Welcome to Day 22 of the 30 Days to Develop Your Brand Challenge!
Whether you do business online or offline, content marketing is going to be imperative if you want to be successful. If your business is online-only, content marketing is going to be the contributor to your overall branding journey. Publishing and promoting your branded content ensure that your brand gains visibility, increases brand awareness, and builds your community like nothing else.
Develop Content That Has a Purpose
If your content doesn’t have a reason for existing, it’s a waste of time. You don’t really need more content; you need more relevant content. Look to your buyer’s journey to figure out what type of content your customers need based on where they are in their own personal journey. It can help to write down what message you want to deliver in the piece before completing it so that you have a direction.
Outline Key Messages You Can Use Again & Again
One way to maintain consistency is to create a few key messages that you can pull from for new content ideas. For example, if your overriding message to your audience is to “Do more with less,” that needs to be a key message that is woven throughout all your content. You may have more than one underlying message based on where they are in their journey. Keeping a swipe file ready that you can pull from when you need to deliver a message is going to cut down your creation time exponentially.
Ensure Your Content is Consistent in Tone & Appearance
Remind yourself of the message you want to deliver, and always look at your branding guides so that you can be reminded of the right tone and appearance for your content. If it’s not consistent in tone and appearance, your audience will get confused, and it can get in the way of the trust component of the know-like-trust principle.
Promote Your Content Via the Right Channels
Your content should be promoted where your audience likes to receive it. That may be in several places across all platforms and in different mediums. For example, if you write a five-point blog post, you may want to share it with your email list, one point at a time with a link to the full post, and in social media as several memes or an awesome infographic. How you present the information can make it more relevant to the channel in which you’re sharing it on.
Make All Your Content Shareable
You also want to make it easy for your audience to get the word out about your content marketing efforts by making all your free and paid content easily shareable. You can incentivize your audience to share by offering points or special rewards or simply by asking.
In short, every single piece of content you share – no matter if it’s a blog post, a graphic, a video, or something else – don’t send it out to the public without ensuring the message is clear both in terms of who it is for and who is sending it.
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