If your main strategy is to compete on price, you’ll struggle to maintain consistent growth. This approach forces your margins to get thinner over time and makes it easier for competitors to undercut your offers. What you really want to do is create brand authority in your industry.
Companies that establish credibility and expertise become the trusted choice in their industry. Content marketing plays a central role in building that authority. Publishing helpful information that solves problems positions your brand as an expert and generates loyal customers.
If you’ve been experimenting with content marketing and aren’t sure what’s next, here’s how to start building authority in your market.
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Align your content with business objectives
A successful content marketing strategy needs to align with your business goals. Rather than producing random blog posts, structure your content around answering questions potential customers typically ask during the buying process. This will ensure all the content you produce will support your efforts to build authority while generating qualified leads.
If this seems out of your wheelhouse, you probably just need a strong leader to guide the process. For a fraction of the cost of an in-house executive, you can hire an interim Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to help align your messaging and distribution strategies to your overall marketing objectives. Executive-level oversight will guide your entire content marketing process to ensure it stays on track with your goal of building authority.
Focus on trust, not just visibility
When your goal is to build authority, it’s not enough to post regularly and hope for the best. Visibility is nice but it doesn’t build trust. People trust brands that publish in-depth content that helps them solve real problems. Educational articles, guides, and tutorials are all ways you can demonstrate your expertise in your market.
Although it’s important to position yourself as an expert, you also want to be transparent about industry challenges and limitations. Authenticity goes a long way in building trust and authority. Businesses that acknowledge limitations and complexities are viewed as more credible than those that only publish promotional content.
Pinpoint your market’s burning questions and concerns
Your ability to produce top-quality content begins with understanding what keeps your market up at night and what they really want. Instead of creating content based on what you want to talk about, you need to create content that aligns with what your market wants to learn. Businesses that build the most authority publish content that answers the questions their market is already searching for.
Before writing your next piece of content, review your sales conversations, support tickets, and online industry forums to curate a list of topics your potential customers care about. This will provide you with valuable insights into what type of content you should be producing.
Focus on quality, not quantity or frequency
Everyone has an opinion about how frequently you should post content, but it’s not actually the frequency or quantity of posts that matter. Content marketing isn’t a numbers game. It’s a long-term strategy for building value. And you can provide that value with just a handful of posts.
Having 10 strong pieces of content that rank in the search engines and generate leads is far better than having 100 mediocre blog posts that rarely rank or convert.
Take the time to create in-depth articles that thoroughly explain your topic and position you as an expert. It takes longer to create this type of content compared to a surface-level summary, but you’ll get more leads this way. Some of the most valuable content you can create will consist of guides and tutorials that remain evergreen in your industry. This content can be regularly updated as needed without disturbing its effectiveness.
Repurpose your content
Creating high-quality content takes a lot of time and energy, and that’s why it’s smart to repurpose your content whenever possible. For example, you can take an article and turn it into a short video for YouTube and post highlights to social media channels. One article could provide Facebook content for an entire week.
If your ideas are a bit complex, turn the information into charts or infographics that people will want to share. You can also convert articles into audio for people who prefer listening over reading.
Authority is a competitive advantage
Competing on price is a losing strategy. When you focus on building authority, you gain a competitive advantage that bypasses price concerns and makes you the go-to brand in your market. Many people are willing to pay more for quality products and services, and when you become a trusted brand, they’ll buy from you even when your prices are higher than the competition.
