How to meet your brand goals by organizing your content strategy
Keeping your brand at the center is crucial to meeting customer needs and addressing pain points.
“As digital presence becomes a greater emphasis for businesses, a lot of companies are looking to find out how best to merge all of their activities and teams,” said Ryne Knudson, Senior Content Marketing Specialist for Brandfolder, at our recent MarTech conference.
As a digital asset management (DAM) company, Brandfolder specializes in getting digital content organized and out in front of customers.
“There’s so many moving parts,” said Knudson’s colleague, Leya Kritz, Brandfolder’s Demand Generation Manager. “And it comes to [how you manage] your remote teams, the massive amount of content, personalization, and products that are going to market. It’s about hitting the right audiences at the right time.”
They both agree that marketers have to “strike the right balance” between quality and efficiency when evaluating their content strategy and tech stack.
Linking back to brand
“In order to be able to really build out that tech stack and take full advantage of what your business wants to accomplish from a brand standpoint, it’s important to understand your brand as the center of what you’re doing as a business,” said Knudson.
He noted that there are many different channels to cover, including email, social platforms and web properties. Additionally, these channels are all underpinned by data. And all of these elements should be connected, from a strategic standpoint, to the brand.
“Ultimately, I think it comes down to being consistent, which builds trust, and trust leads to brand recognition, and brand recognition all comes together for brand loyalty,” he said. “And the greatest advantage brands have is the benefit of building out their digital presence.”
Content partnerships
“Creating that content and delivering the message to create that trust and the value in that relationship is really what’s resonating in the marketplace today,” said Kritz.
“What we really do is a lot of thought leadership events, where we get in front of the right customers, the right prospects, to get that message into the market,” she explained. “And we also partner with a lot of analysts to talk to their connections and their networks.”
She added, “But then also [have thought leaders speak] within our space, doing podcasting, building those relationships with key accounts, doing website materials that really resonate as well to get different offer forms in the right hands or in front of the right people.”
Self-educating customers
The right content starts at the top, right out of the gate, and speaks in front of new prospects.
“We take a look at that top level message when it comes to your digital presence,” Kritz stated. “But then also, how can you bring it down-funnel as well?”
The content should be useful in helping customers do what they prefer to do in the current marketplace, which is self-educate.
“This is really important in their buying experience today,” said Kritz. “I think it’s changed. A ton individuals are searching online. They’re talking to their peers.They’re reading reviews, and they’re doing this all before they’re reaching out.”
Many goals, one brand
“I think aligning your campaign and brand strategy is the number one thing when it comes to hitting your marketing goals,” Kritz said. “There’s a lot of moving parts, and that really comes down to having that personalized experience for your buyers.”
She added that marketers should also create ways during this journey to connect to audiences one-to-one, to understand customer needs and pain points. All of this feedback should connect to the content experience, as well as business goals.
“There are a bunch of different goals when it comes to a brand generating demand, but also it can go from that recognition of their brand all the way down the pipeline,” she said.
These goals include KPIs, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs). This content strategy can also be fleshed out with personas, which help map out many of the steps in a buyer’s journey.
“Everything that we create that goes into market, whether thought leadership or down-funnel, really connects to one of the needs or pain points,” said Kritz. “Even if it’s not solution-specific, we really want to connect on that emotional level to really guide them down the journey to get them ready to raise their hands.”
Watch the rest of this presentation at the MarTech conference here (free registration required).
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