Keeping your content on-brand is essential for building trust, consistency, and recognition among your audience. But how do you ensure that every piece of content you create reflects your brand identity, voice, and values? Here are some tips to help you align your content with your brand strategy.
Before you start creating content, you need to have a clear and documented set of brand guidelines that outline your brand's purpose, mission, vision, values, personality, tone, style, and visual elements. These guidelines will serve as a reference and a framework for your content development process, ensuring that you communicate your brand message consistently and effectively across different channels and formats.
Your content should not only be on-brand, but also relevant and valuable to your target audience. To achieve this, you need to research and understand your audience's needs, preferences, challenges, goals, and behaviors. You can use tools like personas, surveys, interviews, analytics, and social media to gather insights and segment your audience into different groups. Then, you can tailor your content to each group's interests, pain points, and expectations, while still maintaining your brand voice and identity.
Emphasis on relevant and relatable. Just because your colleagues have an MBA doesn't mean your customer does. Most likely they don't. On-brand should take a backseat to relevance and value.
Having a content strategy will help you plan, create, and distribute your content in a way that supports your brand goals and objectives. Your content strategy should include elements like your content vision, mission, themes, topics, keywords, types, formats, channels, frequency, and metrics. You should also define your content pillars, which are the main categories or themes that your content revolves around and that relate to your brand values and audience needs.
Start with a six month map and continue to expand. Give yourself time to ideate, revise, and ideate again after you trash your old favorite idea.
A content calendar is a tool that helps you organize and schedule your content production and publication. It helps you keep track of your deadlines, assign roles and responsibilities, and ensure that your content is aligned with your brand guidelines and strategy. A content calendar can also help you avoid content gaps, overlaps, or inconsistencies, and optimize your content for different seasons, events, or trends.
Before you publish your content, you should review and edit it to make sure that it meets your quality standards and follows your brand guidelines. You can use checklists, tools, or feedback from others to evaluate and improve your content. You should check for aspects like grammar, spelling, punctuation, readability, clarity, accuracy, relevance, value, tone, style, voice, formatting, visuals, and calls to action. You should also make sure that your content is optimized for SEO and user experience.
Have someone from your org who didn't write the content, but knows your goals, evaluate. Is it clear to them? If not, consider revising.
After you publish your content, you should monitor and measure its performance and impact on your brand awareness, reputation, and loyalty. You can use metrics like traffic, engagement, conversions, retention, referrals, and feedback to assess how well your content resonates with your audience and supports your brand goals. You should also use analytics and insights to identify what works and what doesn't, and adjust your content accordingly.
You don't market in a bubble. As you evaluate, look at what else is going on. Are your competitors putting in more effort? Are you doing enough to stand out overall? You're not competing against brands in your space, you're competing against everyone wanting to be in front of your target consumer.
Make sure you know how to differentiate between different brands. What works for one brand probably won't work the same for another. Also, beware of content or branding for one person vs an entire company. Focus on the right things instead of one person or yourself.