For most brands, how they interact and maintain relationships with consumers is high on the list of priorities for improvement. Offline relationships with consumers have always been hard to maintain. Luckily the internet now provides a faster, more open way to start and develop relationships with consumers.
Content is King. The creation and distribution of content for big brands encourages consumers to engage more with the brand and increases awareness online.
Content can exists in many forms, however using the correct type of content to strengthen and grow brands is key:
Journalist/professionally written pieces — these are particularly good for drawing people into dialogue with your brand and offer a significant value for your consumers. It needs to be driven by audience needs and wants and with a creative input is very effective for driving traffic through SEO.
Conversations — these are happening now. You can influence them, start them, respond to them or just be aware of them. These happen via social media (SM) or your own community sites. They could be shared experience, pictures, video or just chatter. Becoming a trusted contributor to these conversations can change the way a consumer perceives a brand and will assist in brand awareness. You just need to know what people are saying and where.
Social currency (apps, widgets, games, viral content) — in essence things that your consumers value, that entertain them or that make their life a bit easier and that they want to share with their networks through SM. These types of content can grow the visibility of a brand online when delivered successfully. The success is dependent on the creation of a captivating idea and extended distribution.
The first step to sourcing and creating this kind of great content is listening to your market. Through the use of monitoring tools, such as Radian6, it is possible to obtain an in-depth understanding of what is being said about your brand, your competitors and what’s hot that you have authority and permission to tap into.
Once you understand this you can create a rolling content strategy to help you start conversations, know where to have them and what content will push the right buttons.
As things evolve so quickly online, constant evaluation and monitoring is required. Monitor changes in perception as well more obvious metrics like traffic, downloads and of course attributable sales. Amend what isn’t working and clean up. Irrelevant and out of date content is as bad as none at all.
Pushing content online encourages brand exposure and growth. With the right idea and intense monitoring, content can become one of the main factors to maintaining loyalty with your online consumers.
—Tim