Why Content is Key to Your Corporate Brand

Creating a brand reputation that reflects how you want to be perceived doesn’t just happen because you have a cool logo and modern colors. Your employees, prospects, customers, stockholders, and other key audiences get to know your brand through a combination of what you say, how you say it, what you look like, and how you sound as a company.?

Beyond the visual, here are five—often overlooked elements—of a corporate brand that influence audience perception of your organization:

1. Cohesive brand story
2. Helpful website encounters
3. Unwavering attention to quality
4. Collaborative community outreach
5. Positive candidate experiences

In companies where brand marketing and content marketing exist in separate silos, it’s critical that constant communication and close collaboration exist between these groups. Ideally, brand and content exist in the same team—or even with the same person.

1. Your brand, your content, your voice?

When people think of company branding, the first things that come to mind are the logos, colors, fonts, and trademarks. While all of those elements must be carefully guarded and brand usage guidelines put in place to ensure consistency, they are really only half the story—literally.

For most companies, attention to mission and value statements, about us, and executive bios are scrutinized as part of the company brand. But what about the rest of the content? What does that say about you as a company? Plenty.?

Telling your brand story goes beyond telling the story of your founders and your history of funding and even going public. Your brand story appears in every piece of content you publish to your website.

For some, this is a mindset shift and requires rethinking how content is created, published, and promoted. If it is truly the voice of the brand, then it deserves a strategy that includes purpose, tone, voice, and agreed upon processes that ensure consistency, value, and quality. With this understanding, content can’t be relegated to whomever in the organization feels like they need to put something up on the website or created as a knee jerk reaction to a whim of someone in the C-Suite.

Afterall, you wouldn’t have your engineering team write the copy for the homepage of your website or the final draft of a social post—why, then, would you allow anyone to write long-form content in a vacuum? In some cases, organizations scrutinize their short-form copy as a reflection of the brand voice without much consideration for the impression their long-form content leaves.

That’s not to say that all content needs to originate with the content team. An effective content strategy begins with processes that allow the entire organization to be successful at creating content with guidelines and editing and review processes that ensure a consistent brand voice, tone, style, and messaging.

Indeed, if content is the voice of the brand, then it becomes the hub of marketing strategy—informing all the other marketing teams’ efforts and not just something that happens in response to the charters of other groups.?

2. The importance of content journeys

Creating an easy to navigate content journey is an essential part of your corporate brand. If people come into your website and can’t easily find what they are looking for, they will get frustrated and leave. Worse yet—they may view your company as incompetent. When it comes to corporate brand perception, every touch matters—not just the banner at the top of the home screen or the graphics on your conference booth.

Company websites can be viewed like a hiking trail. People may enter at any point, but they need signposts and clear navigational elements to get to the end of their journey—hopefully, conversion. Pages that include internal links and clear navigation to related content will keep them engaged and provide a positive experience. Once you’ve established that you’re the source for useful information and advice, audiences will return to your website in the future and are more likely to look to you when they’re ready to buy a solution.

On the other hand, if a first experience with your company is a blog or other web content that has been created outside of the brand guidelines and content process, that first impression may not be what you intended—emphasizing the importance of branding and oversight for every piece of content.?

Be sure to have content that is more than just another product data sheet. Your top of funnel and mid-funnel content says as much—or more—about you as a brand as your “About Us” page or mission statement. Make sure your audiences can find the solutions and advice they are looking for without having to paw through pages of content you’ve simply thrown onto the website to satisfy internal requirements.

3. Brand guidelines for every medium

Most companies provide guidelines for the use of their logo, font, and colors. That’s standard. Surprisingly, less standard are brand guidelines for mediums other than visual content. If we believe that content is the voice of the brand, then we must prioritize the guidelines for how that voice sounds and who is doing the talking.

Creating a content style guide and getting stakeholder buy-in will help ensure that your content reflects the brand image you hope to project and should mirror the look and feel of your visual elements. Together, words, images, and sounds make up your brand.

Here are some elements to include in your content guidelines:

• Brand archetype: Research the 12 brand archetypes commonly used to create a brand personality. Once you decide your company personality, it’s easier to build your tone and voice.
• Tone of voice: Your tone of voice is not just what you say but how you say it. As a company, your tone should reflect your archetype. If you’re the sage, you may want to be conversational and empathetic. If you’re the hero, you might want to be formal and authoritative to demonstrate mastery, and if you’re the creator, you may want to be informal and conversational to make your discoveries easier to understand and consume. How you translate your archetype to your tone of voice will depend on how you want your company to be perceived and how you perceive yourself.
• Style guide: Most writers either adhere to AP Style or the Chicago Manual of Style for writing guidelines. It doesn’t matter which style guide you choose, but do choose one to follow.

• Length: Length is an important aspect of content guidelines and one that is often overlooked. Length is also something that may change over time. For instance, 7 years ago, a blog that was 800 words in length was considered the optimum length. Currently, 1200-2000 is more commonly considered a best practice. Don’t leave out other types of content when you discuss length. Videos, webinars, and podcasts are all types of content that should be evaluated.
• Word choice: Within your industry, there may be various ways of communicating the same idea. If you are in a new industry, terms may be used interchangeably by others talking about your product type of solution. As a company, you will want to clarify those terms that you want to use and how and when to use them. There may be other guidelines around word choice that you feel are important to communicate to anyone writing content. Include those specifics in your guidelines.

• Grammar rules: Oxford comma or no Oxford comma? This is an ongoing debate with staunch supporters on each side of the argument. The use of contractions communicates a conversational tone. Some grammar rules are non-negotiable, while others require a choice. Whichever way you decide to go, be sure to be consistent.

• SEO: If your content isn’t findable, it’s harder to build an audience. Besides the SEO work on the backend, it’s important to include frontend SEO guidelines such as keywords and formatting suggestions.

4. Content as a brand ambassador

If you’re building a content library—or just trying to get more engagement for the content you are creating—consider using your content to help make connections with business partners, customers, and industry influencers.

Many companies engage in co-marketing activities by inviting others to participate in webinars and events, collaborating on creating customer stories, and inviting key audiences to share their thought leadership through guest blogging. In addition, many seek out opportunities for subject matter experts and executive team members to participate in the marketing activities of other companies.?

One way to add more authority to your content and to build your community is to invite thought leaders to weigh in on your white papers, ebooks, blogs, and other content with quotes on the topic you are covering. Promoting your content with outside quotes lends credibility and gives you the opportunity to build your audience by attracting the followers of your contributors.

5. Company culture and the brand?

Even when you aren’t hiring—or the market is in a downturn—it’s still important to build and nurture your employer brand. Tell your brand story through the eyes of your employees with employee spotlights and inside stories.

Celebrate Engineers Week or other employee-focused events with content dedicated to the contributions of employees. Write round-ups and provide content around company celebrations and special events. There are many other aspects of the employer brand that often go overlooked. If you don’t have guidelines and a content plan that includes your social media sites, external sites—such as Glassdoor, recruiter emails, and your own website you may want to consider assigning a dedicated content team to the task.

Don’t forget to include job descriptions and postings as part of your employer brand. People will call you out publicly if you are writing the same boilerplate description for every job (this is a reality, believe it or not). Make sure that what you are saying about the company matches the company profile on the website and in your news release boilerplate. Standardizing “About Us” is critical to creating a consistent brand image.

One final note. Treat your job applicants with respect. Don’t ghost them after interviewing them (even if it’s just a screening interview). You never know when they will go to work for a customer or prospect. Bad recruiting and employee experiences also result in poor reviews on employment sites, such as Glassdoor or word-of-mouth and have an overall negative impact on the employer brand.

Content, in all its forms, is your brand voice. Treat it with the same care and protect it as you would your logos and colors. Your look, your sound, and your words are all the ways audiences get to know your company. Create a unified, positive perception with carefully crafted content designed with your audiences in mind.