Since social media is a distribution infrastructure for content, it makes sense that better content produces better results for both personal and for business brands. A good content marketing strategy pushes problem solving or entertaining content throughout a brand’s social media infrastructure. Many individuals have their personal brand and social media channels tied into the infrastructure of the company they work for or own. This is a good thing because as the saying goes, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” It turns out, if you do a good job of blogging for the company, your personal brand will also benefit.
Here at Kuno all of our employees promote our blogs and our clients' content via social media, and we encourage our clients to do the same. However, brand awareness doesn’t just depend on distributing content via social media. It's also important to be recognized as a thought leader, or influencer, in your own right. That's why we encourage our staff and clients to post their own blogs regularly. By publishing great content, they bring attention to both themselves and the business brand they support.
Ultimately, it's your readers and subscribers who determine whether or not you have the "chops" to write a good blog post. This feedback can be reflected in web analytics, blog comments, social media posts, other people’s blogs, number of leads acquired, and ultimately revenue. The goal over time is to build a following of loyal, interested readers (or social media followers) who look forward to your next post. Better still, if you write consistently well, your blogs may get syndicated on a third party blog or feed, which multiplies your audience and drives more credit back to your content. The example below highlights the validation of good content marketing.
At Kuno Creative, we blog as a team. Our six regular contributors share the load of trying to publish at least five good posts each week. It's an important part of our content marketing strategy and produces tons of inbound traffic and leads. A few months ago our blog posts started to appear in a curated industry blog with a significant following - Business2Community.com. We were happy to have our posts distributed via this network, and we have benefited with significant additional traffic and leads to our website and blog. This week two of our contributors, Chad and John, were mentioned in a blog post as social media marketing "A-Listers", a Business 2 Community list of the top 40 blog authors in the industry.
Of course we were thrilled to get this kind of recognition, and the impact was immediate. Both of us started getting Twitter mentions and a number of new followers (about 150 each in one day). Many of these new followers were influencers in their own right, as evidenced by their Klout scores. All of this leads to an increase in brand awareness for our company as well as for ourselves. Brian Rice, the author of the above post probably had no intention of highlighting business brands in his top 40 list, but our company gained blog followers, leads and traffic as a result of this one instance of third party validation, so the benefits of producing consistently good content are far reaching.
By creating consistently helpful or entertaining content and participating in communities, you can do much more than drive traffic and leads to your business website and blog. Over time you may become recognized for the quality of your content and become syndicated on industry blogs and other well-known publications. This produces a viral effect that enhances both your personal and company brand.
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