Creating Content for Established Brands
From tweets and Facebook status updates to multimedia experiences, there are a number of ways for brands to tell their story. When you’re starting to think about creating content for an established brand, there are some things you should think about before you dive in.
Know EVERYTHING About the Client
Research, research, research! You should make sure that your tone, visual style, positioning and community outreach, just to name a few things, are in line with the brand message and goals. For established brands, this means looking at style guides, strategy decks, mood boards and any other assets you can get your hands on. This also means talking to the client directly to make sure that you can see their vision of the brand as well as they do! Take time researching outside of these things to see what the client has been up to in the media recently.
Read Content Out Loud
This helps tremendously with making sure your writing voice is aligned with the brand’s voice. Especially when writing copy for social media posts, sometimes, it’s hard to recognize an inaccurate tone. Is it mysterious enough? Too rigid? Not funny? It’s like reading a paper out loud to catch grammar mistakes or inconsistencies; reading content out loud will help you identify any misalignment that might’ve otherwise slipped by you. The same goes for reading to a co-worker, they can provide a different perspective on how it sounds to someone on the outside.
Understand Your Audience
Using social listening to inform content creation and curation is a good place to start when the brand you’re working on already has a strong social presence. Go outside of your own immediate community and research what your audience consumes outside of your client. Where are they hanging out online? What part of culture or which behaviors are they reproducing? These questions will help you create content that will keep your brand relevant.
Call to Action
When brands are established, they already have a large following and outside of it people might already know who they are or what they do. Instead of just aggregating content that will make people aware of your brand’s existence, try to add context. Adding context will ask the questions, why is this relevant and interesting to your current followers, and how can you tie this back to your brand? This is what really gets your followers engaged and hopefully will provide value to people who know of you, but don’t follow you yet.
Leverage Brand Expertise
For established brands, leverage your client’s reputation to its fullest potential through your content marketing strategy. Brands with a well-known reputation have a huge advantage over competitors because people can associate the brand with an idea. Use this to your benefit and work off of what people already know.
Consistency
One of the hardest things to do without the proper tools and resources is turn out consistent, quality content. If you’re not regularly on your audience’s feeds (which can be a challenge with new algorithms on social sites) your brand might fall into the background. Make sure you regularly post a variety of content and keep things fresh by not posting the same messages or type of content. Don’t be afraid to switch things up, just always remember to post! We use GAIN to regularly schedule content ahead of time and send it to the team for revisions.
