Every marketer knows the importance of establishing brand authority. Brand authority allows your business to establish credibility among the people who matter the most: clients and potential clients. This article should give you a better understanding of brand authority and how a creative team can help you achieve this essential marketing element.
How Brand Authority Works
Brand authority is how your customers, your target audience, and the public as a whole perceive your level of knowledge about the space you operate in. You can equate brand authority to credibility, and you should test every aspect of your marketing campaign against this concept. Does the campaign improve your brand authority? If it doesn’t, is the campaign hurting your reputation as an industry expert? If a campaign decreases your brand authority, it probably isn’t worth whatever short-term gains you can garner from it. Brand authority may be hard-earned, but regaining brand authority can be incredibly difficult.
The Benefits of Brand Authority
From a marketing standpoint, enhancing your business’s brand authority has multiple benefits:
- Customers will gain trust in your brand, and that goodwill transfers to the goods or services you’re selling.
- Web browsers will specifically go to your site for information instead of relying on search engine results to find the answer to their questions.
- Google and other search engines will prioritize your site in organic searches as your business name appears in a greater number of queries.
- Customers and non-customers will associate your brand with the product or service you sell.
- As your reputation improves, customers will gain confidence in your ability to deliver what they’re looking for, and potential customers won’t hesitate about converting.
Clearly, brand authority has value for your business. But how do you improve it?
Brand Authority and Creative
The creative mission is to find unique marketing solutions for businesses operating in a competitive space. Increasing brand authority is key to this goal. In order to successfully increase brand authority, it’s essential to identify any factors that may be hurting the company’s ability to improve its credibility and to invent ways to nullify those obstacles. Additionally, a creative team must not only enhance the credibility of the business’s site, social media, email campaigns, etc. but also develop methods to get the marketplace to acknowledge the renewed stature of the business. The following are some of the tools that creative teams use to boost brand authority for their clients:
Onsite Content
All existing content should be informative, well-written, and factually correct. Any internal or external links on the page must work. Images and videos should be tied to the content. Keyword usage needs to be appropriate for the subject matter and not interrupt the flow of the text. The content should make any user who intentionally goes to your page feel that they’ve had their questions answered with reliable information.
Social Media
Companies should have designated social media accounts that only focus on business-related matters. Social media posts can draw new viewers to a page. If a web browser is interested in what you’re posting, and those posts are focused on topics related to your business, there’s a good chance that they may eventually convert.
Engage Your Users
Consumers like to be involved in shaping the products and services they use. With this in mind, there are several ways to create interactive campaigns to enhance user involvement. For instance, polls, social engagement campaigns, and when applicable, influencer campaigns can build excitement around your brand while at the same time, improving authority. It has the added benefit of making your customer base feel more involved with the development of the company and future offerings.
Community Involvement
Creating a podcast can be a relatively inexpensive way to garner community involvement and build recognition for your brand. This forum will give you the opportunity to discuss relevant topics within your industry and will give listeners the opportunity to witness your expertise. But don’t limit yourself to podcasts. Creating a blog or publishing articles in industry periodicals can also bolster your brand authority. Additionally, blogs and articles are an ideal forum to link back to your webpage. These backlinks let both readers and search engines know that you curate an authoritative site.
Creating brand authority is an ongoing process. Even the most authoritative web pages must continue to build authority to stay relevant. This is why most businesses choose to work with outside marketing firms. If you are interested in learning more about the creative approach to increasing brand authority, contact Lamark Media today and speak to a representative.