How can you create on-brand content without being too promotional?

1. One way to do this is by focusing on providing value to your audience rather than solely promoting your brand. By creating content that is informative, entertaining, or educational, your audience will begin to trust and respect your brand without feeling bombarded with sales pitches. 2. Another way to create on-brand content without being too promotional is by using storytelling. People love stories. 3. Additionally, incorporating humor or personal anecdotes can add a human touch to your content, making it more relatable and memorable. It's also essential to stay true to your brand's voice and tone. Consistency in your messaging will help your audience recognize and remember your brand.

Craft on-brand, non-promotional content by mastering the art of audience insight. Understand their desires, fears, and aspirations. Tailor your content to solve their problems and ignite their passions, subtly weaving your brand values into a seamless narrative. It's about connecting, not selling.

I'd say going a step deeper, not only knowing your audience's pain points and goals but deeply understanding the processes they're currently using to get there. If you don't know who they are, what they sell, HOW they sell it, and the systems they have in place to help them get there, there is no way to truly resonate with them. It will always feel a bit generic or a little off when you write something tactical that just doesn't quite slot in with their process.

On-brand content doesn't always have to be something where you put up your brand's name. - Talk about the pain points - Talk about your ICP's desires - Talk about what's the perfect bridge for them - Talk about what's the ideal product or service for them - Talk about how your brand is serving that purpose best And that's how it seems way too easy!

It can feel counterintuitive, especially if you sit in a marketing department, but if you want to avoid sounding promotional in your content, resist the urge to put the company first. Ignore what the company wants to tell the world and focus on what the world wants to hear from you. So not "We did a thing, and here's how we did it, and here's why we're awesome." Instead, "Many people find a thing challenging. Here's why. Here's what might make it easier. Now here's a quote from our expert who will explain why we wanted to address this problem, how we went about doing it, and how we hope it will help you." It's a classic example of show rather than tell.

To define your brand voice, I recommend hosting a brand workshop that includes your key thought leaders and at least one representative from each department (to ensure buy-in for the voice you create). Make it fun. Ask your attendees to do some prework so everyone is prepared to add value. You can have interactive exercises, such as: How do your customers see your brand today? What is your brand archetype? If your brand was a celebrity, who would it be? Conversely, who would be the polar opposite of your brand? If your brand were an animal, what would it be? Dig in and ask why.

Consistency is not just about showing up but consistently showing up the same way. Defining your brand voice will guide your content creation efforts.

Have a brand voice document and keep updating constantly, making it available for everyone who communicates about the brand in any form. It should be a live document continually evolving with your brand. As mentioned, this should be fun and created by most departments involved. Take a workshop with pros; they will make your life easy and guide you through. It is a real deep dive.

Defining a brand voice is a nuanced endeavor that goes beyond mere consistency in messaging. It's about creating a persona for your brand that resonates with your audience's values and expectations. As Jeff Bezos once said, "Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room." The alignment of your brand voice and tone with your audience's emotions is vital. A brand voice chart or a style guide can serve as a compass for your content creators, ensuring the brand voice remains unswerving yet flexible to the contextual demands of various content pieces. This alignment not only amplifies the brand's message but also cultivates a deeper connection with the audience.

Your tone of voice is everything. Ask yourself, if all your logos and brand assets were removed from everything you produced, would anyone know who said it? If the answer is no, it's time to look at your tone of voice.

Some of the best ways to drive value is to create content that is applicable independent of your product. If you can give someone a process, tactic or framework that doesn't require your tool, you'll establish brand trust and topical authority. That way, when a team has a specific problem you solve for they're more like to reach out to you or respond when you reach out to them because you've been giving them value without expecting anything in return up to that point.

One of the best types of content that doesn't sound promotional but shows the authenticity of the brand is educational content, such as videos. Powerful videos are those that show how products are made. Show specific actions from your 'lab' - for example, how fruits are selected for your juices, how quality is controlled, how you optimise processes to reduce the impact on nature. This content not only educates your audience, but also builds trust by sharing what goes on behind the scenes.

Share insights, tips, and industry news that will resonate with your target audience. Use storytelling that is supported by authentic voices (authors, subject matter expert quotes and/or customer stories) and can showcase real-world applications of your products or services. By prioritizing value to the reader and relevance to their problems, you'll build trust with prospects (and search engines) while establishing your brand as a go-to resource. As a content marketer, remember to optimize relationships over transactions.

Your number one goal with every piece of content should be to give your readers something they didn't have when they started reading. The content must be engaging and conversational to get them to the end (thus ingesting all the value you've got on offer). If you've chosen your topics wisely (i.e. with your product in mind), your product can be an obvious solution without the language coming off as promotional. You need to actually believe it. If your brand voice is worth its salt, it expressly avoids salesy language, instead opting for an authoritative yet friendly voice that readers will want to read. We all recognize the sales pitch when we see it, so we put up the "No Solicitors" sign. Make sure your content is not a solicitor.

I focus on value-driven content that focuses on benefits instead of features. It’s about understanding the audience's needs, questions, and interests and creating content that addresses them. People are already sick of getting slapped with promotional content no matter what channel they open. Provide genuine value by offering: - How-to guides (provide actionable tips and casually mention your product or service or hyperlink) Provide templates or any helpful resource. For instance, I offer business consultancy services. I could provide templates for business plans or checklists for annual company audits. This not only showcases my expertise but directly aids businesses. Then, engage with the audience to see what resonated, what didn't.

There's nothing wrong with content being promotional, as long as you make it clear from the beginning that's the topic. Don't employ bait & switch tactics where something starts out as non-promotional and then suddenly switches into a sales pitch. People hate that. You can actually damage your brand this way.

A word of warning with 'be authentic' - I think it's starting to head into the same territory as 'can you make a viral video?. I think all of us marketers can agree, that anyone who's ever had to say those words has never made a viral video. It's my view that authenticity goes without saying, and when you have to say it or ask for it, it's often the fastest way to sound completely inauthentic.

The foundations of good content marketing are authenticity and value addition. Because today's consumers can detect insincerity, authenticity fosters trust, making brands more relevant. Meanwhile, giving value goes beyond simply selling and focuses on improving the audience's experience, knowledge, or well-being, which fosters loyalty and engagement. Combining the two ensures that a brand's content is legitimate and valuable to its audience.

I think this is more about being promotional at the expense of adding value. When we create content, we look at the problems our product solves and create content based around that (literally, we have a value-wheel to use as a reference). That way, we can talk about our product naturally, which is less 'cheesy' but still communicates what we do.

Authenticity is the lifeblood of any successful marketing strategy. Your business can reach a wide range of audiences only when your brand content shows its authenticity. It should be around your brand's identity, values, and mission. You can achieve this through storytelling that captivates and engages the audience, leaving a lasting impression. Cultivate the right words, visuals, and videos that encompass your brand purpose.

Often, the mistake is not optimising content production and missing efficiency in distribution. The alignment in business objectives and content production should be spot on. The same creative assets can serve various departments with light modifications. Centralised on brand creative bank production ->Custom adjustments for departments. This increases the ROI on creative investment. Customisation and distribution are what matters.

Optimization serves as a catalyst in propelling your content across the digital landscape. Employing SEO techniques like the strategic use of keywords and meta tags elevates the visibility and accessibility of your content in search results. Concurrently, optimizing for social media through hashtags, mentions, and emojis amplifies engagement and broadens your content's reach across diverse platforms. The practice of monitoring and analyzing your content's performance through analytics is indispensable for evaluating its impact and making data-driven enhancements. This systematic approach to optimization ensures your content not only reaches but resonates with your target audience, fortifying your brand's digital presence.

A common mistake brands make is trying to jump on every trend they see, or to copy a competitor who is more successful in terms of brand awareness or online engagement. Don’t fall into those traps: it is OK to jump on a trend if and when it suits your brand voice and is relevant to your product and/or audience, but don’t do something because everyone else is doing it.

If you're creating content in other languages, make sure it's correctly adapted to the culture of your target audience. Run a cultural audience of your content to make sure that it'll work and what will need to be tweaked to avoid misunderstandings in your target audience. Test a few pieces of content before launching your key content.

Testing is essential. We do not know for sure until we see the data. The efficient testing method with videos: Break content into three pieces: Hook, body, and CTA. Test multiple hooks to see what type will get attention. That's your first 5 seconds of the video. You should be focused on this 80% of the time because here, you can get the most significant ROI if you find what works. When you find that, move to the body and the CTA. Your CTA doesn't matter until you get people to watch the video. It is much work and upfront investment, but these test results bring a high ROI and drive down the cost of production in the future. Because you eliminate guess work.

With platforms like TikTok there truly is no harm in putting out hundreds of pieces of content a day, as most posts will go out to completely different audiences. When it comes to testing your content strategy, specifically on TikTok, the more darts you can throw the better. The algorithm can be an unwavering task to crack. The best way to forefront your learning is to put out loads of content, and continue to adapt based on what's working.

There is this quote I really like: "The best marketing doesn't feel like marketing." Instead of focusing on selling, focus on building a community, sharing your knowledge and using your creativity.

Don't be promotional. Just be helpful! Helpful content search-engine-optimized content will put your brand in front of the right audience at the exact moment when they are looking for a solution to one of their problems. If you're there to help when they need you most, they see you as a trusted source. It's like taking a consultative sales approach. Don't sell, sell, sell. Just be helpful.

Make your customer your hero! The best storytelling focuses on customer stories and not your product. I love the Storybrand worksheet for this. Get your team together, and map out a hero's journey for your customer. Your customer is a character, who has a problem, who meets a guide, who gives them a plan, who calls them to action, that ends in success and helps them avoid failure. Paint the transformation of your character's success. Storytelling will always be more interesting and engaging than listing product features and benefits.

Focus on storytelling. IMO, writing with a conversational, relaxed, relatable tone is the most engaging. If the reader isn't engaged, they'll never finish reading. If they're not reading until the end, the writer hasn't done their job. Humor (unless totally inappropriate) is a great tool as well.

Educate, inform or entertain your audience. Avoid the online sales pitches through your content, this is just the start of your relationship with the consumer.