Why You Should Be Building Your Community With Content
Content has become an essential part of today’s internet marketing. Businesses can take advantage of this by using content to build up their brands and to create communities of people who are ready and willing to hear what their favorite brands have to say.
What kinds of content can you use to build a community?
There are two kinds of content that are vital to community building – foundational content and community-building content.
Foundational content is content that builds the foundation for your brand’s online presence and part of its reputation. This kind of content is the source of information for your brand that potential customers will use to make decisions about doing business with you. Examples of foundational content include any information on your website’s primary pages (home page, contact page, etc) as well as information that can be found on your products and services.
Community-building content is just that – it is content that serves to attract people to your brand and build a community around it. This kind of content demonstrates your brand’s knowledge of your industry / niche and can help visitors gain an understanding of and a confidence in your brand that will help them convert into customers later on. Examples of community-building content include blog posts and social media activity. Anything that can help show others what kind of business you run through knowledge, demonstrations, or other materials and information is going to help you towards building a community around your brand.
Which kind of content is more important?
Honestly, both of these kinds of content are very important, and neither is more important than the other. Imagine if you had great foundational content, but nothing to really attract visitors to your site to see it. This is the role that community-building content helps to play along with other SEO and internet marketing strategies. At the same time, a brand can have wonderful community-building content to bring in traffic and spark discussions, but if there is no foundational content on your website, people are going to arrive there and immediately return to the page they came from.
These two kinds of content work together to form a cycle of attraction, information, and conversion that helps to bring people and brands together every day!
Your next steps
Armed with this information, you are already forming a plan for bringing more of these kinds of content into your internet marketing and SEO strategies…but how can you do that?
- Start off by reviewing your existing website content – Take a look at the content that is currently on your website; does it say everything you want people to know about your company? You don’t have to have a novel on every page, but a skilled copywriter can help you to infuse every page of your website with the spirit of your brand while at the same time optimizing it for your top keywords.
- Create a brand-wide approach to your community-building content – In order to get the maximum benefit from the content you are using to build your community, make sure that each piece you publish has a consistent tone and voice that can be found within any content associated with your brand. The goal is to have someone read a piece of content and be able to immediately recognize it as yours.
Comments:
Which kind of content does your brand focus on the most, foundational or community-building content?
