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Branding and content marketing are two different things. Nonetheless, if you plan them out correctly, you can take advantage of their differences and strengths to enhance your marketing efforts.
Before we dive into how branding and content marketing can complement each other in your overall marketing strategy, let’s define the two.
What is Brand Marketing?
Brand marketing could be an entire blog in itself. There’s so much more to brand marketing than what most consider. In short, brand marketing defines why your business is doing what it does.
It gives your business personality, gives reason for your product and connects your mission and vision for your customers to understand better.
Brand marketing is what turns your customers into ambassadors.
The four pillars of a good brand are: differentiation, relevance, esteem, and knowledge.
- Differentiation - The brand’s unique promises and the reason for being.
- Relevance - How the brand fits into people’s lives.
- Esteem - How people perceive the brand.
- Knowledge
- How well people know and relate to the brand.
It’s how you combine and convey all of these factors that determine how successful your brand is.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is how you sell your product, through every stage of the funnel. It refers to the different types of content you use.
The most popular forms of content marketing are blog posts, emails, infographics, and case studies, but the list goes on. Content marketing is how you deliver what you want your brand to say.
Imagine your brand like an Iceberg. Your content marketing is everything people can see, the part of the iceberg that is above the water. Your brand strategy is everything under the water, everything holding that iceberg up in the first place.
So, how can these two strategies work together within your larger marketing strategy? This article will guide you through the perfect partnership of branding and content.
6 Ways branding and content marketing can work together
1. Your content can convey your brand
Take the five senses we have; how can you convey as many of them as possible through the content you use?
Sight and sound are easy, but if you can convey your brand’s taste, smell, and feel with your content, then you’ll excel at conveying your brand better. This doesn’t mean you need someone to be able to physically smell something from the comfort of their own home. Use powerful story-telling and you’ll be surprised by what senses you can generate from people.
You should aim to bring senses into all of your content marketing efforts and they should reflect those feelings that you want to emulate from customers.
Your content has the power to leave a lasting brand impression on someone if you can appeal to as many of their senses as possible.
2. Your brand can dictate your content
Depending on the type of brand you have formed, it should inform the type of content you create. Your brand guidelines should dictate your content, both in what you create and what you chose not to.
Most are familiar with a brand having to use a certain color palette or tone of voice. However, take this a step further to create guidelines around what your brand doesn’t do.
This is commonly seen in writing style guides but should be spread through your entire content marketing strategy. Perhaps you only create a certain style of images, or your videos are never longer than a certain amount of time.
Manage customer expectations with your content and it will help them to identify and relate to your brand every time they see it.
You’re essentially creating the McDonaldization effect and generating a familiarity with your brand. No matter where in the world someone encounters it or what content platform they engage with it on; they know they’ll have the same, enjoyable experience.
3. Your content can tell your brand story
Your brand story is essential in creating esteem and knowledge with people. It’s what helps people to understand and relate to you and will see you welcomed or adopted into their lives easier.
Use your content marketing skills to tell your brand and business story. It’s a perfect example of how the two strategies can work hand-in-hand to achieve a greater goal for your business.
Firstly, you’ll need to map out your brand story, think of the message you want to get across, how you want the “readers” to feel and potentially act towards you. Map this story out without a content avenue in mind. If you already have an idea of the content type you want to use, you’ll be limited by those restrictions and ideas will not come into full fruition.
Only after you’ve decided on your brand story should you look at content marketing tactics to help decide how to best tell the story. Consider content that is well received by the type of people you want to reach, consider the channel you’ll need to use to support that content and then get to work.
4. Your content should ooze your brand
Take your brand name and logo out of your content. No matter what it is, be it an image, video, virtual tour, a quiz… take it out. Do you still know that this piece of content is yours? If the answer is no, then you’ve got some work to do.
Make sure your content is identifiable within micro-seconds of someone seeing it. Let’s look at the example from Later’s Instagram page , below. Their fonts, styles and colors are iconically Later. We can see their brand name in only one of these six posts yet anyone that’s familiar with their brand knows that this is their content.
You only have one opportunity to capture someone’s attention and, as we’ll explore later, they’re more inclined to give you that attention if they can identify the content as a brand they love.
Find ways that you can make your content as on-brand as possible. Look to build a strong brand identity on social media and other marketing avenues so people can recognize you by your style alone. This brand identity comes with a color scheme, a shooting style, wording or vocabulary, fonts, iconic intros, the list goes on.
5. Your content can help to develop your brand
Brands don’t necessarily change, but they do adapt and grow over the years. Look at some great rebranding throughout the last decade. It’s tough to remember what these brands were like before. This is branding done right.
However, making the decision to rebrand is never an easy decision to make. It takes months of work and considers so many different areas of the business.
You’ll need to heavily rely on your Human Resources department to lockdown on company culture, mission, and vision. You’ll need to rely on your business development team to identify where you want your business to go and how you want your brand to be received because of this.
Your product team will help inform your growth marketing strategy and how brand-storytelling can support it. Use marketing and sales for all of the data they have on your current demographic and how this data can be used for brand longevity.
Let your content and the reception of it inform your brand’s trajectory and decisions. It should play a huge role in either rebranding or gradual brand growth over the years.
If your content is well received and you’ve built a following of people that truly care about your brand then you can use a questionnaire to ask your followers how they perceive your brand and where they would like to see it go.
Questionnaires are not only a great way to collect data but they’re another touch-point with your brand. As you go about collecting this data make sure you’re delivering that same brand experience that your customers know and love.
Your content will constantly adapt and shift as new platforms and technologies emerge and you may decide that it’s best your brand does the same. One of the first, and most important resources, you should be using when making this decision is your content marketing efforts and data.
6. Your brand gives your content a foot in
Lastly, if people love your brand they’re more likely to love your content or at least give it a chance when it greets them in new places.
With story-telling tactics making people up to 22 times more likely to remember something over a fact alone. If your brand messaging has been delivered well, then people are more likely to remember your brand and what your business does.
Use this opportunity and don’t waste it. You only get one shot to make a good impression, so make it count. It’s a great way that building a strong brand can help your business create a more dynamic awareness around what you do and why you do it.
Final Thoughts on Brand and Content Strategies
We hope these tactics will help to guide how your brand and content strategies can help each other. The two can work harmoniously alongside each other to hit greater business goals but it’s important to differentiate them within your team.
A good brand is supported by content and good content champions a good brand. Continue to implement the two strategies alongside each other and watch your business’ awareness, and overall sales expand because of your efforts.
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