Content is a great way for businesses to brand themselves, advertise products and services, establish thought leadership and expertise, and aid search engine optimization.

Branded content is not a new concept, but it has gained some steam during the past year. With people consuming more information than ever, marketers have found a way to weave their brands into larger pools of useful and valuable content.

Doug Kessler shared a rant on SlideShare called “Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge.” He says it’s a plea to all marketers to start focusing on one thing: Creating a great content brand strong enough to survive the coming deluge.

He expanded on these principles in an article on MarketingProfs.

Understand Your Prospect’s World

Be the buyer. “Everything starts with the buyer’s challenges, needs, prejudices, and concerns,” says Kessler.

It takes a bit of work to know and understand your prospects world, but it will deliver a higher return.

Don’t Bluff

Write about the things where you have expertise. When you write about what you know, you provide useful, interesting content. “When you bluff, you write hollow, obvious content that may sound good, but convinces no one,” says Kessler.

He says you can mess up three ways:

• Pandering: You write about things your customers and prospects care a lot about, but you don’t have a perspective regarding those topics.
• Navel-gazing: You dig deep into your company’s expertise, but your prospects don’t care.
• Blathering: You create content that offers no expertise.

When you write about what you know, your content is more likely to bewidely read and shared.

Have a Content Strategy

A content strategy needs to support social media, search engine marketing, branding, and positioning.  It should include who you want to reach, what you need them to do, what content you’ll create, how you’ll share it, and how you’ll measure success.

Build Efficient Content Machines

Kessler says to, “Build efficient content machines that can keep the frequency up without sacrificing quality.”

Content marketing is not just blogging. It’s the act of distributing valuable content whether it be video, text, or audio, to prospects with the goal of converting to a lead, then a customer.

Don’t Be Lazy

Put the time in to make each piece of content great. Share drafts with people you trust and get their opinion, edit, lather, rinse and repeat.

Content marketing is used to engage buyers with compelling content to educate, inform, entertain, and guide them along their buying journey. It creates trust, credibility, and authority. Your ultimate goal is to persuade them to select your solution over the competitors.

What other tips would you add?

Image: mandiberg via Flickr, CC 2.0