How Authentic Content Can Help You Create Lasting Customer Relationships

by Dave Brown Writer

In the digital age, content marketing is everything. Everyone – individuals and brands alike – are now moving into the online space, where a content stream is what you need to keep yourself relevant and at the top of your followers’ newsfeeds.

But just spewing out content isn’t the answer. Content marketing has a clear goal: to create authentic content that will not just promote your brand but also help you build a long-term relationship with your customers that is focused on trust and engagement.

When done right, content marketing can build your brand reputation and make it more visible to consumers. Most brands nowadays still haven’t quite figured out how to use content marketing to engage with their customers. However, by having a good strategy that supports your business and creating good, authentic, and relevant content, you can build a solid relationship with your customers.

The Audience

For any story, the audience comes first. Whether it’s a television show, a book, or an article talking about a product, what matters most is what the audience wants and how they will perceive a message.

Think about all the content out there that results in nothing – Facebook posts with no likes or comments, Youtube videos with barely any views, tweets with no likes or retweets. All of these come from one thing: businesses failing to understand their customers. To build a relationship with customers, brands have to understand their role in the customer’s lives – for all types of marketing but specifically that which is content-driven.

All your content is meant to be consumed by a customer, so producing content that doesn’t appeal to your customers is pointless. But customers also don’t want to have anything and everything thrown at them – providing relevant and authentic content is the key here.

The Quality

In the past, SEO was focused on one keyword alone, which meant that to create content would include using the same word over and over to be able to hit the top in the searches. This not only ignored the entire concept of semantics, where context and meaning would take preference, but also had the side effect of making all the content produced draggy and dull, and using the same words over and over would make them feel repetitive and monotonous.

Even search engines have now become a lot smarter than they used to be, and focus more on semantics than they did in the past. This means that now you can make your content more meaningful by writing naturally and be found in searches – which means you have people who’d be engaging in said content, and if it’s written well enough, then you might even be successful in your attempt at content marketing.

But quality content doesn’t mean just having one article or a blog posted every blue moon. Erratic posting means that you’re not actually concerned about engaging with your customers. Blog and article writing should be included in your list of weekly, monthly, and yearly marketing activities. If you’re only making content when you have time, it’s clear that this takes a backseat in your priorities.

Making high-quality content all the time, and delivering it steadily to make sure that your customers stay engaged and interested is what will help you establish and sustain your relationships with them. Otherwise, some other brand will pop in and steal their attention away and leave you behind in the dust.

Visuals

The fact is that consumer attention spans are growing shorter and shorter. Scrolling idly through feeds and timelines means that people can decide at a glance if they are interested in a piece of content or not.

Usually, the best way to catch customers’ attention is through visuals and images. Images are much easier to process than a blog post, so using images in your content efforts is crucial, but visual is not just limited to images and videos. Visuals also include the effort you make in making sure your non-visual (text) content is also aesthetically and visually appealing enough for people to read it. Using colours and fonts that look pleasant and are easy to read, and preferably having images alongside to illustrate the point being made will help your content become more engaging.

The likelihood is high that if a customer doesn’t like the look of your content, they won’t come back. Even if they don’t engage with a specific piece of content, you want them to be able to return and engage with something else. To do that, you need to make sure your space is easy to read and navigate through, and that it looks nice.

Visuals aren’t just there to make your content attractive; they also convey messages better and explain your point faster. By using the right visual elements, you can create a connection with your audience that gets stronger as you keep using more and more engaging content.

Not to mention original visual content is also going to result in familiarity – think of the typical WikiHow articles and how the images have a distinct style – which leads to more engagement and loyalty on the part of the audience.

Think Long-Term

Many brands think that engaging with a customer is a short-term process and that the best way to establish yourself is to make viral content. This is far from the truth. Gaining traction in social media can be great, but social media trends die fast, and rarely influences long-term behaviour. Would you buy from a brand known for being a meme, or for its products? The latter, right?

Viral content may be good for publicity and visibility, but besides those, you also need to make content that is relevant to your brand and its audience at the same time to provide value to your customers and deliver your message.

Creating authentic content is tricky, especially when you make an effort to keep it high-quality and consistent, with just the right number of visuals. But if you go at it the right way, you can establish a good, long-term relationship with your customers.