Craft a content marketing strategy to boost your brand reputation

- You must have heard the phrase, "content is king", and honestly it couldn't be more true. In a world where consumers are savvier, more demanding, and more skeptical than ever, brands and businesses need to up their content marketing efforts to engage, inspire and connect with consumers. Content marketing is focused on creating, and sharing valuable content to attract, and retain a targeted audience, and drive profitable customer action. If someone is not aware of you or your company, how can you build a positive brand reputation if the market doesn't know you exist? This movie is intended for those who are new to content marketing, or revamping your content creative. I want to share the five steps for building a solid content marketing framework. The first step is to define your objective, that is your purpose, passion and goals. Start by getting super clear on the purpose for your content. Ask what is this piece of content for? Set clear intentions behind what you hope to achieve through content messaging, by considering things like brand awareness, generating sales, increasing custom reviews, downloads, video views, email opt-ins and improving customer retention. The second step is all about the audience. This is where you will really start to think about your niche audience segments, and buyers persona and craft the content that will resonate with your ideal customers interests and needs. So who is your target customer? Get specific, for example, are they college students, working mothers, first time home buyers, freelance workers, or those looking to retire? Think about who your customer is, what they value, what stage of life they are in, what is their financial status, and how is your product or service the solution to their needs. The third and very important step is all about crafting the brand story. Your brand story is what makes both a personal brand and business, unique. To craft your brand story, simply focus on the problem, solution, and success that creates the connection between your product or service and your customer. These stories could stem from the founder of the business, employee advocates, and or successful customers, stories that share results, provide a powerful connection point for prospective customers. The fourth step is all about the process needed to roll out the content strategy, decide who is in charge of creating the content, is it you, or is it someone on your team, or are you outsourcing this part of your business? Either way, create a content curation process that will be sustainable and scalable for your brand. The next video will look more closely at increasing customer connection with your content calendar. And step five is all about measurement. Start by selecting a content metrics tool, like Hootsuite, that will report your content performance. These tools allow you to track which content your audience is consuming and engaging in the most. Remember marketing your business, and managing your brand reputation, is equal parts creative and data analysis, and just know your content marketing strategy will never be perfect the first time, it's all about tweaking and refining, as your audience grows, give your content roll out a three to six month period to track the quality of engagement, so that you can test, refine and repeat what is working. Don't give up too soon, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And finally, here are my last words of wisdom. Don't get too hung up over the amount of likes or followers you have. It's more impactful to have 500 targeted and loyal followers who are engaged in your community, versus 5,000 unengaged people that will never comment or like your posts, and convert to customers. When it comes to content and brand management, quality over quantity will always win.