How do your brand engagements create loyalty and prevent crises?
You are in charge of a brand that targets major clients and you must constantly convince them to trust you.
Your brand commitments will often come before the quality of your products to develop this relationship of trust. A product or service may “underperform” or not meet expectations temporarily. It is your corporate personality which will then take over so as not to lose your customers and your reputation. Just as we will forgive an error of judgment in a person who has our trust.
Faced with these brands which are all showing more ingenuity and creativity to emerge, Brand Content is surely THE most powerful brand recognition lever and almost free to assert your difference and your commitments.
Brand Content consists of developing regular content that supports your commitments and provides concrete evidence of their implementation in your group.
Why is Brand Content crucial in a brand strategy?
In a competitive environment where trust becomes your main lever for success, Brand Content stands out as an almost miraculously effective strategic lever. Unlike traditional advertising which extols the merits of products, Brand Content tells the soul of your company, its deep societal commitment.
Which societal actor are you? Brand Content will showcase your daily life as a societal actor who interacts with conviction in the lives of its stakeholders.
Your “corporate” content, in all your communications (internal and external) must therefore tell the story of your brand and then be broadcast on all your captive media or even public media and in different forms to attract attention.
An agency like SKILLS, specialized in Brand Content, can help you choose your speaking areas and priority topics in order to use them to reach all your audiences. Prior work and renewed every year will therefore consist of understanding yourself and analyzing with you the expectations of your audiences or stakeholders.
How well do they know your brand? What do they equate it with in terms of values and beliefs beyond the quality of your products? On what social grounds do they await you?
If your audiences adopt you, it is because they will have detected a match between your stated ambitions (your “claims”), your customer promises and your actions.
Our proven method for ensuring effective brand content
As with other areas of communication, good practices always start with the right questions. We will support you step by step to:
- Make the right assessment of your situation
- Make you accept the critical analysis exercise of your current communication
- Choose a small internal group to review your communication strategy
- Carefully estimate the resources you have available to implement the decided policy
1/ Know your brand influencers:
You know your customers; but do you know the influence of all your stakeholders? Consultants in the financial world for example. NGOs in all sectors but even more so in health or energy. Journalists, regulators, influencers are all audiences to consider.
We will test their perceptions of your brand and that of your competitors.
2/ Reaffirm your brand strategy
In a world of immediate impressions forged in an instant on details, it is better to focus on a few pillars of the brand and work on them in depth.
You know your group strategy: but what is your brand strategy? We will help you affirm the commitments that should naturally represent your brand. Then we can guide you to formulate the evidence that each of your audiences requires.
Be sober in the choice of areas to be pre-empted but verbose in the number of illustrations and proofs.
Never refer to any of your products or services. Brand Content does not suffer from mixing genres with marketing. It only carries the values of the entity that offers its products. The subtle link will naturally be perceived by your audiences after a few exposures to your messages.
3/ The pillars of successful brand content
This will involve transforming your brand into a living story through storytelling, carried by authentic collaborators, where convictions take precedence over products, and sincerity over sophistication.
With SKILLS and our experience of more than 25 years in brand content (creation and staging), you will position yourself on the following pillars:
A clean narrative identity
- Build your communication like a living book of your brand
- Each piece of content should be a chapter that tells your story
- Favor authenticity over sophistication
- Create a deep emotional connection with your stakeholders
- Make your employees the first ambassadors of your story
- Adopt your tone and style to assert your identity
Commitment to your values
Your brand content will never talk about your products but only about your beliefs. Those that we recommend prioritizing and illustrating through your actions are among the following.
Ethics and Responsibility
Embody your identity through truthful and committed content, concretely demonstrating your societal values through authentic stories and meaningful actions. It will also be appropriate to integrate the plurality of voices in your organization and the diversity of your audiences to obtain broad support.
Transparency and authenticity
Build content that reveals your daily business life with sobriety and prove your commitments with concrete illustrations and not with conventional speeches. The authentic tone and your brand signature (graphic and semantic) are still just as important to be recognized in a saturated media landscape.
Societal alignment
Can you position yourself as an actor committed to issues that resonate with your activities and your audiences? This exercise is all the more important as your activities may be criticized for their negative societal impacts (Environment, Social, Governance). You will then have to show your understanding, your action plan and your contribution to the major contemporary challenges.
Preferred forms and media
Brand Content can look like a book that tells the story of your brand with as many chapters as there are illustrations of your commitments and there are influential targets (personas).
The variety of subjects and formats but also the regularity of production will give you visibility and the recognition you are looking for.
Your Brand Content agency will help you draw the thread from each speaking theme and multiply the formats to reach all your audiences (blog/post/article/infographics/video, etc.).
Let us remember again that all successful communication is a matter of repeating simple messages. Repetition therefore means using all the proprietary media available or even launching into those you are missing and which can reach your audiences (new social networks, digital debates, newsletters, etc.).
Brand Content can also use the annual report as a communication vector. However, most annual reports are institutional presentations of the company that few read in depth.
If the annual report most often involves top managers, the content of your brand content will mix the opinions of many voices in your company. This mix of profiles will allow you more authenticity and also the certainty that the speaking topics correspond to a reality that your ambassadors are ready to convey.
Trends and Innovations
You will be able to exploit artificial intelligence as a catalyst for engagement, an amplifier of your content, while taking care to preserve the human essence and your corporate personality.
The AI can, for example, bring you ideas of other societal subjects on which to assert your convictions, depending on your sector of activity and the way in which the AI can imagine its future and that of its clients.
Technology can also allow you more interactive content: you will thus innovate without loss of meaning, by creating experiences that personally engage your audiences.
Brand content, pitfalls to avoid:
There are many mistakes to avoid, but the keys to getting there could be summarized as follows:
1/ Identify your true personality:
Let’s not communicate just to say nothing, but let’s choose the subjects of conviction that make up our identity and our differentiation. Let’s express what we’re proud of and wear it high and long.
2/ Choose your audience:
Detractors are to be considered but cannot be the preferred target. As the basis of your audience, we will choose your silent majority who support you but do not express it loudly. We will create a pride of belonging that begins with that of your internal brand ambassadors.
3/ Intervene frequently:
Formats, new chapters, varied media, influencers affected. It is the regularity of communication that also creates recognition. What we often hear becomes the truth! Unlike the short-term editorial planning of content marketing, a Brand Content campaign takes place over a long period of time.
4/ Affirm its authenticity:
No need to choose complicated battles, but simple commitments that resonate in the lives of your audiences. You will show how you get involved with the greatest sobriety possible so that your authentic personality comes through, for the benefit of your brand image.
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