Why Authentic Content Marketing Matters And How To Use It
Don’t hide behind a mask of secrecy and intrigue when speaking to your audience. Authentic content marketing is the only way your audience will trust you.
Hi Trish Davies here again and today I want to talk about authenticity and content marketing. Specifically, I want to focus on creating a hybrid authentic content marketing strategy.
The world is savvy and can see an unauthentic person from a mile away. Over the last 20 odd years they have been subjected to hype, false promises and lies and won’t stand for it anymore.
Business owners have tried to fake it until they make it whatever industry or niche they are in. Those days are gone and to be fair never had any credence yet was pursued.
Authenticity in your marketing is the way forward to position your brand as a leading voice in your industry. How you do that is through authentic content marketing, through personalised and powerful content.
Authentic content marketing is the most effective way to market your products and services. It is one of the best attraction marketing strategies you can use to create awareness and engage with your audience.
Obviously you must market and advertise your products and services. As a I said earlier your audience is more savvy and they don’t fall for all the hype. In many respects they become blind to it because they have seen it all before.
You must strive to incorporate honesty within your marketing message. Honesty is a perfect word to describe authenticity and the truth will always come out on top.
The Power Of Authentic Content Marketing
Authentic content marketing equates to being fully transparent with your audience. It engages with your audience, starts a conversation and can create deep reflection in your audiences mind.
Authentic content marketing is a major component to your overall branding. What you are striving for is to create connections, create relationships with your audience. You do that through your message and when your message is authentic the connection is then made.
Your audience are always looking for solutions. Those solutions are what you provide through your products and services but that is not enough. Your audience needs the reason to entrust you to provide the solutions over your competitors.
Buying habits are in general influenced through emotion, not necessarily through logic. The emotional trigger someone needs to take action will be swayed by their belief. Believing that what they are being told is true and not some made up story.
Believe me it is far easier to state the truth that concoct a fairy tale. Your truthfulness, your authenticity will create trust in your ideal customers mind. You will become credible and someone that they want to connect with and ultimately deal with in the future.
The Principles Of Authentic Content Marketing
Creating authentic content is not hard to do. As I said previously it takes time and effort to come up with a story you think your audience wants to hear. In reality there are four principles to authentic content marketing.
- Create Engagement
- Add Value
- Focus On Quality Over Quantity
- Show Your Authenticity
Now to fulfil those principles you must focus on a number of things. You must find your voice, your tone and the language that you use. Above most things you must be consistent with that voice and not deviate into using different context.
Your audience is a small segment of society so you must know who you are talking to. Always give your unique perception on the issues your create content around as this will establish you as an authority.
Finally, you must be respectful of your audience and always remain relevant. Consistency and congruency is vital through all forms of communication you have with your audience.
The Benefits Of Authentic Content Marketing
When you are authentic in your message you will only attract specific people. That is your aim, to laser focus your message to the people who are interested. These are the people who will engage with you which is your objective.
You only need a small audience to create a profitable and sustainable business. Therefore, forget about trying to attract everyone in the world as this simply won’t happen.
I have emphasised engagement a few times already. This is only achieved if your content is readable, relatable and believable. Creating content around those three factors will add value to the people who are reading, watching and listening to it.
Authentic content marketing creates awareness of particular needs your audience has. In many respects your are planting seeds in their minds so when that need needs filling your brand will be what they recall. That then results in buying decisions being made, transactions will then go through.
Once those transactions go through it creates brand loyalty and customer retention. It is a lot easier to sell to existing customers in the future and it also leads to brand advocacy. You will get recommendations through physical and virtual word of mouth.
How To Create Authentic Content
By now I hope that you can see the power of authentic content marketing. You may be wondering on the best practices to create authentic content. This was the focus of my latest Build Your AU mastermind and it came about through myself asking a simple question.
“What is a transformation you have been through that you get excited to share with others?”
I set this question and gave my members a week to think through their transformational moment. Over the 90 minutes of our mastermind there were some truly powerful and inspirational stories.
Truthful and authentic stories that you only experience within a safe and secure environment. That is what I pride myself on within Build Your AU. It is safe, secure and a place where there is always support.
Now I simply can’t go into the transformational moments as there is not enough time. Also, I respect my members privacy outside of my mastermind. What I can say is what I told them to do with their transformational moments.
What’s Your Transformational Moment?
That is to create content around that transformation moment. To create a series of videos, blog posts, audios for podcasts around what change their experienced. In many respects it epitomises the before, during, now and future.
The before and after and the continued evolvement. This is authenticity in it’s purest form, there is no substitute, and this is what your audience wants to hear.
They want to be inspired, informed, educated and entertained through your story. You may have multiple transformational moments which is all authentic content you can share.
This authentic content is your vein of gold. It is your content bank that people always dip into and will inspire the trust the need in you to move forward in business. At the end of the day just be you, don’t pretend to be anything different. You will reap the rewards long time into the future.
So, this is your task for today. To sit down and think about the times in your life where you have experienced transformation. Then create content around those moments and publish it on many different platforms.
Your authority website, your social media channels, your podcasts. Tell your audience about your transformations through authentic content marketing. This is something I can give you more insights into through my 9 step program. That program focus on three things, authenticity, authority and audience. More details can be found here.
Helping you build your authenticity, authority and audience.
Trish Davies
Build Your AU
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