Enhance your brand experience with strong content

When creating content, always focus on adding value, not on selling your products or services. Ask yourself whether your content is useful to your target audience. Because before you know it, you're back on autopilot pushing your products or services.

Never give your brand the starring role, that part is reserved for your customers. You can compare it to a first date: if you talk about yourself all the time, there might be no second date. The customer journey describes the customer side of the story. It is their experience, not yours. So don't show off all your knowledge, only reach out with content that will help your target audience.

It is important to ensure that the quality of your content remains consistent. Are your blogs top-notch? Fine, then make sure your ads, web copy, shop navigation and posts on your socials meet the same high standards. On social media, for instance, by giving tips on your area of expertise or discussing common problems faced by your target audience. Show both your expertise and empathy.

The benefits of high-quality and consistent content tailored to your target group are numerous:

1. Your audience will return
Strong content stimulates the curiosity and interest of your (potential) customers. It’s your ticket to attracting and holding the attention of your target audience.

2. Your social media become more social
Do not focus on the number of followers you have on social media: here, too, quality prevails over quantity. It’s about how many and what kind of responses you get to your posts. Does it trigger your audience? Does your content strike the right chord? Does it spark a conversation with your target audience?

3. You build trust
Strong content builds relationships with your target audience. Answer questions and communicate with your audience. Offer value without asking for anything in return, this increases the chances that your advice will be taken to heart.

4. You generate more and stronger leads
Those who like your content are more likely to buy from you. Integrate calls-to-action that lead to your landing page, generate new leads or guide your audience further.

5. Your online findability improves
The more quality content you produce, the easier it is for search engines to find you. Especially if you incorporate the right SEO terms in your texts.

6. Your brand emerges as an authority
If your content proves valuable, you come across as an expert. Not sure exactly how satisfied your audience is with your content? It’s easy to ask them via content scoring.

7. Your brand awareness grows
A smart content strategy ensures that your content - and thus your brand - appears everywhere your potential customers are looking for similar products or services.

8. You cultivate ambassadors
Chances are that the people who are enthusiastic about your content will also become advocates for your brand, influencing purchase decisions of friends and family in your favour. Even if they have never bought anything themselves.

9. You save on your marketing budget
A lot of marketers do not realise that content marketing is probably the most cost-effective marketing strategy. What you pay the writer of your content pales into insignificance compared to the cost of paid advertising and other traditional marketing methods. However, you should always use a professional copywriter. Michelle from Marketing or Frank from Finance may be able to string a few sentences together but may lack the writing experience to deliver the consistent quality you need. Not even with the help of ChatGPT and other text assistants.

The most logical and easy-to-find home base for your content is probably your brand’s website. It goes without saying that your website should not only be excellent in terms of structure and design, but also in terms of content. Go for up-to-date, relevant, interactive and personalised multimedia content on your site. The days when you had a static site built and could then rest on your laurels for years are long gone.

Four requirements your website should meet:

1. Up-to-date and relevant
The first requirement is a double one. Your site must provide answers to user questions and attract new visitors. Update your website regularly. Relevant and up-to-date information ensures authenticity and promotes the personal connection between brand and audience. Consider engaging blogs, insightful podcasts and enlightening videos.

2. Multimedia
Your audience wants to read, hear and see your content. Answer your customers' questions with an educational video. Show in product videos exactly how a product or service works, and how they better your customers' lives. And give your audience a look behind the scenes of your organisation: videos that highlight your company culture - a barbecue, team lunch or other event - create an emotional connection. Nothing profiles a company or brand better than the people who work there. Those who show personality reinforce their brand.

3. Interactive
Strong digital platforms are no longer passive information carriers, but virtual meeting places where busy interactions take place between you and your customers. Think of online forms, competitions, live chats, calculators, configurators, interactive timelines, pop-up screens and - of course - web shops. Also invite your site visitors to share their stories, opinions and concerns. This not only keeps them involved, but also gives you valuable insights into what they find important. It will give you instant inspiration for new content.

4. Personalised
Personalisation on your website is also becoming increasingly important. By tailoring your content to specific customers or target groups, you make it more relevant. You can also personalise the structure of a text. For instance, you can ask a copywriter to build texts in a modular way, so you can change the order of the paragraphs without disrupting the logical text flow. For example, if someone lands on a web page via a Facebook post about product benefit X, it may be advantageous to have content about that particular benefit higher up in the text than it usually is.

Great content that no one sees is useless content. A cool website that is easy to find online thanks to smart blogs and popular videos may be a good basis, but it takes more to maximise your content efforts. Promoting your content on social media, for example. There, you can share your content with a huge number of people potentially interested in your products or services. If done right, social media act as a megaphone for your content and your brand. Moreover, social media are great for engaging in conversations with very specific target groups.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used for content creation. However, it’s important that you bear in mind that ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini are not always accurate and dependable. They answer your questions with assumptions that they present as truths. While the incremental growth in data and computing power increases the probability of correct answers, a fact check is still essential.

Just to say: feel free to get GenAI on board, but don't rely blindly on it. Train yourself to write good prompts and – once again – always do a fact check. And always ask yourself whether the generated answers are relevant and accurate. Because even though they may appear to be sophisticated at first glance, on closer inspection, they can often be quite disturbing. In other words: use your natural intelligence to filter out artificial intelligence’s nonsense.

When it comes to visual branding, as a content creator it is best to keep it sober. A blog page or video doesn’t need to showcase your entire brand book, although you might want to incorporate a few recognisable visual style features.

You can express your writing style or brand identity a little more strongly, albeit without constantly yelling your slogans or lapsing into shouty advertising messages. Now ChatGPT and the likes are in every content creator's toolbox, there is a threat of stylistic uniformity among competing brands. So, if you want to stand out in the best possible way, you not only have to come up with more engaging topics, but you also have to use your writing style to raise the bar. Be sure to have a clearly defined and distinctive brand identity. Especially if several authors work on texts, this ensures more consistency.