With content marketing, the online marketing moves away from the traditional promotional communication. Instead, the communicated content in content marketing is created in such a way that  it offers an added value to the user. The purposes of content marketing are manifold. Especially for brand manufacturers, content marketing proves useful to generate brand awareness. We provide tips on how facebook can help you to create awareness for your brand.
Brand awareness is an essential marketing goal for brand manufacturers. In the best case scenario, the user does not only know the brand, but it is top-of-mind, i.e. your brand comes to mind first for the corresponding product group. Content marketing on facebook is especially suited to reach this goal. The large coverage, which can be reached via the viral distribution within the network, allows a rapid increase in awareness. Interesting content invites users to engage with the brand and creates often more awareness.
The repeated statement that content in content marketing needs to be entertaining and informative in order to offer an added value and encourage sharing should have reached everyone by now and should be natural. Therefore, this article will deal less with the creation of content but more with the potential, facebook offers for distribution.

Use Categories for Structuring

Contents in facebook content marketing are usually posted via the company profile timeline. This enables contacts to view the new contents in real-time in their news. However, for users, who deliberately look for contents on the company profile, the timeline is not always as clear. Facebook offers the option to display content in your own categories – and not only in images, which are automatically imported in the category “photos”. The facebook API allows you to embed almost any type of content in the categories. Although, it is not possible to structure content as facebook postings, you can, for example, integrate websites, where the content is archived.

Use Facebook Ads

Facebook ads do not always need to appear promotional, but they can also contain (non-promotional) content or link to it. In the interaction between the precise targeting options, which facebook offers advertisers, facebook ads make an ideal tool to reach users, who belong to the target group but are not contacts of your company or brand profile. Facebook ads can also be booked as page post ads, which are displayed directly in the news stream of the user.

Integrate User-generated Content

Content for facebook does not necessarily need to come from yourself. Use the creativity of your facebook contacts. Through competitions or incentives, you can motivate your contacts to create (company or brand-related) content for you. In the best case scenario, you may even have convincing brand ambassadors, who are so loyal to your brand, that you don’t need any additional incentives. These brand ambassadors may create the content autonomously and independently from your brand presence on facebook. The only thing, you need to do is enable the brand ambassadors to publish content about your brand presence.
Prior to using user-generated content, you must determine how to control the publishing of the content. If you allow users to post content on your brand profile without your approval, you must also accept that users may post inferior or even damaging content. However, if all content must undergo quality assurance prior to publishing, you might upset users, whose content you reject. No matter, which procedure you favour, you should clearly communicate users your publication policy and reasons for this.

Link Different Channels

Content marketing is not an autonomous marketing discipline for individual communication channels. Thus, integrate your content marketing on facebook with other tools. In particular, dialogue marketing tools, such as email marketing and other social media platforms are recommended. For example, integrate Twitter as a category on our facebook profile. Start photo competitions on Instagram or Pinterest and feature them on facebook. Use content from email marketing on facebook and vice versa.

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