Your corporate identity is more than just your logo, colors, and fonts. It's the essence of who you are, what you stand for, and how you communicate with your customers. It's also a powerful tool to create a seamless customer journey, which is the process of guiding your prospects from awareness to loyalty through consistent and relevant content.
A seamless customer journey is important because it builds trust, engagement, and loyalty with your customers. It also helps you stand out from your competitors, who may have similar products or services, but not the same identity. A seamless customer journey means that your customers can easily recognize your brand, find what they need, and enjoy a positive experience across all touchpoints, whether it's your website, social media, email, or offline channels.
Corporate identity is more than colours, font types etc. It is about the strong messaging, values and consistency of them that a company stands for. This can be guided by from your customer journey in terms of awareness, consideration, conversion, advocacy through consistent and relevant content that appear in all platforms such as social media channels, your website, printed collaterals, online articles, blogs, white papers, case studies etc.
Different touchpoints are managed by different silos. And the content customers consume comes from diverse sources. A strong corporate identity helps cover up the seams inherent to this experience, making your brand look more professional and trustworthy.
One thing that I have understood from my experience is, at the end of the day a seamless journey is for customers to "come back". More easy it is for customers to traverse the value chain, more is the probability that they are going to interact with your brand vs the other brand again. I am getting the same product at same price point delivered at the same time, and yet I choose to order from Swiggy vs Zomato, why? It's the easy seamless journey without a lot of cognitive constraint and decision making by my muscles. :)
Your corporate identity is integral to your brand strategy, and it should be reflected in your content creation and distribution. To define your corporate identity, ask yourself what your purpose and vision is, what values and principles you stand for, what makes you unique, how you want to sound and appear, and how you want customers to feel when they interact with you. Tools such as a brand pyramid, archetype, or persona can help you articulate your corporate identity and ensure it resonates with your target audience.
As the famous saying goes “brand identity is what people say when you’re not in the room.” In B2B create an exemplary experience as a trusted advisor in sales and CS. Work with your customers and prospects, not at them.
Once you have defined your corporate identity, you need to align your content with it. This means that your content should reflect your identity in terms of message, tone, style, and format. You should also use your identity to create a content framework that defines your goals, themes, topics, formats, channels, and metrics for each stage of the customer journey. A content framework helps you plan, create, and distribute content that is consistent, relevant, and engaging for your customers.
To ensure that your existing content is aligned with your corporate identity and your content framework, you need to conduct a content audit. A content audit is a systematic review of all your content assets across all channels and touchpoints. It helps you identify gaps, overlaps, inconsistencies, and opportunities for improvement. You can use tools like a content inventory, a content matrix, or a content scorecard to help you organize and evaluate your content. A content audit also helps you create a content calendar that outlines your content production and distribution schedule.
To create a seamless customer journey, you need to optimize your content for conversion. This means that your content should guide your customers to take the next step in their journey, whether it's signing up for a newsletter, downloading a lead magnet, requesting a demo, or making a purchase. You can use techniques like call-to-action buttons, landing pages, lead forms, or email sequences to encourage your customers to move forward in their journey. You should also use tools like analytics, testing, and feedback to measure and improve your content performance and conversion rate.
Creating a seamless customer journey is not a one-time project, but an ongoing process. You need to maintain and update your content over time to ensure that it stays relevant, accurate, and fresh for your customers. You should also monitor and analyze your content performance and customer behavior to identify what works and what doesn't, and make adjustments accordingly. You can use tools like a content lifecycle, a content governance model, or a content maintenance plan to help you manage and optimize your content over time.