They say spontaneity is the spice of life. When developing content, spontaneity is also a way to spice up digital branding.
It’s like cooking….nobody wants to eat a bland piece of meat, but throw some seasoning on it and soon enough you’re Gordon Ramsay!
But you don’t just become a Michelin star chef by throwing ingredients together without the know-how! Use the steps outlined below to understand how to use content to spice up your digital branding.
Using Content to Spice Up Your Digital Branding
Content Helps to Spice Up Your Identity
Certain dishes require various spices, which means you should know what you’re preparing before you start cooking.
Right?
Similar to taking steps to prepare before cooking your meal, you must understand your audience, and your offering before you begin to spice up your identity. Specifically, you must know your audience and understand their challenges.
Step 1: Find Your Audience
Before spicing up your identity with content, you must first find your audience. If you want to create great content, it is critical that you understand the end consumers of your content.
Your digital identity will likely revolve around your consumers. Conduct research to understand what type of messaging will resonate with them.
- Determine your audience demographics– Location, Age, Gender, Occupation, Marital Status etc.
- Examine target audience psychographics– Personality, values, options, attitudes, interests
- Identify their problems- What keeps them up at night
Step 2: Consider Your Offering
Once you’ve gained a complete understanding of your audience, you want to consider how your offering will help to alleviate your audience’s challenges.
It can only benefit you to do your research and drill down on consumers’ pain points to figure out how to communicate your offering that will help them solve their problems in a way manner they can understand and appreciate.
Ask yourself, how does my offering provide a benefit and a solution for my audience?
By understanding how your offering fills a void for your consumer, you can create content that speaks to those voids and presents your solution.
Knowing the connection between your digital identity and the consumers is paramount to spicing up your content. Particularly, when you consider your offering and its benefits, your audience won’t get enough of your savory content.
Step 3: Spice Up Your Brand Personality
After understanding your audience and your offering, you can use content to spice up your brand identity.
Your content must convey personality more than ever before.The goal is to develop content that tells your story and engages people in a meaningful way.
Hone and make use of a unique brand voice, look, and feel that is appealing and inspires a connection with your brand for your audience.
SEE ALSO: How to Use Social Media to Develop Your Digital Brand Voice
While you want to deliver content that is exciting and fresh, you also want to remain consistent.
Developing consistent content allows your audience to build a memory structure around who you are and what value you have to offer.
That means ensuring, every time your content is consumed, it is consistent in appearance, use, size, scope, color, feel, etc.
This memory structure becomes the identity of your organization.
How To Use Content to Spice Up Your Visibility
Why should you care about using content to spice up your visibility?
Simply put, great content increases visibility.
Step 1: Create a Great Headline
One of the biggest draws of great content is a great headline. You want to create an enticing headline or title for your piece of content that motivates your audience to click through.
Taking this a step further, keywords are very important spice.
There is a science behind keyword usage. These keywords must be placed appropriately and used to a certain density. Here is a special recipe that uses the right combination of ‘spice’ to increase your visibility.
Step 2: Optimize your Content with the Keyword Recipe
For keyword optimization, place your keywords in the title, description (first paragraph, typically), headings, content, image titles, alt text, and URLs.
Title
The recommended length for titles is below 65 characters, so the whole title is visible in search engine results. Make sure your target keyword is in the title!
Description
Also known as the meta description, this shows up in the search results below the title and URL. Descriptions don’t directly impact rankings, but they are your way of communicating with the reader.
Headings
Keywords in your headings are also important because visitors like to see the keyword they searched for visible right away.
Body
Like with headings, your readers want to see the keyword they searched for in your content, so does Google!
Image Titles
The image title typically pops up when a visitor runs their mouse over an image in your post which will typically display the keyword.
Alt Text
Add keywords and decriptions as image alt text so your content will be visible in results via image search.
URLs
The alt text is for the purposes of finding your article in a search engine based off of your image.
Content Can Spice Up Credibility
Credibility is fragile. Through your content, your audience will learn to know, like, and trust your brand.
By definition, credibility is the quality of being believed or accepted as true, real, or honest.
You want to create content that establishes and upholds a positive brand reputation.
Be Authentic
As cliche as it may sound, honesty is the best policy when trying to enhance your digital brand’s credibility.
As tempting as it is to convey brand highlights and best moments to keep your brand portrayed in a positive light, consumers value authenticity. Share your process. Keep the lines of communication open.
SEE ALSO: 4 Reasons Why Consumers View Brands As Relationships
Keep Your Promises
Your brand will only go as far as your credibility allows it- now more than ever. People are more sensitive to brand communications based on the business, political, and financial landscape in the United States.
If you break a promise to your audience once, it will be extremely difficult to remedy. Needless to say, your reputation is on the line with every promise.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing offers a means to shape your brand identity by telling your brand story in a way that stands out from the competition and leaves a pleasant taste in the mouths of your consumers.
When used correctly, content can spice up your digital branding. With the right amount of effort, content can take your digital brand from bland to savory. It’s the spice that takes your digital brand to the next level in expanding your outreach. Spicy content establishes you, to your audience, as a thought leader in your niche meanwhile attracting interest from clients and leads, as well as, improving your search engine rankings.
Which of these tips do you find most useful? What would you like to see more of? Please let us know in the comments below!
