Regardless of the type of business, you’re running or even the industry that you’re operating in, to say that your brand identity is important is a little bit of an understatement.
Successful branding doesn’t just help create an improved image and a relatable identity, but it also brings with it the most important benefit of all: increased customer loyalty across the board.
You know how certain companies seem to not really have “customers” so much as they have “fans”? The type of people who won’t shut up about a particular company’s products or services and who tell everyone they know about them? The ones who show off every purchase, post on social media and even stop by a particular store just to look around?
These are the types of people who allow companies to stand the test of time and strengthening your brand identity is “ground zero” in terms of accomplishing this goal. To that end, content marketing will be a hugely important part of these efforts for your business in a number of ways that are more than worth exploring.
The power of content marketing and your brand identity
There was an era not too long ago where a large part of your brand identity was informed by the advertisements that you put out into the world. Make no mistake, those days are long gone.
Consider the fact that in 1984, the average person saw about 2,000 ads per day. By the time we get to 2014 just a few decades later, they were seeing about 5,000 ads per day. If you truly want to take complete control over your brand identity, straight sales techniques are no longer your most powerful weapon due largely to this type of ad/information overload.
So what does that leave you with? It’s simple – content marketing.
Remember that so much of what people feel when they experience your brand will ultimately come down to what you represent. Not what you’re trying to do, but why you’re trying to do it. The values and ideals that you believe in. The shared concepts that are both important to you and to members of your audience.
What better way to convey that you deeply care about the success of your audience and the communities that they live in than content marketing? What better way to show that you truly care than with a video outlining your recent community outreach efforts, or an Infographic that outlines all of the money you and your teams were able to raise for charity last year?
These are the types of things that people respond to in a very raw, earnest way. They’re also hugely informative, feeding back into your brand and painting a much more vivid picture of its very personality than any traditional advertisement ever could.
Content marketing can be especially helpful when your brand goes through some type of significant change – like if you appoint a new CEO or if your company is purchased by another. During these times your brand identity will naturally be in a state of flux – content marketing can be a great way to redefine and double down on the aspects that work in the minds of your audience.
Take this Infographic, for example, created with Visme (which I founded). Titled “How Do You Know When It’s Time to Rebrand?“, it outlines both the steps that you can take to assess your brand identity during transitional periods and outlines how you can ultimately use this as an opportunity to make the strongest impression possible on the audience that you’re actually communicating with.
There are certain elements that you can lean into – from font selections to color schemes to even logo designs – during this time that all feed into the larger brand identity that you’re trying to portray. When executed properly, this can be a great way to navigate from one end of a rocky transitional period to the other – keeping what has always worked and what people identified with and jettisoning everything that didn’t.
Infographics and similar types of collateral can be hugely invaluable during this time. When you use a tool like Visme that is so straightforward that anyone with little or no design knowledge can make the most of it (Visme is just one example – there are many others), every element of your brand identity is fully within your control at all times.
Resources like Uscreen can also be invaluable in terms of this goal, because they let you monetize your video collateral across various channels that both expands your organic reach and that allows you to maintain the elements of your brand identity that people are connecting with at the same time.
The tools are already in your hands – you just need to know how to use them.
The right identity for the right business
Again, it is hugely important for you to understand that your brand identity is a lot more than just a logo or a particularly pretty website. It’s the impression that people get when they encounter your business. It’s not the logo itself, but the feeling that they get when they see that logo. It’s about that sense, somewhere deep inside them, that makes them immediately interested in your products and services in a way that they themselves might not even be able to vocalize.
Based on that, it stands to reason that you should always be looking for new and innovative ways to strengthen that brand identity in any way possible. If you’re not sure how to do this, get in touch with Outre Creative. For the last few years (and for at least the next few, if not longer) content marketing will be one of the most powerful ways that you have to accomplish precisely that.
