In today's digital landscape, it's not enough to simply exist as a business. Building a distinctive brand identity is a necessity for success. Around 29% of marketers use content marketing to promote their brand and meet the needs of their customers. This method involves creating engaging content to attract potential customers and keep existing customers satisfied. Content marketing is a powerful online marketing method that offers businesses the means to communicate their brand effectively. In this blog, we will guide you through the steps to not only convey a message, but to build an enduring and impactful brand identity by leveraging the potential of content marketing.
Why is building brand identity important?
A brand is a product and service with unique and immediate recognition that helps it stand out among its competitors in the eyes of the public. It helps to promote the company's image and has a store value. For a company, it is essential to build a brand identity to create awareness about products or services among the target audience. But how can we build brand identity? There are multiple ways through which we can create brand awareness, such as word of mouth, advertising, promotion, etc. However, one of the effective ways to build brand awareness is through content marketing.
What is content marketing?
50% of online marketers are planning to invest more resources in content marketing. This shows the importance of content marketing. It is a strategy that is used on the internet to captivate and retain potential customers by creating and sharing relevant content in the form of articles, videos, blogs, etc., known as content marketing. It is one of the effective ways to create awareness about brands in the public. It is a form of marketing focused on making, publishing, and allocating content for a targeted audience online. Hiring content specialists who are experts in contention creation can be a practical step in building a brand.
Businesses often use it to achieve goals such as lead generation, sales generation, increased brand awareness or credibility, and engagement of online community users. Lead generation is the first and foremost step in creating brand awareness. It helps brands to find potential customers and develop them through a process until they buy. If a business lacks enough information and skills, a lead generation company can be hired to drive quality traffic to the website.
Steps to build brand identity
1. Promote the definition of brand in the market - Understanding what brand is the first step in promoting brand identity. This means what your brand represents and who your target audience is. A brand identity is the characteristic of a brand that depicts color, design, logo, shape, and name that distinguishes itself from competitors and stands in the eyes of its audience.
2. Develop identity that is consistent throughout all channels - A brand visual identity is very important to build a brand. It depicts its special features and engages the users into taking the desired action. Imagine you have created a brand name that is difficult to pronounce and the user experience is not good. What will the customer do in the first place? They will switch to your competitors. Therefore, it is suggested that a visual identity of the brand is created, considering the public's views.
a. The very first step in creating a visual identity for a brand is creating a brand name. A brand name should be short, simple, and easy to pronounce. It should not contain any tongue-twister words which are difficult to speak.
b. After creating a brand name, it is essential to create a brand logo. A brand logo should be unique and simple and should reflect your brand image.
c. The next step is writing a slogan for your brand. A slogan is a statement that reflects brand identity and the company’s mission. It should be short, unique, and memorable lines.
d. When choosing typography, make sure it aligns with your brand identity and is easy to read. Use consistent typography across all visual elements, including websites, banners, posters, and social media sites.
3. Create content that adds value to customer’s knowledge - After building a strong visual identity, it is necessary to create content that sparks your brand story to the targeted audience through various social media such as Facebook platform, Instagram platform, YouTube platform, X(Twitter) Platform, etc., to create brand awareness and make products better to cater to your audience. Social media marketing also boosts your business visibility and increases your customer base. You can hire experts who can create compelling content to avoid mistakes.
4. Regularly engaging with customers for feedback - Regularly engaging with customers is essential to track complaints and feedback to improve products and services. This creates a sense of acknowledgment in the customers, which can positively influence brand image and increase the customer base.
5. Regularly monitoring brand images in the public - Maintaining a strong brand identity requires careful monitoring of your brand image. How people perceive your brand can significantly impact your brand reputation, loyalty, and sales. By monitoring feedback and taking action based on it, you can make your customers feel valued and create a sense of belonging, which can help you build your brand identity more quickly. These are the essential steps to build a strong brand identity. But what role does content marketing play in building brand identity? Let’s understand the role of content marketing in building brand identity.
Convergence of content marketing with brand identity
Building a content strategy is essential in the content marketing strategy. Content strategy refers to planning, organizing, and developing content to cater to people, and content marketing refers to distributing content to the target audience through blogs, posts, emails, newsletters, videos, etc.
With an effective content marketing strategy, you can create and increase awareness about the brand to a broad audience through storytelling, sharing information, and creating a need for the brand. Content marketing is a very effective tool to tell your business goal and agenda. It helps in building awareness about your brand. Effective content marketing is done by a specialist who can drive traffic to the landing page.
How content marketing shapes brand identity?
I. Display value of your brand - Brand value depicts the brand image through storytelling, content marketing, and sharing information online. It helps in advertising brand value, its vision and its goal, which can be used to attract and retain customers. This can be a great strategy to make people aware of your brand and to create need & desire among them. For example, if a brand preaches affordability, it can produce engaging content about the same and attract like-minded customers who follow the same practices.
II. Shows brand qualities - The writing style of content, language, and how you write content depicts your brand personality. For example, there is a brand that preaches healthy but tasty food; it can demonstrate its personality by creating funny videos and memes, Q&A sessions, lives, community, etc.
III. Convey your value proposition - Content creation can help you to promote your value proposition. Value proposition refers to a concise statement of the benefits a company delivers to customers who buy its products or services. For example, a company practices recycling plastics; therefore, it believes in using plastic bottles and recycles them to pack its products. Companies can create content by creating videos, blogs, articles, etc, about how they procure used bottles and recycle them for packaging. This consistent message can help a brand stand out from its competitors and fulfill its duty toward the environment.
IV. Create credibility and dominance - High-quality content with precise and consistent information depicts brand credibility and authority in the market. For example, suppose you have a company that sells superfoods. In that case, you can publish well-researched articles about the benefits of regularly exercising and eating superfoods, organize podcasts with fitness trainers, and share insightful tips to create a strong brand reputation and attract customers to buy your products and services.
V. Boosts consumer engagement - Engaging content can attract customers' attention and encourage interaction. By responding to queries and complaints, a brand creates customer awareness regarding the use and benefits of products and services in customers' lives. As in search engine optimization, you focus on enhancing user experience and conducting SEO audit to prepare SEO reports. In the same way, you need to focus on conducting a content audit to analyze the necessary changes that need to be done. This would include updating old content and optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, etc.
VI. Promote brand remembrance - In today's world, where information is available widely and quickly, retaining all the information becomes difficult for a person, and this applies to remembering a brand. Brand remembrance refers to instant recollection of the name of a brand. So, Creating content that imprints in customers' minds becomes crucial. For example, if you have a travel agency, creating budget-friendly packages can help boost the sales of your travel agency and create a positive image of your brand.
VII. Fosters brand advocacy - If your content becomes successful enough to boost brand recall, it can create brand advocacy by creating awareness about the brand through word of mouth suggestions. It can help increase the sales of the brand. The more the users are aware of your brand the better the chances of them choosing your business. You need to focus on optimizing the content in sync with the latest marketing trends. It helps search engine algorithms easily recognize the relevant page for the users search query and enhances the website ranking on the SERPs.
VIII. Exhibits social duty - Every company has a responsibility towards society. A brand can demonstrate its responsibility towards society by building roads, schools, and hospitals or donating gifts or clothes to the poor and needy. It can also create content that can preach the benefits of certain practices that can improve people's lives.
Developing content marketing strategy
Content marketing plays a very significant role in building a brand. It is also essential to understand content marketing strategy, which can effectively and efficiently reach the target audience. Some of the strategies are:
i. Identify your target audience - The first step in building a successful brand is to identify the people who have the exact needs that your product or service addresses. This will help you cater to customers who share the same desire for what you offer. Just like in PPC advertising, where you focus on targeting the right audience to ensure that the relevant users click on the ad, your content marketing strategy should also focus on choosing the relevant target audience so that the users who engage with your content take the desired action.
ii. Determine your KPIs - The next step is to determine the key performance indicators(KPIs). KPIs help you to analyze your actual goals with the desired goals. As in search engine optimization you focus on enhancing SEO metrics so that the performance of SEO campaigns increases. In the same way, you should analyze content marketing KPIs to achieve the desired marketing goals.
iii. Monitoring performance of crucial metrics - Monitoring business goals and metrics is key to developing a content marketing strategy. Content should be created in such a way that it can align with the business goals and metrics. Analyzing the performance of crucial metrics is essential as it highlights the necessary changes that need to be implemented to optimize the content performance on the website. It helps to know the changes that need to be made, like updating content on the page, title tags, meta tags, etc.
The better the performance of essential metrics, the higher the chances are that users will choose your website for the relevant search queries. With better-optimized content, the website visibility on the SERPs increases, thus increasing website traffic and ultimately increasing the conversion goal.
iv. Content management tool - Content management is a strategic process that involves creating, editing, organizing, and distributing content. This process helps the smooth flow of content, leading to brand recognition among customers. With changes in the marketing trends, content marketing strategies keep evolving and online marketers need to stay updated with these changes. To analyze the changes in content marketing, multiple content marketing tools can be leveraged to know how the content is performing, like the Semrush tool, Ahref tool, Grammarly tool, etc.
v. Updating content - Finally, it is essential to consider the budget and human resources required to achieve targeted goals. Creating engaging content to grab users attention is crucial to ensure that the relevant users reach the website. Well-curated content helps in building brand awareness and attracting the relevant users to the website. It can help boost sales and increase the public image of the brand. Therefore, it is essential to set a budget to create compelling content, to enhance user experience.
Website content strategy
Every company that runs its business online has a website. A website is a web page collection that shares a single domain name. To create a compelling website, you can also outsource a web development company. A website content strategy is developing, planning, distributing, and maintaining content to align with business goals. Consistently posting engaging content on a website helps to establish the credibility and trust of its brand among the customers. It also increases the website's visibility on search pages, as more visitors lead to an improved website quality score and higher rank on the webpage. Writing concise meta descriptions can increase click through rate (CTR) of a website which will increase search engine ranking of the page.
Benefits of content marketing
A. Expand your SEO and traffic - Engaging content attracts customers to your web page. It helps to create traffic when people visit your webpage frequently, and boosts website SEO. Search engine optimization of a website is also important to enhance user experience and engagement.
B. Affirm authority and trust - There are myths regarding SEO which must be kept apart and a properly implemented SEO helps in increasing users' trust, increase website traffic, etc. This can increase the authority and trust in your company among the employees, which can lead to brand recognition.
C. Vary learning formats to engage your audience better - There can be multiple types of people who can have various interests. For example, some people like to read content, while some like to watch videos related to that content. Content marketing helps connect with the audience through learning formats such as blogs, videos, photo essays, live sessions, etc.
D. Boost lead generation - Do you know, lead generation is one of the most important metrics used by content specialists when measuring effectiveness of content marketing. A company can boost lead generation when it publishes excellent content. When customers find useful content, they promote the brand by sharing it with their acquaintances. Whenever a new person visits a website, a company can generate leads by asking simple questions such as name, email address, mobile no. etc. This can help in the generation of leads organically.
E. Build brand affinity and devotion - When a brand offers exact content that satisfies the needs of its consumers, it is exactly like eating your favourite meal you were craving. When a brand satisfies the need and desire by providing the exact content that the customer is looking for, it helps create brand awareness and recognition, eventually leading to brand affinity and loyalty.
Conclusion
Content marketing is crucial in creating awareness and promoting the brand’s identity. Great content allows the brand to express its identity, engage with customers, build links with authoritative websites. With a strategic, consistent, and audience-centric approach to content marketing, brands can create a distinct, impactful identity that resonates with customer needs.
It is a proven way through which you can increase organic traffic to your website by regular tracking content performance. You can also do competition analysis to find the strength and weakness of your content marketing strategy and implement it to increase website traffic. If you find content marketing a tough task to perform you can get in touch with a digital marketing company and avail content marketing services. The content specialists focus on optimizing the content, luring the target audience into taking the desired action and ultimately helps in achieving the desired marketing goals.
References:
. Brand identity: How to develop a unique & memorable brand in 2023
. How to build your brand with content: 4 things you must do