Everywhere I go people are wearing New York Yankees' apparel. People, who probably do not even know who Derek Jeter is, are sporting "Evil Empire" gear from Brooklyn to Berlin. As a die-hard Baltimore Orioles fan, it is painful to see so much international support.
Ok, I'm a hater. The point here is that the Yankees don't need to do much blogging to sell their brand.
What The Yankees Succeed At: A Similar Goal in Content Marketing
These guys already have well-established brand awareness in their followers. For me, the Yankee symbol represents success and achieving this level of connection with customers should be the goal of any brand manager.
Big name brands do far more than blog. However, most would agree that blogging is an important aspect of brand awareness. If you Google blogs on the New York Yankees, you will receive several pages of blogs. Most of which are from outside organizations blogging about the team. Any company simply from blogging does not reach this level of outreach. There must be more to the story.
Blogging Is No Longer Enough: Why?
Currently, the blogosphere is very crowded, forcing content marketers to include a variety of marketing tools in their programs, writes Jason Myers in "When Posting Content Isn't Enough".
Blogging, quality Web copy, E-books, and whitepapers are just some of the necessities to building a more holistic strategy. Not just a variety of content, but also different places to distribute content such as Email and social media.
A good marketing strategy will have something available to potential customers at each phase of the buyer's cycle. Myers calls this "nurturing" the customer.
Let's be realistic. Most of us are not creating content for big name brands such as the Yankees.
5 Ways to Improve Brand Awareness
So, here are some tips on how to improve brand awareness from Adam Torkildson in his Business News Blog for Epoch Times:
- Refocus your logo to reflect your company better
- Segment your market efforts to target the appropriate customers
- Emphasize the unique traits of your brand
- Retarget prior customers with things such as newsletter or Email marketing
- Focus on relevant messaging and ideas that resonate
Torkildson is just skimming the surface in his summary, which he admits. Brand awareness takes a complete communications strategy and time. For over a century, the Yankees have been establishing a brand culture around the success of their team. It must be said, long before blogging was around.
From a content manager's perspective relevant content is the name of the game. Your readers want to read your stuff because it in some way makes their lives easier or provides them with something they want. If you want to generate more sales, then you need to tap into every resource possible.
How Do We Rate Success?
The success of a marketing campaign is usually graded on an increase in sales. Following this logic we can define quality copywriting as writing that increases sales. But there is more to it than that. There are so many analytical tools out there to help measure marketing success.
If you post a blog and the blog attracts a large amount of readers, I think that should be considered a marketing success because of the secondary brand awareness that this causes. But you must do more. Imagine how many readers you could gather if you not only blogged, but tweeted, and Emailed as well. This is where the nurturing portion of the buying cycle takes place.
If a reader is attracted to your website because of an engaging blog about smartphones, but they have no intention of buying a phone at that time, you still were successful. Your blog is now in their head along with your brand. That same customer could come back to your site months later and purchase a smartphone or a different product.
What attracts these readers? High-quality content that fulfills their needs.
An Example of Curated Content Success: My Great Content Roundup
For tips on creating high-quality content, you should follow my weekly posts on "The Great Content Roundup", at Express Writers. These are "curated" posts where I showcase resources and add some commentary. This blog series is a good central location for information on hot content topics in our industry. Here's what I've looked at so far:
- Content curation
- Content curation tools
- Content and SEO
- Super Bowl content
- Making your content go viral
- Why today is the best content era
- Succeeding on social media
Developing Your Blogging Strategy
In The Copywriter's Handbook, copywriting expert Robert W. Bly explains why blogging simply is not enough to sell your product or create a brand culture around it. With the massive growth in online marketing and the ability to deliver more content, blogging is just a piece of the puzzle.
Bly explains; your website is the "base of operations". This is where you prove to the world (or your niche market) that you are the best at what you do. From your landing page to your product descriptions, everything on your site will lead your potential customer to doing what you want them to do. Whether it is to buy the product, fill out a contact form, or call, your website is the heart of your content marketing operation.
So, your website is the heart, and your blog is a leg or an arm, maybe even the head, but either way, a successful online marketing strategy needs to include the whole body. Blogging is foundational to gaining rankings, but we need to include other approaches to this marketing plan.
The Yankees have hundreds of people not only wearing their gear, but also blogging, tweeting, and analyzing their brand. This is a cost effective way to get the word out about your product or service, have other people so infatuated with it (or hating on it) that they write about your product for you.
Now it is time to play ball and see how we can develop strategies to promote our brands.
Featured photo credit: jeffreycmeakins.com
The post How The Yankees Are Killin' It With Brand Awareness appeared first on Express Writers.