Brand Perception
How to Improve Brand Perception with Content Marketing
As a brand, it’s one thing to try and reach more customers and another to leave them with a positive impression. When it comes to marketing, brand awareness and brand perception are two very different concepts.
While building brand awareness means making efforts to get more people to know the brand exists, brand perception focuses on building deeper relationships with people. Naturally, both will benefit from various branding and marketing strategies.
In this article, we’ll discuss brand perception and how some marketing efforts that focus on content creation can help nurture it. Content is a great tool to make people learn more about your brand while enhancing your brand image and boosting trust and loyalty.
We’ll concentrate on eight different tactics that you can use to employ content marketing to nurture the perception of your brand. But first, let’s dwell on the topic of brand perception a little longer.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- What Is Brand Perception?
- Show That You Care About the Individual
- Show That Your Brand Should Be Taken Seriously
- Show an Appropriate Amount of Objectivity
- Show That You Respect Your Readers’ Time and Attention
- Show That Your Company Has a Relatable Face
- Prove How You’ve Made a Measurable Difference for Your Customers
- Show That You Speak With Authority
- Show That You Create Knowledge
- Final Thoughts
What Is Brand Perception?
Brand perception is a multi-faceted sum of the feelings everyone has about your brand. It’s an indicator of what consumers who are already aware of your brand think about your:
- Products or services
- Customer service
- Visual presence
- The impact you have on society and the environment
- Place among your competition
- Other similar sentiments that make a difference in customers’ lives
People’s perception of your brand is closely tied to the emotional imprint you have on those that already know you. Every interaction they have with your brand is influenced by your brand perception.
While it’s not something you can control, brand perception can be cultivated as you grow your business. It usually takes years, if not decades, to build a positive perception of your brand in the markets where you operate. Even then, a minor misstep can leave a stain on what you’ve worked for and cause people to develop a negative sentiment toward you, even if it’s to a certain degree.
To learn best what the customers’ perception of your brand is, you can start by analyzing their opinions and habits. Conduct surveys, read their reviews, and analyze their shopping patterns. You can even hire a specialist to evaluate your progress and identify which areas you need to improve in.
Below, you can learn about different ways of using content marketing to make your brand evoke strong, positive feelings among your target groups.
Show That You Care About the Individual
People won’t care about your brand or products if you don’t show that you care about their needs. Addressing their concerns through your website’s content is an excellent way to show that you’re truly dedicated to helping people solve certain pain points.
To achieve this, always keep in mind that customers view every brand from the aspect of its functionality and convenience. They care more about what your products will do to solve their problems and how fast, and not much about how it’s going to make it happen.
That’s why it’s crucial to always place your qualities front and center. Create content to describe the benefits your clients will get if they decide to work with you. That way, you’ll steadily improve their perception of your brand.
You can also create personalized content, which is a great way to boost brand perception. Giving every visitor something which will be of personal use is fantastic for showing you’re a serious player who brings value to the table.
Transparent Labs, a supplier in the sports and nutritional supplements space, created a Macro Calculator – a free tool that helps their visitors pick the best nutritional supplements for them according to their details.
This tactic gives the impression that their brand has gone through the trouble of building something complex purely because it’s going to give their readers something more personalized. That way, they show that they don’t view their reader simply as a nameless generic entity but as a real person with unique needs.
Show That Your Brand Should Be Taken Seriously
The brands that regularly make people form associations with them throughout their daily lives enjoy the best brand perception. That cannot be achieved if you don’t prove that your brand is a serious one.
One way to do that is to show consistency throughout all of your online channels. Whether it’s your website, social media, or even guest content or interviews with other outlets, your behavior always needs to “stick.”
Positive brand perception comes when your brand identity and messaging revolve around factual, insightful statements. Consumers are far beyond the tired sales talk, and they want honest and sophisticated marketers.
As soon as you put yourself out there as a respectable business, people’s perception of your brand will start to grow. To do it through your content, you can begin producing posts and articles that will resonate with intellectual control.
It’s super easy to simply create a basic listicle, but if you’re serious about brand perception, you’ll take a topic and inject it with incredible insight, research, and value. This is especially important in certain sectors like finance and health.
As an example, let’s take a look at January and their What Are The Best Snacks For Diabetics? blog post. It could so easily have been a 900-word post that’s simply a list of snacks with pics. But no, what this brand did was include a huge amount of actual, referenceable, scientific information to back up what they said to publish a 3,000+ word post.
Show an Appropriate Amount of Objectivity
People read content because they want questions answered. They want to do research. As they move further down the marketing funnel, they want research that helps them make a decision on what product to buy.
You can use this consumer practice by showing objectivity in your content. Publish posts that don’t seem like they only pander to selling a product or a service but rather provide valuable information and resources to the readers. That way, the general perception of your brand will be that you genuinely care and want to help.
Certain brands publish posts that cater to customers who research which product best fits their needs. So, instead of simply using these posts for a hard (and potentially awkward) sell, they also include several other competing products in the list. While doing so, they usually masterfully present their own product in a better light so that the reader is more inclined to opt for it.
Aura does this really well with their Best Amazon Repricer tool to Increase Profits post. They list their product beside two other similar products of competing brands. While promoting their product by placing it on the first spot and providing more information about it, they’re still buying a huge amount of credibility with people who want to feel trust by including other viable options.
Show That You Respect Your Readers’ Time and Attention
We’re sure that your amazing products offer a ton of functionalities and are complex in nature. However, explaining all of them in detail to your readers who only want quick, simple solutions won’t suit their curiosity very well.
Instead of elaborating on how awesome your products are with walls of text, use visual content to deliver their benefits in a plain, straightforward way. Convey your points by using images, videos, infographics, diagrams, and illustrations. This will also help make the reading experience generally more pleasant and accessible.
Readability makes a lot of sense when you want customers to perceive you as a brand that respects their time and makes an effort to speak using their language.
To get a better idea of how this works, we’ll analyze this Somnifix post – 5 Best Military Sleep Hacks. By adding short paragraphs in between the many images, videos, diagrams, and visual instructions, they demonstrate how to solve a problem in a few quick, easy steps.
In line with our previous point about showing objectivity, Somnifix does that in this post by providing all of the useful information and hinting at their product in a subtle way at the very end of the post.
Show That Your Company Has a Relatable Face
People are always prone to flock to the companies that seem most down-to-earth and genuinely human. Any business that gives off a snobbish corporate vibe rarely makes customers ecstatic to work with.
So, it’s no wonder that the brands that enjoy a perception of being relatable and friendly experience high conversion rates. Being a cold cash register that only collects money from customers is what people usually want to avoid.
In that spirit, to build solid brand perception using content marketing, you can start by showing your human side. Make it known that your team is comprised of people that are just like your customers.
Some steps you can take here include:
- Showcasing your team on your website in a sincere, laid-back setting. Presenting your employees while they use the products or services that you offer or when they deal with the problems your customers face is much more effective than showing stock images of random models with put-on smiles.
- Speaking the language of your customers. Adding a familial voice rather than overwhelming your readers with a puffed-up tone makes it clear that your company takes care of its clients.
- Invest in delivering exquisite customer service. Ensure that your customer care department is easily accessible and highly efficient. This is a great way to spike your brand loyalty levels.
Take a look at the following video to see how the staff at Zappos gets to enjoy the winter holidays. Zappos has an entire YouTube channel dedicated to showing how their teams love to have fun just like everyone else. That’s very effective for scoring high on the brand perception scale.
Prove How You’ve Made a Measurable Difference for Your Customers
People love hearing successful customer stories about the brands they are considering buying from. The more proof they have that your products/services are of great quality and work exactly as intended, the better their perception of your brand will be.
This is one of the most effective tactics you can employ to increase trust and loyalty for your brand. It is also one of the easiest. All you have to do is share those success stories on your website and across your social media pages.
To convert visitors into loyal customers, you can use any of the following tactics for showcasing social proof:
- Feature successful customer stories that list the benefits of your products/services
- explain your solutions
- Display case studies of high-profile clients that you’ve helped fix a major problem
- Showcase short, eye-catching product reviews
- Add customer testimonials that praise your customer service
For instance, Zendesk posted this elaborate customer story about how they helped a high-profile client boost their regional sales for 500%. The piece explains all of the details of the process so readers are well aware of how their problem can be solved.
Show That You Speak With Authority
Becoming a trusted voice in your industry is another aspect of brand perception you can work on. To be perceived as an industry leader in your particular niche takes a lot of time and hard work, but if you achieve that level of respect from your target audiences, they’ll always turn to you in times of need.
When speaking with authority, your content needs to be well-researched and provide measurable evidence that your solutions work. You can seek help from experts in your field to vouch for you or cite your sources while ensuring they are 100% proven and trustworthy.
Making abstract, vague promises that you cannot validate and verify doesn’t look good if you want to leave an impression of a high-value brand.
Some of the best practices when looking to become an authoritative brand include:
- Linking to trusted external sources
- Including numbers and percentages while citing scientific studies
- Ensuring that your content is well-researched and crafted with exceptional care
- Collaborating with industry experts that can speak for your brand
- Providing tons of details and data to satisfy every question your readers may have
Here, we have Branch, a brand that operates in the office furniture space. They published the ultimate guide to ergonomics – What is Ergonomics, and Why Does it Matter? In it, they speak with confidence while backing their claims with scientific data and linking to university studies. That way, they come off as highly trustworthy to anyone interested in sprucing up their office space.
Show That You Create Knowledge
You can also build your brand perception by becoming a researcher yourself. That can even bring next-level admiration and loyalty. There’s a reason why high-profile enterprises such as Porsche are almost never regarded with skepticism.
Trust can also come from being seen as a thought leader. Leveraging that kind of power to boost the perception of your brand translates to high conversion rates.
By conducting research and creating new knowledge, you get a priceless opportunity to get referenced by other brands on their blogs, publications, or social media channels.
Analyzing your sales and revenue, conducting surveys and interviews, processing the gathered data, and presenting it as well-rounded research is a smart move to join the industry captains club.
Wyzowl, a video production company, has a perfect opportunity to leverage this marketing aspect. Each year, they conduct a massive survey on digital video usage and publish the results in their visually-stunning Video Marketing Statistics report.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing is an excellent way to establish positive brand perception over time. There are many well-known brands that utilize content marketing campaigns to reach that goal. However, that’s only one of the ways you can do this. There are other tactics that you need to work on and show people that you’re there for them and their communities.
Providing quality products and services and making a real difference in people’s lives is the best way to earn their trust and loyalty. Hopefully, our eight tips on how to improve brand perception with content marketing can be a good start for your long journey ahead.
Travis Jamison
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