Running and maintaining a business takes up every hour of the day. Whether it’s deadlines, unexpected events, or adapting to the everyday workings of a post-COVID world – there’s not much time to sit back and reflect on your brand.
Through no fault of your own, the growth and changes within your company can cause confusion in regards to who you are as a business. It may feel like you’ve not missed a beat, but a brand needs to be completely understood, or eventually, those cracks will emerge.
The fundamentals of brand identity are what keeps customers coming back. Without a comprehensive knowledge of your values, principles, and beliefs, you’re leaving gaps that your customers will inevitably fill in for themselves.
Taking these four steps into consideration will help you to not only understand your brand’s most appealing features but how you can better communicate them through your content.
Step one: your mission statement
A good mission statement clearly communicates what your brand does, why it does it, and how it can benefit others. Use this as the heart of your mission statement, and pad the rest with additional information about who you are – with a little backstory about your business.
Your mission statement helps to humanise your brand and is the pivotal first step in earning the trust of your customers.
Step two: your values
If you can’t explain what you stand for, and what matters to you as a brand, then it’s time to go back to the mission statement and start over again.
Your business needs to have clear principles. Without them, you’re just another faceless company that’s trying to win over customers in a very competitive landscape. The ability to define your brand values through content is crucial – if you don’t have values, what value will you be to your customers?
Step three: your audience
Now that you can clearly communicate what matters to your business, it’s time to channel that into quality content that converts. How? By stepping back and gaining that outsider’ perspective on your brand.
It’s vital to research and consider what the biggest complaints, obstacles, and fears are for customers within your industry. When you’ve established what those are, you can shape your content around these problems – guiding consumers from a place of worry right into your online checkout basket.
Step four: your competitors
At its inception, your brand most likely offered something unique. With luck, this is still the case today. However, businesses can sometimes get lost in their own universe, and struggle to critically view their current ability to stand out from the crowd.
Take the initiative to implement some tough love. Where can you clearly see that your competitors are currently better than you? How do they show this in their content marketing?
It may sound painful to be so surgical and blunt with your own business, but by taking a long, hard look at your brand, you just might discover how different you are from others.
Once you’re absolutely certain of knowing your brand inside and out, you can begin to plan ways to show that in your own content. Understanding these four steps means you’re now able to channel this into what really matters – converting new customers.
