When you start a new business, one of the first things you need to consider is establishing your brand identity. Before you begin marketing and selling your product or service, you must have powerful branding to go alongside it.
The most successful brands have brand identities that make an impact, and it will serve as the foundation for all your future marketing efforts. What your brand identity says about your business is equally as important as what you’re actually selling, and one of the ways you can help establish it is through content marketing.
What is brand identity?
Your brand identity is what defines and distinguishes your brand, creating an overall customer perception. It is established through visible elements like your logo, color scheme, fonts, and other design features. It’s essential that you create consistency across all your branding elements and use them effectively everywhere that you represent your brand.
You can showcase your brand identity in point of purchase signs, your storefront or office, product packaging, website, online advertising, customer service, and various streams of content publishing.
Establishing an impactful and cohesive brand identity can help you attract new customers, get more referrals, and build brand loyalty.
What types of content can you use to establish brand identity?
Integrating your branding into all the content you publish is a great way to establish a strong brand identity. Not only that, but your content is an essential part of your marketing efforts. Here are some of the various content types you can use for marketing and building your brand identity:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Infographics
- Social media posts
- Email marketing
- Podcasts
- Ebooks
- Online courses
- Webinars
- Slideshows
- Lead magnets
With all these different types of content in mind, here are the ways you can use it to establish brand identity.
More professional visuals
When you first land on a business’s social media platform or website, you will instantly form an opinion of the brand based on its visuals. If the colors don’t match, the font is hard to read, or the design is outdated, you won’t take them seriously. The layout and style of your website are an important part of content marketing and what images and logos you use as part of it. You can use design platforms that can help you create logos, fonts, and color schemes.
The templates you use for your website and the theme you choose will help you create a more professional brand identity. Having a professional look and using images, designs, and graphics will establish you as an authority and show that you’re a business that customers can trust.
Share relevant content
The content that you choose to share, whether on social media, an on-site blog, or in email marketing is the perfect chance to establish your brand identity. While you might have a fantastic website design, the content you share is what will help you build relationships with your customers. You need to keep your visitors engaged and share content that provides value to encourage them to keep coming back.
The content you share needs to align with your brand and each piece of content will define your identity more and more. When you share original content, such as blog posts or videos, or share externally sourced, relevant articles, you need to be strategic and ensure you are conveying a clear message about your brand’s identity.
Optimize with SEO
SEO is a huge part of content marketing, and a key strategy to use in the development of your brand identity. You want your business to show up on search engines so that your target audience can find you. For that to happen, you need to implement SEO strategies, with a focus on particular keywords that you want your business to rank for. That will ensure that when your audience searches for a specific keyword or phrase, you will pop up.
The keywords that you rank for will go a long way in establishing your brand identity. When people think of the product or service that you sell, you want them to think of your brand. Choose your keywords wisely based on what most accurately represents your brand and implement that into your written content. You can also use those keywords as the descriptive text for your visual assets, images, videos, and social media posts.
There is a lot more to SEO than just keywords, but when it comes to implementing it into your actual content, keywords are an effective strategy that can help with brand identity.
Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
When you’re combining professional visuals with relevant content and optimizing it with SEO, you may expect customers just to come flooding in. The reality is that all these elements don’t equal a customer, at least not right away. Instead, they will create a lead for your business, which you can then nurture and convert into a customer. Lead generation and nurturing is yet another avenue of content marketing that allows you to establish your brand identity.
You need to have a system in place where you can capture these leads. A visitor may come to your page and check out your product or content, but if you don’t capture them as a lead, you won’t be able to nurture them. You can include “contact us” typeforms in your website, pop-ups encouraging people to sign-up to your email list, or provide interest-based offers, such as free downloadables.
Once you’ve captured their details as a lead, you can start to proactively engage with them through content that establishes your brand identity. Use your color schemes, fonts, logo, slogan, etc. in your lead nurturing content to create a cohesive brand identity that your audience will remember.
Establishing your brand identity is an integral part of becoming a successful business. Use your content marketing strategies effectively by implementing your brand identity into every piece of content you use.