Digital Content Marketing Strategy: How To Apply The Foundations To Your Business
Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital content marketing strategy empowers companies to promote their ideas, answer audience inquiries, build trust, foster relationships, and ultimately drive sales.
Despite the fact that content creation and distribution are more accessible than ever, capturing attention and effectively conveying messages remains challenging.
Consider this: over 7 million blog posts are published daily, and 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
While these figures may seem daunting, we're here to help.
This article will delve into the essentials of a digital content marketing strategy, from identifying the most suitable content to create, to aligning it with your brand identity, to analyzing content performance.
Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, you can begin applying these insights immediately. By implementing these strategies, you'll be able to produce content that stands out and cuts through the noise.
Content Navigation
• What is Digital Content Marketing Strategy?
• Fundamentals of Content Marketing Strategy
1) Your content must solve a problem
2) Content marketing for the right audience
4) Define the type of content you will create
5) Distribute your content efficiently
6) Align your content with your brand
What is a Digital Content Marketing Strategy?
A digital content marketing strategy is a step-by-step plan that will drive your content (written words, audio, and video) towards your business goal.
A strong content strategy will help identify the right audience, define the information you share with them, position your brand, distribute your content efficiently, and measure your success.
Depending on your goals, the strategy might take different directions.
For example, if you are just starting out, you will probably need to generate more awareness by delivering content that educates your audience and helps them answer their questions.
On the other hand, if you want customers to buy something from you, the content you share should promote your free trials and consultations or educate them on the product or service you are offering.
When you successfully apply a digital content marketing strategy, you will inspire and attract the right people and, more importantly, keep satisfying your current audience wherever they are in their customer journey.
Why do you need a Strategy?
Simple, every successful company has a content strategy, so if you want to compete in your industry you need to develop yours as soon as possible.
Plus, as Hubspot's research shows, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing – are you part of that 70%?
The following are the key fundamentals for creating a successful digital content marketing strategy that you will be able to apply to your business right away. Let's jump in.
Fundamentals of Content Marketing Strategy
1. Your content must solve a problem
Why would you go online and search for "content marketing strategy"?
Probably because you want to learn about the topic, understand it better, and apply it to your business – simple, right?
However, there is a significant pain here: uncertainty and lack of knowledge.
That is precisely what your content needs to solve.
Creating content for your strategy
Many people get stressed when creating content, but in reality, you have only one option to help you stand out.
Answer this: What does your company do better than the competition?
This is the first question you need to answer.
Some people call it your unique selling proposition (USP), point of difference, competitive advantage, as well as by other names.
We call it your expertise.
The second and final question you need to answer is: Which of your audience’s pain points can you solve by using your expertise?
That's it.
By answering these two questions, you have just discovered the exact area from which you will create content.
In the book Content INC., Joe Pulizzi calls this area the “sweet spot”, which is the intersection of your expertise and your audience's desires or pain points – we will call it content creation.
Examples of content creation
Anthony Fasano (Engineering Management Institute)
Anthony Fasano, a trained engineer, had a unique talent and used it by spending his first years out of college teaching other engineers how to network, bring in new businesses, and manage teams.
He was able to do this because of the human and communication skills that he had developed over time.
At some point, he realized that he could use these skills to start his own business and help even more people.
What makes this so great is that while engineers are known for their impressive mathematical, technical, and analytical skills, typically their lack of communication and human skills make it hard for them to network.
The following is how it would look visually.
Expertise: Human and communication skills
Audience's pain point/desire: Networking
Content creation: The intersection between Anthony's expertise in communication and his fellow engineers' desire for networking skills.
The Branded Agency
At The Branded Agency, we have always believed that it is not our story, but it’s yours that matters. Caring about others has earned us the trust of hundreds of businesses that need help finding their voice, developing their brand image, and growing their company.
Businesses still see the relationship with their audience simply as a business transaction so they have difficulty connecting with people, creating trust, or selling what they have to offer.
Expertise: Brand positioning (humanizing businesses)
Audience's pain point/desire: Connection with the audience
Content creation: The intersection between The Branded Agency's expertise in branding and businesses' desire for connecting with their customers.
So the first thing to figure out is what your expertise is and what pain points you can solve. Once you have a clear answer, you can move on to the next foundation.
2. Content marketing for the right audience
Finding the right audience
Once you identify your expertise and the problem you are solving, you need to get laser-focused.
If you want your content to resonate with people, you need to know as much as possible about them.
Unfortunately, countless businesses fail when developing a digital marketing content strategy because they focus on what they are good at communicating, instead of their specific audience and what it is they need.
When we make it all about us and not the audience, who really cares?
Not many people.
Remember, for your content to resonate with the right people, you must put all your energies into defining their needs and pain points as precisely as possible.
Here are some questions about your audience that you should answer:
What are their needs?
These are their informational needs.
What are their values?
Why would they care about your products or services?
What are their pain points?
How is their personality?
What does their average day look like?
As Seth Godin says, "when you speak to everyone, you speak to no one."
Businesses make this mistake every day, thinking that the more people they speak to, the more opportunities they will have – unfortunately, it doesn't work like that anymore.
People want to connect with businesses, have more profound and meaningful interactions, support a cause, have two-way communication, and feel that companies care about them.
Create your buyer persona
You have probably heard many times that you need to create buyer personas, but we will show you why typical personas are not precise enough and what to do instead.
The common definition of buyer personas is that they are “semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers” and that they help you “make decisions and connect with your audience”. This is very accurate, but a problem arises when we create it and use it.
Here is a typical example of what most people do:
Although you have a lot of valuable information here, what can you actually use?
You can’t use it as it is. What you find in most buyer personas are indicators, not insights.
So, what do you do instead?
Find the most important indicators/characteristics/traits and create one unique value.
Check this out:
In the previous image, we found the words authentic, helping others, and agreeable. Now, you need to find one single word (value) that represents all these indicators. How about these:
Empathetic
Harmonizer
Encourager
When you identify the precise personal value, get rid of everything else and start thinking like your audience.
Let’s choose one unique value from the previous list – “empathetic."
Now, you know the person you are talking to is empathetic, so go to Google and do some research about empathetic people. Here’s what comes up:
With this information, you can create one paragraph that describes the main motivators of empathetic people based on what they would love to read:
“I want a bank/clothing store/marketing agency that really cares about me as a human being – I need a company that understands what I feel.
I don’t want complicated systems. I need to talk to real people – it should be very easy.”
As an empathetic person, the statements above will likely resonate with you because that is how you are.
That is the ultimate business goal – to talk to your audience using their language and from their point of view.
On the flip side, you can create one paragraph that will help you identify the main objections that empathetic people will have.
“They just want my money; I’m just another business transaction to them.
I’m sure I will be chatting with bots and receiving automated emails all day – they don’t even take the time to connect with people anymore.”
Doing this gives you an idea of how your audience thinks and feels when dealing with businesses and it allows you to create content that alleviates these pains or uncertainties.
The following image will summarize step-by-step everything we just explained:
This information will be the foundation of your content strategy. Once you figure it out, move on to the next foundation.
3. Break through the clutter
Differentiate your content strategy
Unfortunately, identifying your area of expertise and the audience's pain points and values is not enough.
Most companies stop here.
The problem is that the competition is still very stiff.
This is the point at which you need to break through the clutter.
How do you do it?
Your content must fill a hole that nobody else is filling (or at least one that only a few others are).
You need to find an area with little to no competition that gives you a chance to break through the noise and be relevant.
Examples of content differentiators
Ann Reardon
This example from the book Content INC., talks about Ann Reardon and her recipe site called “How to Cook That”.
She is a food scientist (expertise), and knows that people are searching for step-by-step cooking education (pain point).
However, as you can imagine, there are thousands of other blogs and videos on the web – the competition is high.
What did she do?
She found an area with little to no competition and she put all her energy into that.
She focused her recipes and baking on seemingly impossible desserts, such as a cake that is a five-pound Snickers bar or a cake of the Instagram logo.
Here’s what Ann Reardon’s focus looks like visually:
The Branded Agency
The Branded Agency has years of experience helping businesses develop their brand voice and brand personality, connect with their audiences, and establish their brands (our expertise). Oftentimes, companies are still stuck with their old mindset of using traditional marketing techniques by trying to sell to everyone – they simply can't connect with their audiences this way (pain point).
However, many marketing agencies help businesses with their brand, which makes the competition very high.
So what did we do? We found an area with little to no competition and focused our efforts there.
We concentrated on understanding human behaviours and their psychological drivers, which helps us connect with audiences on an emotional level.
How to find your content differentiator
The core of a digital content marketing strategy is the information you will share.
When people are online, they have a few different goals; they want to educate themselves, connect with family and friends, and find entertainment.
The first step to finding content differentiators is to find out what people are searching for when they are online.
We will show you step-by-step how to use free tools to start finding the right content for your marketing strategy.
Google Trends
Google Trends will help you find what people are searching for on Google, allowing you to compare different topics, identify trends, and more importantly, get free ideas for content creation. Let’s see how it works:
When you go to Google Trends, the first thing you should do on the site is scroll down until you find the "recently trending" section.
If you are lucky enough, you might find something trending within your industry, which would allow you to create a quick social media post or video about it for easy and fast reach.
If you’re not that lucky, scroll back up and type a keyword you are interested in finding information on in the search bar.
The first thing you will find is this map that will show you the popularity of the keyword over time.
As you can see, content marketing strategy has been going up and down, and the trend seems to be flat.
However, Google predicts that the keyword interest will go up again, which makes sense because content creation becomes popular during important celebrations such as Christmas.
If you keep scrolling down, you will find information such as interest by region and more.
However, what we are interested in is getting more content ideas, and that is what we will go over now.
At the very bottom, you will find these two sections that show you critical information for your strategy. “Related topics” shows similar information as your keyword.
The more important one is “related queries”, which displays terms people search for associated with your keyword.
In our example, related queries will show terms people are searching for that include the phrase "content marketing strategy."
Besides “related queries,” you can see the word “rising.”
That means that the phrases on the list are increasing in popularity.
If you click on the drop-down menu and change it to "top," you will find the most popular searches – this is what we need to start creating content that people are interested in learning.
Udemy
Udemy is a platform where people can buy courses about pretty much everything. How is this related to finding content? Follow along with me.
Go to udemy.com and sign up for an account in the top right corner.
When you sign up, they will ask a few questions to get to know you better and offer what you need – complete it.
Next, go to the top right corner again, hover on the circle and click on "teach on Udemy."
It will take a couple of seconds to complete the questions they ask. After doing that you will get to the dashboard.
On the left side, go to your options and click on “tool”, then “marketplace insights.”
Search for your keyword. We will do “content marketing.”
Here you can find topics of interest, top searches, and more information to use as an inspiration for your content marketing strategy.
The best part?
You don’t need to create Udemy courses to access this tool.
Reddit and Quora
These platforms are based on networks of communities where people share interests, opinions, hobbies, passions, and more.
The members are known for being a little bit rough when talking about products or services. The nice part?
They will tell you exactly what they love and what they hate.
Let's check it out.
Just go to Reddit.com, for example, and on the top bar search for your keyword.
That’s it.
We are searching for “content marketing.”
Then, you can join discussions and see some content. In our example, look at the second result. Isn’t it something you might be interested in knowing? “Does most content marketing fall flat?” Let's click through to read the question and find some more information.
Check out this answer.
Isn’t that something that many companies are doing right now?
“Content isn’t engaging enough.”
“A lot of content is somebody shouting something into the world, without consideration whether anyone is interested in the topic."
There you go, another easy way to get content, ideas, and inspiration for your strategy.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is a popular keyword search tool that marketers use to get ideas and inspiration. It puts all the Google searches for a particular topic together into a visual and comprehensive "map." Let's check it out.
Go to answerthepublic.com and write your keyword into the search bar. We’ll stick with "content marketing."
Here you will find questions people ask, giving you a clear idea of what they need.
The green circles at the beginning of each question indicate the popularity of that keyword search – dark green means very popular.
AnswerThePublic is one of the most powerful tools out there that can help you with your digital content marketing strategy.
However, because of its popularity, you have only three free searches per day.
Google Alerts
Just go to Google Alerts, and create a new alert for your keyword. Like this:
This tool will send you daily information about your keyword, allowing you to keep up-to-date on your topic of expertise and get inspiration from other content creators.
Amazon Reviews
Another simple and helpful strategy that can help you come up with amazing content is using Amazon reviews.
Go to amazon.com and search for the topic you are interested in creating content for. We will continue with “content marketing.”
Click on any of the books, go to the reviews section at the bottom, and search for a review that can bring you value and new ideas.
Read reviews with 3 or 4 stars, but don't go lower because they are usually complaints that are not very helpful.
This review shares both positive things as well as areas that need improvement. The reviews that suggest what to improve are the ones you should focus on.
"I would love to see more diverse backgrounds." This person is recommending more examples from different industries.
Although it might take more time to find helpful reviews, the information you can get will be very valuable.
Ask social media
Social media is one of the best ways of getting ideas and inspiration for your content strategy, especially if you have a large audience. How do you go about doing this?
Ask your followers on Instagram Stories. Go to your Instagram account and create a “question” post. It should look something like this:
By doing this, you will get ideas directly to your private messages on Instagram. Even if your account is small and you get only one answer, it is still good and will allow you to keep creating content.
You can also create LinkedIn Polls. Go to LinkedIn, create a new post, and select “create a poll.” Create your poll and post it for your connections to see.
By doing this, you will learn what people are most interested in, allowing you to research and create more content about that particular topic.
Honestly, you can use any social media platform, email, or even phone calls to get more ideas for content.
If you have a sales team, you can train them to ask the right questions when meeting new customers to get more content ideas.
The bottom line is, if you care about your customers and ask how you can provide them with more value, they will love to help you.
Ideas to differentiate your content creation
There are many ways companies can differentiate themselves and make content that resonates with people. Here are three good examples from the book Content INC. that we want to share with you.
Audience focus
When you share information with your audience, the more familiar they are with what you are communicating, the more your message will resonate with them. What do we mean by that?
For example, saying “we have the perfect product for pet owners”, is kind of a meh statement... not very interesting for anybody.
However, if you say something like “we have the perfect product for homeowners who like to travel with a dog in their vehicle and live in Vancouver, Canada”, that is much more specific and will resonate with the right people.
As you can see, this message is not for everyone, and that is the beauty of what you are learning here.
Companies need to be specific when communicating. Let's quickly analyze the second example.
"We have the perfect product for homeowners who like to travel with a dog in their vehicle and live in Vancouver, Canada."
This message will not resonate with everyone; it will only resonate with homeowners (no renters), people who like to travel with their dogs (no rabbits, cats, or birds), people who have a car (no motorcycles) and, lastly, people from Vancouver.
So, when you write your content, try to be as specific as possible. Remember: "when you speak to everyone, you speak to no one."
Recombination
This idea says that it is nearly impossible to find originality in today's world. Millions of people create content every day from different areas, so probably 99% of the things you are thinking about creating already exists.
In the book Content INC., Joe Pulizzi suggests taking two successful, independent concepts and combining them to create something new. That could be your differentiator.
That is what has been happening in recent years. People have mixed things up and created new concepts.
For example, neuroscience + marketing = neuromarketing, and collectibles + cryptocurrency = non fungible tokens (NFTs).
Recombination will require more thinking, but it can be applied for content creation as well. Give it a shot.
Personality
We believe that personality is one of the best ways to differentiate your content. For companies, having an identity is the key to their success because people don’t want to be part of business transactions ONLY.
People want to interact, connect, and feel identified with a business that stands for something.
Businesses need a personality, core values, and a unique way to communicate with their audience – they need a brand identity.
The market is forcing companies to humanize, be more transparent, show more emotions, and create more human connections. People don't deal with logos; people deal with people.
By using at least one of these differentiators, more people will be willing to interact with you and, hopefully, buy something from you.
4. Define the type of content you will create
There are many types of content and companies need to identify what they can do best.
Most businesses are using one or more of the following:
Social media content
Videos
Blogs
Articles
Email newsletter
In-person events
Webinars
E-books
Print magazines
Podcasts
SMS
The three primary forms of content are written, video, and audio. So, what should you do? Well, this one is harder to figure out.
To start, you need to try different types of distribution and identify what you do best. For example, most people are using social media, videos, and blogs. Once you have created enough content on your chosen platforms, you can determine which one is producing better results. There is one crucial factor though and that’s that you must enjoy whatever you are doing.
What do we mean by that?
You probably know that videos receive more engagement than other platforms, and you might feel you need to create videos to be seen by more people.
However, if you don't like cameras and get nervous in front of one, you probably won't succeed. Likewise, if you love writing, your blog will probably do fantastic.
Before choosing a platform, answer these questions:
What do you feel more passionate about?
Maybe you are very charismatic and prefer to be in front of a camera and show the world who you are. Then, go for videos.
Maybe you don't feel very comfortable showing yourself to others, but you still prefer to talk. Then audio content might be more your thing.
Maybe you don't like cameras or talking, but you are super talented at writing. Then, articles and blogs might be the way to go.
No matter what it is, do whatever makes you feel comfortable and helps you express yourself best.
The next two questions are:
What channels are best for reaching your audience?
What channels are best for controlling your audience?
This is vital for businesses to understand. If you want to reach more people, you must utilize social media platforms, especially LinkedIn and TikTok because they have a decent reach. However, as you know, when Facebook changed its algorithm, every single company that built a community there, lost it.
Why is this important to consider?
Because although social media gives you a larger reach, you don't have control over those platforms.
They can do whatever they want, at any time.
So if Instagram decides to change its algorithm tomorrow and not show content from business pages, what could you do about it?
Nothing. So, it’s wise to be aware of this and keep it in mind when making decisions.
On the other hand, when you create a blog on Squarespace or WordPress, you don't have the same reach.
You depend on SEO, organic reach, or Google Ads.
However, you do control over your site, and you decide what to show and when.
The same happens with email newsletters – you have control over what content to send and when to send it, to whoever has joined your community.
So, what should you do then?
The best companies are very good at leveraging social media channels and building an audience, but their main platforms are not there.
They create engaging, educative, and attractive content on social media and redirect the audience to their email newsletter, website, or SMS community.
5. Distribute your content efficiently
Based on the previous section, our goal is to send the audience from social media platforms to our website, newsletter, or SMS community.
So, what do we do first?
Identify where your audience is
You can use the buyer persona you previously created and identify where the audience with those characteristics spends their time.
To do that, you need to have a basic understanding of the most important social media platforms and their demographics. Let's go over them quickly.
The largest social network on the planet is Facebook.
Unfortunately for businesses, since Facebook changed its algorithms, it has become one of the least favourite platforms to build an audience.
However, the biggest potential comes from Facebook groups.
So, instead of building your audience on this social media platform, you can create a very targeted community instead
Facebook User Statistics
Largest age group: 25 - 34 (26.3%)
Gender: 44% female, 56% male
Monthly active users: 2.7 billion
Facebook is becoming a more family-focused platform, so this is the right place if your audience is older (35+ years old).
Instagram is the top image-sharing social media site, with more than one billion users. Instagram is also one of the preferred social platforms for brands because of its variety of channels to connect with the audience.
Instagram allows you to share images, make short-form videos (stories and reels), produce long-form videos (IGTV), create highlights, broadcast live, and more.
Check out the complete list of Instagram features for marketers created by Influencer Marketing Hub if you want more information.
Instagram User Statistics
Largest age group: 25 - 34 (33.1%)
Gender: 57% female, 43% male
Monthly active users: 1 billion
YouTube
Although many people might not see YouTube as a social platform, it plays a vital role in network creation and is at the core of many businesses.
Also, Youtube is currently the number two search engine in the world.
The most popular video creation platform also allows you to use hashtags to get more visibility.
YouTube User Statistics
Largest age group: 15 - 25
Gender: 72% of all female and male internet users. (very impressive)
Monthly active users: 2 billion
LinkedIn has become the most powerful business publishing platform on the web and is the best channel to use for a B2B content marketing strategy.
You can publish short updates, long-form articles, videos, ask questions (polls), and have access to many other features.
If you want to learn more, check out these 10 things you need to know about LinkedIn.
LinkedIn User Statistics
Largest age group: 46 - 55
Gender: 49% female, 51% male
Monthly active users: 738 million
As Joe Pulizzi defines it, “Twitter has become the official broadcasting tool of the web."
It works amazingly for short-form publications and allows you to gather quick news or conduct customer service.
Many people see Twitter as a jungle where you have no idea what you will find.
It is open-source with few restrictions, so be prepared to read many comments and be subjected to loads of information.
Twitter User Statistics
Largest age group: 30 - 49 (44%)
Gender: 32% female, 68% male
Monthly active users: 187 million
Snapchat
Snapchat gained popularity with younger users due to its chat/image-sharing functionality where the content was only available for a short time.
This type of content is now used by many others, such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
If your brand wants to share a message with younger generations, this is the right place.
Snapchat User Statistics
Largest age group: 13 - 34 (75%)
Gender: 60% female, 40% male
Monthly active users: 187 million
TikTok
TikTok has become one of the fastest-growing platforms on the planet.
It began as a short-form video-sharing platform for younger users but has evolved to being used by people of all ages over the past few years.
Like Snapchat, TikTok is the way to go for younger generations.
TikTok User Statistics
Largest age group: 18 - 24
Gender: 59% female, 41% male
Monthly active users: 100 million
Here’s another photo-sharing site with more than 300 million users. It lets you actively manage your own photos and share images or videos from others. The posted pictures are called "pins" and according to the book Content INC., there are currently more than 200 billion pins on the platform. Pinterest has been prevalent in the retail space and is primarily used by women.
Pinterest User Statistics
Largest age group: 30 - 49
Gender: 78% female, 22% male
Monthly active users: 400+ million
Reddit works differently than a regular social media platform. With 430 million users (more than Twitter and Snapchat), Reddit is made up of "subreddits."
A subreddit is a community devoted to a particular topic. The Reddit platform has more than two million different subreddits.
You can share your point of view and thoughts about products or services and learn a lot as well (as we saw in previous sections) to become an expert on a topic.
The key part?
You really need to know what you are saying and you can't directly sell your services or products.
Reddit users are unforgiving and can smell a sales pitch a mile away.
Reddit User Statistics
Largest age group: 20 - 39
Gender: 38% female, 62% male
Monthly active users: 430 million
Clubhouse
This social media platform emerged in 2020 and became extremely popular at the beginning of 2021.
Clubhouse is a voice-based social media app where users can navigate different topics and rooms only using audio through their smartphones.
It works similarly to in-person events, where you can attend any session you want and, if you like, ask questions or even participate as a speaker.
Clubhouse User Statistics
Largest age group: 18 - 34
Gender: 43% female, 57% male
Monthly active users: ~ 40 million
Check out this HubSpot article if you would like to learn more about Clubhouse.
Here are some key statistical takeaways:
Where do I share content and how often?
Use the buyer persona you previously created and connect with the target market's emotions you identified.
Based on the age, gender, and emotional value you discovered, create marketing content on the platforms that best match those characteristics.
As we mentioned, you will need to try different types of content on various platforms until you notice some trends that can better guide your decisions towards the best digital content marketing strategy.
Here is a list of the platforms with their content type, length, and frequency that marketing experts recommend you follow.
Successful businesses are organized and plan everything they do.
We recommend you use a Content Calendar to control the entire process of content creation from beginning to end.
A content calendar allows you to see the bigger picture of your strategy and make the right decision. When creating yours, include the following:
Author
Headline
Status
Content-type
Channels
Category
Keywords
Call to action
URLs
Outcomes
If you don't have one, please get our Free template.
6. Align your content with your brand
Once you have defined who to talk to, what to talk about, your differentiator, the content you will create and where you will publish it, you can move on to this essential next step – aligning your digital content marketing strategy with your brand.
We’ll begin by clarifying what a brand is and why we need one. Let's get started.
What is a brand?
It is easier to start by saying what a brand is not.
So, let's clarify some of the myths that people believe about brands.
A brand is not a logo – a logo is a symbol
A brand is not an identity – brand identity is what defines a company
A brand is not a product – products are what people get from companies
So, what is it?
As Marty Neumeier defines it, "a brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization."
It is a person's gut feeling because brands are defined by individuals, not companies, marketers, or markets. Remember that people are emotional and intuitive beings, and they decide if they like something in a few seconds.
Remember this when creating a brand:
What is branding?
Branding is the process of creating a humanized business identity allowing your brand to interact and positively influence the desired perception from your customers.
Why do you need branding?
Because people have too many choices and not enough time
Because most companies offer similar quality and features
Because humans base their buying choices on trust
People won’t create a relationship with your logo or your products. People will, however, build a relationship with the human side of your company.
Branding is existential stuff and you don't have a company without a brand.
Here is a quick comparison between marketing, advertising, and branding from the book The Brand Gap.
Marketing helps you saying what you offer
Advertising helps you saying what you offer… over and over
Branding helps THEM understand what you offer.
Let them create your brand. If you keep telling them precisely what they have to think, they will reject you every time.
Ten ideas you must remember
How to create an audience
Creating an audience is not easy. It requires empathy, love, work, and patience. Audiences are built over time and in the same way that you develop a friendship – it takes years. However, once it is created, it is solid, hard to break, and can last a lifetime.
Here are some ideas from Marty Neumeier that will inspire you to take action and start changing the way you see business:
1) See the best of people: Companies tend to target our weaknesses or addictions. Your job is to change the game. Don't position your products, instead position your customers. Figure out what they are trying to achieve in their lives, professions, or industries and help them do it. The goal is to position your customers for success.
2) Help them find meaning in their lives: People desire to achieve the top floor of Maslow's pyramid – they want self-fulfillment and self-actualization.
This is what you need to understand:
The products have features.
The features have benefits.
The benefits offer experiences.
Experiences create meaning.
So, what meanings does your business create? Remember that people are building their identities when buying your products, and this is what they think:
"If I buy this product, what does that make me?"
Answer that question yourself. After customers get your products or services, how do they see themselves? What happens inside their brains? What do they associate it with?
3) Design the customers you want: If you create something without designing it, it is just a mess because it doesn’t have consistency, organization, or purpose – you are just creating something empty.
What do we mean by this?
You have to create the space for your customers, so they can see that space and live in it. When they see your designs, they should be able to say, “Oh, that is me. That is me you are talking to.” The beauty here is that if they feel identified with what you create, they will tell others and help you create a tribe.
Remember this: Any effort to get customers is marketing, which is what most companies do, and any effort to get customers and keep them is branding.
4) Support and empower the tribe: You have to support your tribe and invest in them. So how do you do it? Start with a small core group of customers, get them to join you, motivate them to spread the word and keep growing the tribe.
Take care of them, decide for them, create content for them, and as a result, they will fight for you against any other tribe.
The following is an idea from The Brand Gap that will help you understand how the audience becomes part of a tribe and defend your brand against anything. People start from the bottom of the ladder to the top:
Satisfaction: Which is the minimum requirement from the audience to start engaging with your brand.
Delight: Where they start telling people about your brand.
Engagement: Here, they start feeling they belong to a tribe.
Empowerment: Where they would be very upset if your brand is taken away from them. Because they are very engaged, they depend on it; their identity depends on it.
Remember this: “Customers don’t buy brands, they join tribes.”
5) Create a framework for stories: Your brand is an ongoing story and what more businesses get wrong is that they should not tell the stories; the tribes should tell them on the brand's behalf. Empower them to say the right things about you.
How do you do that?
You must set up the scene and tell your customers what the situation is; you have to define the following clearly:
What is the direction your brand is going?
Why are you going there?
Who are the heroes of the story?
Who are the enemies?
You just need to provide small pieces of information with a solid meaning that customers can put together and create a powerful story from. You don't dictate the story because you would be selling, and people don't like that.
Brand positioning
Now that you know why branding is so important, you need to develop your brand's messaging system and personality – the way you will communicate with your audience. The following are the critical elements for a successful brand positioning that we use at The Branded Agency.
Target audience and differentiators: Explained in previous sections.
Research: Research will help you identify the most important things about the market, but unfortunately many businesses either don’t put enough time into it or just skip it entirely, not understanding that it is the foundation of branding. Your research should identify the following:
Industry outlook
Industry trends
Industry drivers
Customer demographics
Customer motivators
Customer behaviour
Psychological and behavioural drivers
Product research
Competitor research + SWOT
Purpose statement: This is your internal statement that explains what gets you out of bed in the morning and what inspires business decisions day in and day out.
Brand pillars: The guiding principles that your brand follows, ensuring alignment with the purpose statement. Some strong brand pillars include, but are not limited to:
Inclusivity
Empowering
Accessibility
Sustainability
Healthy mind and body
Simplicity
Quality
Purposeful
Clarity
Connections
Encouraging
Remember that these words must resonate with your target audience. These brand pillars will guide your tribe to share the right information with others.
Key messages: They are statements that represent key topics that you discuss and share with your audience time and time again. These messages help to flesh out the story of why you do what you do. It is how you will inspire people to follow you and defend you against other tribes.
Taglines: This is an easy-to-remember external catchphrase that explains your value proposition to your customers.
Vision: The long-term impact you wish to make in the world. This statement, both aspirational and idealistic, influences your business decisions and is an expansion of your brand purpose.
Brand personality: To create a human connection, you have to select characteristics that will unconsciously connect with your audience. These characteristics help shape your tone and voice. The same way you describe people is how you should describe your brand and, of course, act accordingly.
Some examples:
Professional
Confident
Friendly
Approachable
Playful
Interactive
Bold
Empathetic
Empowering
Encouraging
Modern
Uncover your market position: Identify critical attributes in your market, then map out your competitors against them. This map will visually tell you where you are, compared to your competitors, and how you can improve. Check out this map from Oberlo.
Brand identity: This is the collection of elements that your company will create to connect with the audience – it must portray the right emotions and beliefs about the brand.
Here’s an example of the brand identity and social media guideline we created for Keoch. Some of the elements are:
Logo
Colour palettes
Typography
Illustrations
We did the same for Pianu, check it out:
The following shows a style guideline summary for brand identities:
7. Measure, learn and create again
The final step is to check the analytics of all your platforms and adjust as needed. We will show you how to do it step-by-step, but first, you need to understand everything we have done so far conceptually.
Your digital marketing content strategy can use the Lean Startup Methodology:
How do you apply this model?
You first come up with ideas by researching online on Google Trends, AnswerThePublic and other platforms. Then, you build content, which represents the product. The next step is to measure what you do by checking your data (analytics). Finally, you will learn from your platforms' analytics and then return to the first step again (ideas).
Using analytics
Most platforms give you access to analytics tools, which give you a very in-depth look at your social media platforms, website, Google Ads, and more. Analytics tools will help you improve your content marketing strategy in the following ways:
Get information about your visitors such as visits per month, page views, number of clicks, demographics, locations, seniority and company size (LinkedIn), and more.
Check your content to see how it is performing. You can get information about reactions, comments, shares, impressions, CTR, and more. This information will help you identify what type of content is performing better than others.
Visualize all the information in timeframes so you will know how your content is performing over time.
Let’s go over our own LinkedIn Analytics.
First, go to your page and click on analytics at the top and select the information you want to see.
The above image shows our visitors section, where we can see exactly how many people are checking our page and when. You can select specific dates at the top.
This image shows visitors’ demographics, where we can see the industries our visitors work in. When creating content, this information gives us amazing insights and allows us to share the correct information with our audience.
This image also shows visitors’ demographics, but here we can see where our audience is located in the world. This information allows us to understand our audience even more, and we can use phrases such as "if you live in X, we can help you with Y." This type of messaging will make our content resonate even more with the right people.
You can also see information such as seniority and the company size in which our audience works. Check out these next two images:
If you want even more information about your content, go back to the top, click on analytics, then click on updates.
You will be presented with a chart like this:
This graph gives you data about impressions, clicks, reactions, comments, and more. In addition, the data will be placed on a timeline that will help you see the big picture of how your content is performing.
Finally, you can also see each piece of content you have created and track its performance with data on impressions, views, clicks, CTR, reactions, and more.
If you have access to the analytics of your website, you will find the same information. Here we will show you the analytics of our website.
Analytics and business decisions
To have a winning digital content marketing strategy, you must understand what is happening behind the scene. Analytics will help you identify if the content resonates with people and provide you with insights on the health of your current strategies, campaign success and more.
Critical information you can get from analytics:
Measure the performance of the website and social platforms.
See if your content marketing strategy is working.
Define which type of content to create
Detailed user segments (age, gender, country, etc.)
Optimize your website for optimal performance
Device and operating system they are using
Content performance (impressions, views, clicks, CTR, reactions, comments, share, etc.)
Digital Content Marketing Strategy: Key takeaways
A digital content marketing strategy is a step-by-step plan that will drive and guide your content towards your business goals.
You need a system because it is the only way for you to compete in your industry.
Your content must solve a problem, be directed to the right people, and be unique.
Your buyer persona has to identify the key emotional values of your target market. Most people get indicators; you need insights.
Use the free tools to find content for your campaign. There is plenty of information out there; you need to find it.
Distribute your content efficiently by identifying where your audience lives.
Remember that a brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. Create a communication system that allows you to connect with your audience and create meaningful content.
Analytics will guide your business decisions.
Reach out to us, if you’re curious to learn more or need creative strategies to get your business going!
Here are some very specific step by step branding guides for: Real Estate, Lawyers, Accounting, Doctors, Dentists, Optometrists, Jewellery, Makeup & Beauty, Skincare, Pet Food, Fashion and Construction.
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Feel free to check out our other blog posts here for more valuable information to grow your business.