If Content Marketing is Not Part of Your Brand Strategy, You're Doing it Wrong
Your brand strategy is a key part of your business plan, as it provides the big game plan for all of your brand’s goals. It includes what your brand hopes to be, the purpose it serves, and the message you use to communicate that to your audiences. Many marketers make the mistake of thinking that their brand strategy is a separate part of their business and doesn’t interact with other aspects of marketing strategy. Some people also make the error of conflating a content strategy with a brand strategy.
A brand strategy and a marketing strategy are two different things, but they need to work together in order to bring cohesiveness and alignment to your brand. By understanding the differences between the two and how you can bring them together, you can put together a strong marketing plan that addresses both your branding and your content marketing goals.
Content Marketing Strategy vs. Brand Strategy
A brand strategy and a content marketing strategy work together to help your business grow, achieve goals, and bring your message to your audiences. Both strategies work to help you strengthen your brand identity and grow the brand to reach more people. Let’s break down the two different strategies and explain the differences.
Brand Strategy
A brand strategy is an ever-evolving plan for your brand’s goals and how you achieve them. It requires you to understand the core identity of your brand and the overall brand ecosystem. Brand strategies aren’t put together in a single day, instead they take many hours of deep thinking and collaboration within your internal teams in order to imagine what your brand is from top to bottom. Creating a brand strategy might include:
Mission, vision, values, and purpose
Auditing your existing content
Creating buyer personas
Gathering information on brand reputation
Crafting brand messaging like your value proposition and tagline
Building branding guidelines
Content Marketing Strategy
If a brand strategy is the overarching plan for your business, the content marketing strategy is the blueprint for how you get it done. A content marketing strategy refers to the ways in which you communicate the message of your brand through content. This includes different elements such as:
Marketing goals and definitions
Measurements, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs)
Lead mapping and buyer’s journey mapping
Brand messaging
Editorial calendars
Social media planning
Marketing budget allocation
How Content Marketing Supports a Brand Strategy
Content strategy and brand strategy need to work together. Your brand strategy provides the big picture and the idea of your brand that you want to communicate to the world, and the content marketing strategy is the tool you use to execute that plan.
By keeping the two terms separate and understanding how they are different from each other, you can perfect both strategies and come up with clear ways in which they interact and inform each other. For example, your brand strategy might come up with a value that is core to the identity of your brand, while your content marketing strategy creates ways in which you can communicate that value in your other marketing activities.
If you try to begin your marketing efforts without a clear brand strategy in place, you might find yourself struggling to stay grounded and make actionable moves towards your big goals. Your brand needs to be the core of your business, which then uses content marketing to make sure that your core is reflected in all the activities you do.
How to Make Sure Your Content Strategy and Brand Strategy are Aligned
If you aren’t certain if your brand strategy and content marketing strategy are aligned, there are a few ways you can assess your business and work on creating more cohesion between content and branding. Here are a few strategies you can employ so that you can keep all of your teams working towards the same goals.
Brand Stories
Creating brand stories is a great way to ensure that your messaging is cohesive. A brand story is a narrative that supports your positioning and your value proposition, and is key for brand storytelling. You can also use these brand stories to generate content ideas for your content marketing plan and ensure that your brand stories are reflected in your other content efforts.
Personas
Personas are fictionalized representations of your key audience segments, and are one of the foundational building blocks to both brand strategy and content marketing. A buyer persona tells you who your audience is and what types of messaging, marketing tactics, and sales initiatives will work best with them. Take a look at your personas and make sure that they fit both your branding strategy and your content marketing strategy, and develop them further if they do not.
Core Identity Content
Creating content ideas can be difficult, especially if you create content on a frequent basis. Your core identity can help you come up with more content ideas and ensure that all the content you create reflects the shared values and goals that makes your brand unique. It’s a great way to make sure that new content isn’t just relevant to audiences and optimized for SEO, but that it ties back into your brand identity.
Documented Strategies & Brand Guidelines
Having clear brand guidelines is another tactic you can use to ensure that your content marketing strategy and brand strategy are working together. When you have clear documentation of what your different strategies are and how you express those strategies both visually and verbally, you can maximize cohesion while minimizing confusion within your team.
Identify Responsibility
Keeping your brand strategy and content strategy separate but united is a difficult task. Having clear, delineated responsibilities between team members can help you avoid crossed lines. You can have a brand ambassador or steward who is in charge of making sure brand guidelines are adhered to, all while increasing communication within your teams and making sure that everyone is aligned towards the same goals.
