Using Content Marketing to Build Brand Stewardship and Authority

The power of strategic branding is long-established in the business world. So is the all-important relationship between brand strategy and content strategy. But more is needed to ensure that your content marketing efforts are on-brand. Modern marketers are increasingly embracing the notion of brand stewardship, which melds brand and content strategy into a cohesive and mutually beneficial whole.

Understanding Brand Stewardship

By definition, a steward is entrusted to care for something or someone in need of trustworthy guidance. Similarly, brand stewardship is a responsibility that involves managing brand alignment across all elements of an organization’s marketing and forward-facing communications. You took a great deal of care when developing your brand identity. Now, make the most of this care by entrusting your brand to a comprehensive stewardship plan. Among other things, brand stewardship means maintaining a cultivated consistency across all facets of brand strategy, messaging, compliance and consumer experience.

The Impact of Content Marketing on Brand Authority

Brand authority is the degree to which your brand elicits trust and your consumers view your brand as credible. When governed by effective brand stewardship, quality content marketing can position your organization as a subject matter expert and build brand authority. Take, for example, Lucid Advertising’s content marketing campaign for the Coyle Institute. This women’s health clinic was struggling to bring in new patients before Lucid redesigned its website with a focus on consumer-directed brand authority and SEO (search engine optimization)-friendly content. These efforts resulted in an 800% increase in total patient appointments and a new patient conversion rate of 33%.

Elements of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Publishing dozens of social media and blog posts a day can certainly mean good things for your marketing efforts. But don’t make the mistake of valuing quantity over quality when it comes to marketing content. By devoting resources toward making exceptional content, you can both speak more directly to your target audience and leverage the power of SEO to keep your organization at the top of relevant Google searches. A good marketing agency can tailor content to fit your organization’s brand image, underlying values, overarching goals and audience expectations.

Content Types That Boost Brand Authority

An organization can greatly enhance its brand authority by regularly publishing high-quality social media content, blog posts, online articles that showcase your organization’s expertise in one or more areas. Other types of content that have been proven to increase brand authority include unique case studies/whitepapers that detail solutions to common industry problems and compelling videos/infographics that make complex information easier to digest and understand.  

Measuring the Success of Content Marketing Efforts

To ensure that you are getting a satisfactory ROI (return on investment) for your marketing dollar, you must be able to track results using quantifiable KPIs (key performance indicators) for brand authority. Fortunately, digital KPIs are incredibly easy to record and measure. Some of the best KPIs to assess overall marketing authority include branded impressions (the number of times your brand appears on a user’s screen), branded searches (the number of times a user searches for your brand online) and social reach (the total number of people you are reaching on social media). To track engagement and influence online, marketing professionals use tools and platforms that range from Google Analytics to HubSpot CRM.

Integrating Content Marketing with Other Branding Efforts

While marketing professionals promote products and/or services, PR (public relations) professionals promote an entire organization. But when these two distinct professions work well together, the brand authority prospects are virtually limitless. By incorporating third-party endorsements and other common PR techniques into your branding efforts, you can better position your organization as an authoritative resource. Beyond optimizing your website content, a good content marketing agency will use social media to strategically amplify your outreach.

Ongoing Trends in Content Marketing for Brand Authority

When it comes to enhancing brand authority, the power of personalized UX cannot be overestimated. Looking to the future, content marketers are striving to deliver UX that resonates with target consumers in highly direct and/or intimate ways. Other rapidly evolving trends in content marketing include the increased use of AI automation and the deployment of more interactive content.

Improve Brand Stewardship with Content Marketing and More

At Lucid Advertising, we believe in crafting content marketing messages that are designed to guide and further brand stewardship in exceptional ways. For organizations that want to stand out from their competitors, the power of uniquely compelling messaging cannot be overestimated.

Lucid’s artful and tactical content writing services are designed to boost your conspicuous visibility in today’s oversaturated media landscape. Contact Lucid Advertising today for more information about brand stewardship in content marketing.