital marketing strategies. Web advertising has reached new highs and has become one of the most effective marketing techniques. What makes it even better is the feasibility of building websites and the number of various attractive themes out there. All the reasons a business should own a website.
Among the many benefits, a website can help businesses offer brand awareness and visibility to their potential customers. This eventually drives more customers to their business, helping them create a solid customer base.
Importance of Content Marketing for Brand Awareness
Content marketing significantly influences organic traffic toward your website and can beat the drum of brand awareness for your business.
A robust content strategy needs to have at least two components. Firstly, it should get your brand name out and display it across platforms. Moreover, it should bring organic traffic to your website.
A solid content marketing strategy provides:
Increase in social media followers
Referral traffic from social media toward the website
Build strategic brand partnership
Drives organic traffic to the website
Earning high-authority backlinks
Improving customer retention gradually
And these are only to name a few of the benefits that encourage brand visibility through content strategy.
But how do you make the content work to help you gain visibility through your website? To make your content work for you, here's what you need to do.
1. Understand Your Target Customers
The people who are most interested in your products and services are your target customers. Often, most of them have similar characteristics, such as gender, age, or interests. To determine a selling point that stands out, you need to know these characteristics.
Once evaluated, you will know who your potential buyers will be. You can also check out your competitor’s audience and notice their similarities and differences to understand your audience better. Other than that, your business needs to stand out against your competitors. You will compare your target audience with theirs, and if it's similar, you will bring forward an innovative selling point.
With insights, you can strategize the perfect content marketing strategy that will allow your business to be visible to your target audience.
2. Build Your Website
To boost your online presence, you must design your website a certain way. As mentioned before, a website offers business visibility and credibility. Your website gives you the power and complete freedom to mold your brand’s online persona. The way you set up your website plays a huge role. Thankfully, it's straightforward to set up a website. You would need the following:
Web Hosting Provider
To make your website accessible on the internet, you need a web host. It would be best if you had a trusted web hosting provider who is reliable enough to offer you website security and availability. Be mindful of your website requirements and aims, and pick a suitable web hosting provider.
If you don't want to worry about your website traffic going overboard over the bandwidth limits — leading to a decrease in page load time, then you should opt for an unlimited web hosting plan.
With unlimited bandwidth, you can also publish diversified website content without a hassle. A fast website that is engaging for visitors will make them stay on your website and explore your products and services, and ultimately this is how you gain brand visibility.
Domain Name
The access to your website, which you enter in the browser address bar, is your domain name. A short, simple, and to-the-point domain name stays memorable and is easy for people to remember and look back at. It is the way your business will be recognized on the web.
A domain name has three fundamental parts:
Subdomain – for example, “www”
Second Level Domain (SLD) – most often, the name of the brand
Top Level Domain (TLD) – for example, ‘.com’, ‘.org
And, you need to consider every part to get the best out of your domain name. So, how should you choose the perfect one? Keep these points in mind.
Choosing SLDs
Your domain name or Second Level Domain (SLD) should be the same as your brand's name because that will make it easier for others to remember it. So, first, check whether the concerned domain name is available.
For this purpose, use an online domain availability checker, such as NameCheap, Godaddy, Name.com, etc. Simply type the intended domain name in the search bar, and check their available options.
Be Careful with TLDs
If the intended option is already taken, you can go through the list of alternatives that may have the same domain name but different top-level domains (TLD). These are further segregated into:
gTLDs (Generic Top-level Domains) – for example, .com, .org, .net
ccTLDs (Country-code Top-level Domains) – for example, .us, .uk, .in
sTLDs (Sponsored Top-level Domains) – for example, .gov, .edu
Infrastructure top-level domains.
Experts recommend going with gTLDs as users find them safe. In fact, the ‘.com’ TLD is associated with more than 50% of the websites, followed by ‘.org’ with a 4.4% market share. And if you’re targeting a specific country or region, you can choose a ccTLD of that country.
For Subdomain
As far as your subdomain is concerned, you can have the “www” subdomain for the main page so that customers can find you easily. To distinguish your product pages from information-based pages, you can use a distinguished subdomain.
For example, if you have a blog, you can have the domain, “blog.yourwebsitename.com”. Or if there are too many products or services, you can opt for a separate subdomain, such as “service.yourwebsitename.com”
Website-Building Platform
Regular website builders offer limited functionality and customization. With such tools, your website would look bare and very similar to many other websites.
With a content management system (CMS), you have more control and flexibility on your website. WordPress is a widely-used CMS, and it offers plenty of themes and customization options; on top of that, it’s effortless to set up as well.
No matter which option you opt for, you must make sure that the website design stands out.
Moving forward, you need to keep in mind the following things to provide a better user experience (UX) to your customers.
Stay simple. Be mindful of keeping your layout clean and easy to navigate. Do not stuff too much information on home pages.
Never use below-par image quality. High-quality images produce a professional look on the website.
Be consistent. Whether it is color schemes or typography, ensure you incorporate the same elements throughout your website.
Think about mobile-friendly design. More people use their mobile phones to visit websites. Ensure the website looks attractive and is responsive on all devices, such as tablets and phones.
When you make your website accessible for all and build it with a user-friendly interface, you are most likely to gain the brand visibility that you are looking for.
3. Offer High-Quality and Valuable Content
It is vital to keep your audience in mind when creating content. Focus on your customers’ pain points and address them through your content. Using relevant keywords would also help you rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Besides that, you must keep your content original, accurate, true to fact, well-researched, and error-free. This way, you can display your professionalism and expertise to your customers, improving brand visibility online through your website.
Avoid duplicate content, and experiment with different content types to see which ones your audience engages with the most. For example, if podcasts work for your website, and written content doesn't get much traffic, you should increase the number of times you publish podcasts. Read ahead to learn about the types of content you can offer your audience.
Different Kinds of Website Content
Initially, it may be hard to pick the kind of content that will resonate with your audience. You may want to create a combination of different content forms (text and visuals) and experiment with different combinations to see which combination gets better results.
After the trial and error phase, you will finally find out which content has the most impact on your audience and your business.
Your content needs to communicate your business values to your customers. You can make use of the following content types on your website to explain them to your audience.
Blogs
Videos
Podcasts
Infographics
Live videos
Interviews
Guest posts
Tutorials
Whitepapers
Hosted events
With time, the results will show on your analytics report which types of content your website visitors liked most. This will give you a strong direction of which content you should post often and which content less regularly.
4. Streamline Your SEO
Conduct keyword research and make sure to optimize your website with relevant keywords. However, be careful not to overdo it. Google algorithms consider keyword-stuffing or over-optimization as ‘gaming’ tactics – and tend to penalize such websites.
More importantly, optimize the following:
The draft
Alt text
Page titles
Meta description
This is called search engine optimization (SEO) and helps your business website rank better on search engines such as Google.
You can also find keywords on Google Trends and through Google’s autocompleting feature. SEO plugins also help to keep your content optimized by providing on-page suggestions and other features.
5. Use Effective Marketing Strategies
No marketing strategy is a one-size-fits-all solution for your business, but the following are general rules of thumb you can adapt and grow from.
Be clear about your goals. Using SMART goals, create campaigns that have a specific aim – for example, increasing your brand visibility by 50% in the next six months.
Your marketing needs to craft messages that can resonate with your audience and understand.
Select key marketing channels that suit your business best. For this purpose, you need to know where your audience is located.
Data analysis tools like Google Trends, Ahref, Moz, etc., can help you find out your target audience across different social platforms, saving you ample time in choosing the right marketing channels.
Apart from the above, always check your efforts on analytics to make sure that you are reaching your goals or if you need to make improvements.
FAQs
Q. What is brand awareness?
The level of familiarity consumers have with a business, its products, or its services is called brand awareness. It could vary from knowing the brand's product or its name to being a loyal customer.
Q. What is the importance of quality content for a website?
Quality content displays a business as a professional. It allows the company to stand out from the crowd and offer credibility.
Q. Do businesses require content marketing?
Online businesses require content marketing to help them boost their brand awareness and sales. Even if you are a brick-and-mortar business, you need to create an online presence.
Final Words
Using your website to boost your online visibility is essential. It helps you by providing growth for your business. You can quickly increase your business's credibility, and it will eventually lead to bringing in profitability.
You need to understand your audience, build a website that is user-friendly and publish content that offers insight into your business and also provides value. That way, your business can gain the visibility it needs.
Author bio
Daniel Martin has hands-on experience in digital marketing since 2007. He has been building teams and coaching others to foster innovation and solve real-time problems. Dan also enjoys photography and traveling.
