They purpose of writing, no matter what context you refer to it for your business, is always working to promote your brand. If your voice is not consistent, then the persona of your brand will fall apart entirely. It sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but if you do not learn how to utilize this skill properly, your competition will always be one step ahead of you in gaining and retaining customers. Content writing just doesn’t refer to the organic success of your website in the SERPS (search engine results page), but to other aspects of Digital Marketing such as social media management (like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), the strategies behind email marketing or press releases.
In this blog, you will not only find out how to define or redefine what your company means to you, but also hone your writing skills so you can develop the brand quickly and effectively.
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1. The Importance of a Strong Brand Presence (PPC)
2. The Importance of Content Writing for Your Brand
3. How to Define and Redefine Your Brand with Content Writing
4. Tips on Content Writing for a Brand
Why Do You Need a Strong Brand Identity?
The only thing worse than being disliked is being unmemorable. By appealing consistently to the lowest common denominator (e.g. sacrifice any sort of personality for the biggest audience possible) your generic identity will be obvious from the start. While it may seem like a positive effort to try to reach as many people as possible, in reality you will not be appealing to anyone. Either specific demographics will feel shortchanged by how little attention you give them, or the customer will be less inclined to engage with your product or offering because you aren’t connecting with them on a personal level. Instead, the brand identity you are presenting only comes across as a blatant advertisement.
As such, you will need to develop your brand in a way that feels authentic to yourself while also reaching the customers that you want. In the next few points we will go over not only the importance of content for a strong brand’s success, but also how to define what you are as a company and how to write like the expert you are.
Importance of Content for Your Brand
Companies do not realize how much they rely on writing to build their brand until they start to lay down the groundwork for it. From optimizing the content on your website with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactics to writing creative and engaging social media posts (lengthy text posts or visual advertisements) to growing your brand by starting a newsletter and marketing your services through email, content writing for your brand will always be important.
Writing can be a springboard for a wide variety of ideas that does not have to be restricted to the online world. For example, a social media post may get you a complaint in your comments section. The way you respond can say a lot about you and what you mean to customers. Giving a generic “we are sorry to hear about that” message without personally addressing the complaint, especially in a small business, makes you look inauthentic. Interacting with customers and finding out what has bothered them in the past may inspire you to analyze how your company addresses the situation and work through the complaint. Are your employees inaccessible when the customer needs them? Did someone notice paint chipping on the walls at your physical location? You will never know until you write back to that customer and try to figure out what went wrong and how to make it better.
How to Define and Redefine Your Brand
Many times the downfall of a business will be the lack of identity that their brand has. It may sound shallow, but a lot of times the product and services you provide are not going to be the lasting impression a company holds about you. On the contrary, people remember the way a message or transaction is presented rather than the actual product or service itself. A low-budget commercial may make your company seem cheap and amateurish even if you have been in business for decades. This even extends to Facebook posts, and the content created for it.
The modern consumer is much more savvy to the tricks that companies will use to sell products, and can recognize when someone is trying to sell them something. For new businesses’, it’s understandable that the biggest priorities are to make a significant revenue and acquire initial customers over building their brand. But, if your business has been around for a few months or even a few years and has plateaued with only a small base of loyal customers, it may be time for you to go in a different direction.
It may be good to loosely base your campaign off of a previously successful campaign of a competitor brand. Rather than copying it straightforward and trying to steal the appeal of another brand, you can use it to inspire creativity and become a foundation for the image you want to cultivate for yourself.
Understanding what the identity of your brand is, even to just differentiate yourself from close competitors, is the first step to writing successfully.
Digital Marketing Strategies to Increase Patient Loyalty
Tips on Writing for Your Brand
- Grammar is one of the most overlooked aspects of writing content for brands. When grammar is done well, no one usually notices. But when grammar is done poorly, everyone will notice. This can make your brand lose credibility with customers, even if your business has a casual personality, who may think the business is sloppy. After all, if your company can’t be bothered to fix a simple typo on an advertisement, how can they trust you to do a satisfactory job with the service that you provide?
- Don’t lose the personality you have been cultivating in the previous sections. To keep it brief, your professionalism should not impede how you see yourself in your role. Customers love the effort of creative advertising, a funny joke or a sincere and warm hearted message of appreciation. A company that tries and fails earnestly is better than a company that transparently just tries to make a buck off of them.
- Press releases also have an incredibly specific format in regards to how they address the dateline (seen below) and can be written ahead of time in order to release it later. However, even social media posts that have a much lower standard than press releases still need to be written well in order to clearly communicate what they want the customer to see. If you are writing a press release or are otherwise involved in public relations, you will need to learn how to write in Associated Press style in the event that your writing is used by journalists for articles. Examples of this include knowing when to write a word out versus when to use numeral digits, abbreviating states for promotions that may be state-specific, and knowing how to write a quote (with no quotation marks before the punctuation mark separating it from the rest of the writing).
- Consider creating a pressroom or business blog page to organize all of the public relations writing that your company does, especially if it is a fast-growing company. Your company does not need to be the size of Coca Cola to organize your works in this way, and it can be a convenient way for you to archive your work for easy access for your customers and the media.
- Be personable and nice to your customers. This is a tricky balancing act but essential to the success of a brand’s social media page. The Internet can make people more hostile, and you cannot fall into that trap. Do not insult your customers, assume all of their complaints are valid, and remember the human behind the computer screen. The email above was an excerpt from an infamous PR scandal for N-Control and Ocean Marketing, the marketing agency that N-Control had hired to promote their Avenger video game controller attachment and handle customer inquiries. The PR lead of this agency got in a particularly heated email exchange with a customer asking when his order would arrive, to disastrous results. In addition, the representative’s grammar was terrible and further added to the unprofessionalism of this response. This forced N-Control to remove the marketing company from the project entirely and redirect any inquiries to N-Control itself, and ruined what could have been a lucrative job for the marketing agency.
Common Mistakes
- The most common mistake made in regards to writing is a lack of consistency. Going off of the previous section, if you do not establish a consistent style from the get-go then you will fail to capture more customers. By trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, your brand loses the personality you have been cultivating by utilizing increasingly generic advertising. Rather than gain new customers, you will just fail to develop any long-term relationships. While it may seem risky to be a bit more personable online, it is better to cultivate a smaller following of loyal customers rather than gun for a larger base that will only last for a short amount of time.
- Wit is important to develop a personality, there are certain aspects that may alienate parts of your audience that are imperative to avoiding controversy. Political posts are very difficult to manage properly. Not a lot of establishments have the clout of a company like Ben & Jerry’s or Chick Fil-A to stay in business while also supporting or criticizing a political or social movement. As long as your business is smaller and not become a national company yet, it is best to avoid political content at all costs.
- Research hashtags and the context they are used in so you may not dilute your message. The tweet above this paragraph is from Digiorno, a frozen pizza company. They used a hashtag, “#WhyIStayed,” and turned it into a joke about how the pizza was too good to leave. What they missed by not researching was that “#WhyIStayed” was a hashtag about why abused partners stayed in relationships, leading to the apology and bad press for them that day. A widespread hashtag could make your company seen as a joke if it is a meme unintentionally copied, or incompetent if it is a more serious hashtag used for corporate gain. Similar to the political posts, avoid posting hashtags that you do not know are safe to use in correlation with your brand until you research what they are and why it is trending.
Next Steps
A lot of this information can be overwhelming to someone who is new to utilizing content writing for their brand. If you feel like you cannot handle the responsibilities of writing various pieces of content nor be able to grasp the grammar necessary for a successful post, you should consider outsourcing your content writing to a digital marketing agency like Mack Media Group or a public relations agency.
While the majority of examples used looked at this from a social media context (which Mack Media can help you with), the tips and mistakes hold true for every word you write for your business. Stay professional, understand grammar and make sure you stay true to the identity you have cultivated for your brand. This is a very important part to growing your business and should not be taken lightly, so having someone take care of the responsibility of writing these posts after establishing your tone could take a lot of stress off of your mind. That way you can focus on providing the quality service you are trying to sell rather than needing to focus on selling yourself online.
However, if you feel confident enough in your skills or your staff’s abilities at writing, these tools will help you grow your brand into a strong and stable force in the way your business is marketed. Through good grammar, an understanding of what your appeal is to customers and avoiding the trappings of lesser businesses, you can use content writing to build your brand into one that not only stays in customers’ minds, but is likable and distinct enough to be a brand your customers will regularly come back to.
