MOST BRANDS HAVE A SELF-AWARENESS PROBLEM

MOST BRANDS HAVE A SELF-AWARENESS PROBLEM

I was once asked what problem I find most of my clients facing. My answer? A lack of self-awareness - particularly so in today's market, where brands are but one among many offering increasingly identical solutions.

To succeed with your marketing - and especially your content - you must first determine what your brand is and isn't.

Here are a few questions about your brand that you should be able to answer -

• Why is your brand what it is? What are your guiding principles? What is it your brand wants to accomplish? How does it measure success?
• Who is your target audience? What are their pain points?
• What makes your brand (and the solutions it offers) different from its competitors (and their solutions)?
• What is your brand's voice and tone? How is it that your brand comes off to those who interact with it?

Now - self-awareness to this degree doesn't often result from self-reflection. That's where individuals such myself come in - but if you're unable or unwilling to bring in someone with the expertise to assess your brand and how it fits into the market - you should turn to your customers.

Make sure you don't accept a non-answer - really get down to the root reason your customers choose your brand - and understand what would make them leave.

From there - lean your content and messaging into what your brand is - knowing it won't resonate with everyone.

A good brand attracts the customers it wants and filters out those that aren't a good fit.

WORTH YOUR TIME

Futures Exchange and Sam Bankman-Fried were favored with more media coverage than most any other company in recent memory - and as Lulu Cheng Meservey - Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Chief Communications Officer at Activision-Blizzard - writes, "coverage like that doesn't just happen."

In this post from her SubStack - Flack - Meservey discusses just how Bankman-Fried used the media to his advantage - and how others can use those same tactics to their own advantage.

TRY THIS

A content strategy - if done right - represents hours of work.

One must ideate, research, draft out the content, edit it, and, after it's all been posted, audit everything to see what works and what doesn't.

Content audits - as you might imagine - represent most of the work - and it's also a subjective process, meaning that you might come away with the wrong conclusions.

Enter MarketMuse, which automates content audits and removes subjectivity from the process so you can prioritize the right content in a much more efficient fashion.

What's in your tech stack?

Did you find any of this useful? If so, let me know what and why - and if not, why?

Also - check out my marketing primer to make sense of the modern-day marketing maze - https://bit.ly/3n5JYsT