Brand content: how to build an effective brand content strategy?
The brand content. Another anglicism to designate content produced by a brand in a content marketing logic. These editorial contents take various forms: videos, blog articles, posts on social networks. But concretely, how to set up an explosive, different brand content strategy to reach your targets? In a few lines, we offer you some advice to build a strategy consistent with your brand identity. A golden rule: differentiate yourself!
The editorial line or how to direct your brand content strategy according to the desires and needs of your targets
Your content presents the image of your company. Imagine that you are a young startup looking for an investment fund to develop your range of products or services. Could you speak during a product launch or presentation to investors without having prepared your speech? No, of course not. In digital, the logic is exactly the same. To reach your prospects, first design an editorial line in line with their desires and needs.
Three principles to be respected for the editorial line
Respect the following three principles, pillars of your editorial line:
- The firm’s positioning
- The style, tone and spirit of the brand
- A storytelling process to tell stories by putting you in the reader’s shoes. The positioning must not simply describe the company, it must illustrate a medium-term vision of your firm, be the image you project of your company in the next 5 years. It is illustrated by a sentence explaining the company’s identity: its capital gains, its products/services sold. There are several ways to co-create a differentiating positioning: positioning mapping, strategic canvas. Crux proposes to its customers to elaborate this positioning during a workshop day.
Style, tone and spirit allow communication through a semantics specific to the brand. For example, an offbeat style differentiates the brand from the competition. For example, Oasis, with its panoply of characters representing fruit in a humorous or even hysterical tone, offers brand content through an original editorial line. The brand content brushes the audience with a sense of humor.
A storytelling approach: using the example of Oasis, the brand distills several “episodes” leaving its consumer community in suspense.
It is the same in B2B: you can completely produce content by putting yourself in the shoes of your Persona. Personiv, one of the Crux’s clients, proposes a white paper presenting the different types of defaulters. By comparing them to a bestiary of animals each having their own characteristics. The parrot for the one who keeps repeating that he will pay soon. This white paper, thanks to storytelling, hits its targets with humor by putting itself in the place of individuals or companies who are victims of unpaid debts. The key: a customer knowing that you have understood his problems.
Brand content: what advantages for your brand?
You still hesitate to apply a brand content strategy? And yet, brand content brings many benefits to your brand. Which ones?
Brand content or how to clearly assert your brand positioning.
I say to you Redbull: you immediately imagine the can of energy drink, but especially its offbeat spirit, inciting you to surpass yourself. An example of a brand content perfectly illustrating this state of mind: the parachute jump from the stratosphere at an altitude of 38,000 meters.
This brand content is a perfect illustration of the brand’s positioning, which promotes a certain lifestyle focused on energy, sport and performance, much more than it seeks to sell its product directly.
The brand content or how to assert the brand’s expertise on its universe: example of Leroy Merlin and his comic strip blog
Leroy Merlin produces branded content in the form of a comic strip blog humorously illustrating the tribulations of a young couple settling in their first apartment. The whole blog focuses on the housing universe.
The Internet user can also discover the products of the sign and be advised for the installation of his house or the realization of small works. In this way, the brand, with its offbeat approach and storytelling, asserts its expertise. No need for catalogues and long commercial speeches, digital has now revolutionized the buying process. Internet users have confidence in the brand because it proves its expertise by putting itself in its customers’ shoes and proposing solutions to their daily problems.