How to Build Brand Authority With Content Marketing?

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With a colossal amount of information at their fingertips, 87% of buyers begin their search online. A strong authority builds trust, so they choose your brand over competitors. 

Creative content marketing strategies have led brands like Ahrefs and Semrush to their present status. It includes blogging, video marketing, and personal branding, and you can do the same by following the guide below. 

7-Step Checklist to Build a Rock-Solid Brand Authority with Content Marketing 

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1. Be Consistent With Your Messaging 

Speaking about everything will never establish your authority. The Internet is an ocean of information, and you have to pick a topic and build expertise in it. 

Stay consistent with what your brand stands for and make visuals aligned with it. Your tone, style, and colors must all be specific to your brand. 

How to stay consistent with messaging?

• Create Branding Strategy: A branding strategy or guidebook is a blueprint for your marketing team to follow while creating content and campaigns. It constitutes brand colors, logo, fonts, and image style—for instance, HubSpot sports bright orange colors throughout its website and templates, and Ahrefs uses blue as its brand color. 

• Pick a Tone: The tonality of your content is crucial for authority. Do you want to sound formal or funky? It’s up to you. For instance, Ahrefs uses a conversational tone with up-to-date slang words, while Harvard Business Review sticks to a semi-professional tone. 

2. Create Sharable Data Reports Or Surveys 

People love data. Robust statistics prove your content to be well-researched. Survey Monkey surveyed 1054 US-based adults, and 74% found data-backed content “more trustworthy”. 

Data and surveys also earn backlinks, and other sites need them to prove a point. Create infographics to increase shareability. 

The screenshot below shows surveys done in a particular profession that pulls the audience to take surveys before and engages them after publication. 

Tools to create surveys:

• Survey Monkey Create easy surveys and gather feedback via emails, social media, or mobile chat. It provides automated charts and summaries to analyze the acquired data in a snap. The subscription starts from a free plan and goes up to a $780 per year platinum plan.
• Google Forms: Collect information through a FREE personalized form where people can provide their elongated opinions or answers. Add multiple choice wherever necessary. Share links via direct links, emails, or social media. 
• Survey Planet: You get unlimited surveys, questions, and respondents in the free version but can import data from only the pro version ($15/month) to excel. 

3. Use In-House Experts

Leveraging in-house experts (and their brand) contributes to brand authority. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) also serve as the face of the brand - if you don’t already have one - as people relate to other people rather than a company.

Take this blog, for example: “7 Reasons Scale-Ups Earn more Investments, According to HubSpot’s Founder”. HubSpot leverages the authority of the founder by mentioning him in the title.

How to Leverage your In-House Experts?

• Social Media Help Groups: Helping your target audience is the key to growing brand authority. Let your in-house experts handle designated groups where they solve the queries of the participants. 
• Webinars by Employees: Webinars are pretty popular in marketing as people tune in to learn from experts. A face from your company teaching about a concept or product builds your authority as a brand. And sometimes, inviting well-known guests in the niche will also increase content engagement. 

• Create Thought-Leadership Blogs: Market leaders like HubSpot and Backlinko collaborate with in-house experts to write thought leadership blogs. With a famous name attached to them, the blogs work very well. 

4. Build Social Proof 

Social proof is the chief contributor to your brand authority, and people need proof that a product works before they swipe their cards. Without proof, all advertising is fluff. 

Content serves as an agent that triggers emotions and builds connections, but social proof serves as logic. Combine both to ace the marketing game and drive sales. 

How to Build a Strong Social Proof for Your Brand?

• Create Case Studies: Case studies help you showcase your product in action. Display numbers in the form of graphs and infographics. For instance: how many people bought from you? How much money have your customers saved? This is one of the reasons why Backlinko creates a lot of Case Studies to market its content. 

• Showcase reviews and Testimonials: Wear testimonials as a badge of honor. Paste them into your website’s landing pages. Testimonials work best in a contact form, a sales page, an about us page, order form. 
• Incentivize Reviews: Adding incentives like bonus points encourages customers to review a product. On top of Yelp, use Facebook - the most significant source of positive reviews. Whenever customers comment on your Facebook page, it displays on their friends’ feed, giving you more exposure. 

5. Genuinely Help Your Audience

Brand authority thrives upon the number of happy customers. The more customers or prospects your help, the better will be your brand authority. 

How to help your target audience?

• Engagement: Engage with your target audience via DMs and comments on social media. Create giveaways and help groups to solve specific problems. 
• Write Detailed Blogs to Solve a Query: Long-form blogs serve as educational material for your target audience. Include original research and statistics to increase authority. The long-form content gets more social shares (as shown below) and link mentions from others. 

• Create Omnichannel Experience: 9 out of 10 customers prefer multiple-choice answers. Brands like Ahrefs are acing this by creating blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, and social media content to educate the audience. 

6. Collaborate with Industry Experts and Influencers 

At the beginning of his journey, Neil Patel posted on multiple websites such as Entrepreneur and Forbes without expecting results. Then, his posts started ranking, and business owners started contacting him for work. 

They trusted him due to his published content. Collaborating with high authority sites or even influencers in your niche works wonders for your business.

How to Collaborate?

• Guest Posting: Guest posting is the go-to strategy for many marketers. Around 60% of them write around five guest posts per month. Select a relevant topic and pair it with engaging content to benefit from guest blogging. 

Many sites accept guest posts that you can find by entering certain keywords as an example in the search engine. 

• Influencer Marketing: In their recent survey, Influencer marketing hub found that 91% of marketers speak in favor of influencer marketing. They say it’s “an effective marketing strategy”. Leverage the virtual word of mouth and increase reach with influencer marketing. 
• Podcasts and Interviews: Interviews in podcasts are a great collaboration tool. 90% of people who listen to podcasts don’t mind ads and consider them effective. 

7. Create More Educational Content 

Educational content reflects your authority as a brand. Creating educational content for free in blogs, social media posts, and YouTube videos establishes your expertise. Educational content answers the audience’s questions and shapes a useful website. 

Tips for Creating More Educational Content

• Create Content Pillars: Content pillars are long-form posts that constitute A to Z information around a topic. A pillar is an extensive piece of content that you can repurpose in bits and pieces on social media and shorter blog posts. 
• Write for Search Intent: Research what your target customers are searching for. Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest to find top searches in your niche. 

Here’s an example of the keywords and search volume in these tools. 

Target “how to” keywords for educational content. 

Brand Authority & Content Marketing - FAQs

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1. How To Build Brand Authority With Content Marketing?

You can build brand authority by following these simple tips:

• Be consistent with your messaging
• Create more Educational Content
• Collaborate with Industry Experts and Influencers 
• Build social proof 
• Genuinely Help your audience
• Use in-house experts
• Be consistent with your messaging 

2. What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing means creating and distributing valuable content to attract your target audience organically. It also helps to build brand image and authority. 

3. How To Get Started With Content Marketing?

Get started with content marketing in 4 easy steps:

• Identify your target audience and their pain points 
• Plan your content formats such as blogs, videos, etc.
• Create and Publish Content 
• Distribute it across various channels

Key Takeaways

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• Be consistent with your messaging as a brand. 
• Decide color palettes and tonality so your target audience can recognize your content instantly. 
• Write educational content while keeping the search intent in mind. 
• Leverage the knowledge of in-house experts and collaborate with them on blogs and webinars. 
• Build social proof with case studies, testimonials, and reviews. 
• Create data reports and surveys and distribute them in the form of infographics to increase shareability.