Brand building

the importance of blogging

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The importance of blogging

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β€œIf Google has the choice to show two articles for the same keyword, which one are they going to choose? The one where readers average 45 seconds on the page or the one where readers average 4.5 minutes on the page?” – Marcus Sheridan, keynote speaker, author, and partner, IMPACT

Blogging is the fourth core essential for building a sturdy online brand identity. According to an Orbit Media Survey, the indexation of your website rises by 434 percent when you have a blog. Brands which blog also get 97% more links to their websites.

Blogs are further viewed as one of the most trustworthy sources of online information. Blogging is the second most popular media format that marketers leverage, and ranks as having the third highest marketing ROI.

Blogging should be part of every marketing strategy because it gives your brand an opportunity to show its identity on a deeper value level. It’s also an opportunity to exhibit your brand’s unique knowledge and expertise in your particular industry.

Creating a blog should be one of the first steps you take to drive new traffic. It’s a highly effective way to reach your target audiences. You reach them through creating content that is relevant to their online searches.

GNL considered some of the latest insights and trends to get you going. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to blogging or would like to invigorate your content strategy.

Five key ingredients for the perfect blog:

  1. Blog posts should be in sync with your brand’s goals – particularly that of serving your audience:

One of the main reasons you’re blogging is to express your brand’s market insights and expertise. Yet, if your blog doesn’t strive to also address the needs or challenges faced by your audience, it becomes a pointless exercise. A blog post that doesn’t resonate with its audience will not generate traffic, leads or sales. Speak to your brand persona’s challenges and obstacles it may have encountered, and how it overcame these. In short, humanise your brand to make it more relatable.

  1. Leave your audience with something to take home:

Content becomes most effective when it gives readers something they can benefit from. One way of achieving this is by including concrete, actionable steps they can apply. When compiling a blog post, ask yourself: have I truly added value to the few minutes my readers will spend on my post?

  1. Give authority to your blog by making research a priority:

Content creation is a serious business. Always remember, you’re not just writing for your unique audience, but for the world’s stage. Most people will probably never have heard of your brand, so make the moment count. If you want your blog to be impactful across industries, peoples and cultures, you’ll need to write with authority that’s backed by current research. Challenge yourself to add to that research by offering new insights through your writing.

  1. Links produce authenticity and trust:

With search algorithms continuously evolving, one of the key things still looked for is links. All links, whether external, internal or back, should be part of every SEO checklist. Links also add authenticity to your writing by showing your content is credible and well-researched.

  1. Long-form content:

Your content should be as long as it needs to be in fully addressing the reason why the reader has landed on your site. Don’t underrate long-form content. With longer content, you’re also telling search engines like Google that what you’ve compiled answers a user’s inquiry. Doing so more comprehensively is of a higher value than short-form content. Long-form further makes people spend more time on your website, which is also very important for SEO.

Ultimately, you want your brand to be a trustworthy source of information. Key industry insights will make your website worth visiting again and again. Well-researched, authoritative and well-written long-form content can help you achieve this.

The Capstone: Search engine trust

Your brand identity is not complete without the buy-in of internet search engines. If your website isn’t optimised for SEO, you won’t be attracting new customers – not easily.

CEO and founder of seosupport Vincent SΓΌnderhauf was featured in Forbes magazine. He used real-life human prerequisites to help us understand Google’s trust algorithm.

Basically, there are three trust accelerators to the algorithm:

  1. We trust people we have interacted with and know.
  2. Β  The longer we have known someone, the more we trust them.
  3. Β  Our trust grows faster and stronger (or breaks down entirely) in shared crises or under intense circumstances.

The more interaction, duration/frequency and intensity, the better the ranking will be. The bottom line here is earn the trust of your users first. Google will quickly pick up on this through its user engagement analysis. And again, it comes back to that humanity principle.

The more a brand is perceived as human, the more relatable it becomes, and the more people it will draw to itself. The intimate connections brands create are foundational to brand loyalty. And if you have a loyal audience who visits you time and again, search engines will take notice!

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Why video content matters to your brand

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Why video content matters to your brand

Let’s consider that your brand’s website and social media are the building blocks of your online identity. It follows, then, that video content and blogging are the central supporting elements. The synergy between these four essentials is what helps brands to build thriving online identities.

Thanks to its human-to-human interaction, video is a powerful medium to connect with your audience on a more intimate level.

Video has shaped the way social media platforms operate, largely because of the higher engagement rates it gets.

Here are seven reasons video content should be part of your brand’s marketing plan:

  1. Video offers the highest ROI of any media format.
  2. Β  In 2022, 82% of all consumer web traffic would be from video.
  3. Β  The average time people spend on pages with video is 6 minutes, while the average on pages without video is 4.3 minutes. (Google views this margin as massive.)
  4. 1 in 3 marketers plan to invest the most in video marketing in 2022.
  5. 86% of businesses today use video as a marketing tool, as opposed to 61% in 2016.
  6. 86% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads, and 81% say video has helped them directly increase sales.
  7. Consumers spent 14.6 billion minutes watching video in 2021; that’s a 20% increase from 2020, and 121% from 2019.

In today’s digital-first landscape, video content is an integral tool for consumers. They can discover and research new brands or products easily and quickly.

Compelling video content can drive consumers further down your marketing funnel. But before you can convert them, you need to nurture them and build trust.

The main goals companies have with video are aligned with top- and middle-of-funnel efforts. These include:

  • Β Driving brand awareness (22.4%)
  • Β Product education (21.6%)
  • Driving customer engagement (18.4%)
  • And generating leads (18.4%).

According to Wistia, most companies want to create original video content. Yet, only slightly more than half said they had a concrete video strategy in place.

GNL considered five criteria to help your brand create video content that matters.

Five ways to make your video content matter:

  1. Strive for brand synergy:

Video is an opportunity to be inventive and to express your brand’s identity in exciting ways. Ensure, however, that your core message remains in line with your brand’s unique persona.

Establish a set of guidelines to ensure that a “golden thread” of brand identity is evident in your videos.

  1. Find your brand’s creative sweet spot:

What is it about your brand that sets it apart from the rest, and that makes it so relevant to your audience? Be imaginative with your video content and look for honest ways to draw your audience in. Video is your opportunity to show your brand’s inventiveness.

  1. Social video is all about story:

Consumers overwhelmingly prefer to watch a short video as opposed to spending time on most other forms of brand communications. With video, you can compile a compelling brand story that’s easily digestible yet layered. Make the moment count, and make sure the telling is done in such a way that it will be remembered. Also, be prepared to invest in its professional production.

  1. Befriend TikTok:

62% of marketers plan to increase their investment in TikTok, and for good reason. Since its arrival on the scene, short-form video has made massive strides. Some are even claiming that TikTok will take over social media, leaving other platforms to adapt.

  1. Show awareness of the bigger picture:

Video content is not just about projecting your brand to the world. It’s also about showing a keen awareness of what else is happening around us. To connect with audiences who are quick to scrutinise brands, it’s become expected of brands to take a stand on social (even political) issues. This is the new normal, and brands are increasingly making social responsibility part of their social video campaigns. Consumers want to perceive your brand as human, after all.

Brands, nowadays, are more than their products or services. Find the deeper meaning in your brand that resonates with people. Make that the core of all your marketing efforts. Use the full power of video to bring this to life.

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Building an online brand identity

Building an online brand identity

The superstructure of brand identity is dependent on a vigorous online presence. This presence feeds on a consistent uptrend of user engagement and conversion.

If the foundation of your brand identity is not robust, the whole framework will be fragile.

Two important building blocks of online brand identity are:

  1. A user-sensitive website
  2. Β  And an attentive social media presence.

These form the backbone of your brand’s online business endeavours. They are the points from which you expand to all other consumer and business touchpoints.

Home is where the website is

β€œWebsites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that.” – Paul Cookson

Your website is your business’s digital head office. It’s the place that never sleeps and where your brand narrative starts. It’s also the stage from which you project your brand’s values, objectives and achievements.

It is, in a sense, the vanguard of your online ecosystem. It’s how you set yourself apart from the competition and from where you drive new business.

And, as with a physical storefront, website user experience (UX) is key. It impacts your online brand identity. The first impressions of those “entering the door” matters – a lot!

β€œFocus on the user and all else will follow.” – Rule #1, Google’s β€œTen Things” Philosophy

Customer experience (CX) is the overarching category into which user experience falls. It’s the customer perceptions of a brand as a whole and throughout their entire brand journey. User experience (as a subset of CX) is the end user’s experience with your product, service, app or website.

Nowadays websites need to work well on desktops as well as mobile phones and tablets. And if they don’t deliver an excellent user experience, your brand’s reputation will be at stake.

A good UX starts with understanding who will be visiting your website. What will they be wanting from your website? Whatever they need, you’ll need to ensure they get it quickly – or else they’ll leave. This is considering that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.

For this article, GNL researched insights from A Comprehensive Guide to the ROI of UX, Monsido’s 2022 State of Websites Report, UserZoom’s The State of UX 2022, and Adobe’s Achieving Deliciousness: Adapting to an increasingly content-hungry world, among others.

Six ways to optimise your website’s user experience (UX):

  1. Invest in UX and make design central to all touch-points consumers have with your brand:

On average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return – that’s an ROI of 9,900%. When users value a website experience or interaction, they are bound to visit again.

Stunning design also trumps simplicity. When pressed for time, 59 percent of global consumers crave beautiful design over simplicity. Design-driven businesses also outperformed the S&P by a whopping 228% over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, 94% of people cite web design as the main reason for mistrusting or rejecting a website.

  1. Integrate user research in your website’s development process:

According to UserZoom, integrating user research in product development works wonders. It impacts customer satisfaction (by 80%) and brand perception (by 76%).

  1. Optimise page speed:

Pages that load in under a second convert around 2.5 times higher than pages taking five seconds or more. An extra five seconds of page load time can also increase your website’s bounce rate by more than 20%.

  1. Adopt a mobile-first approach:

A mobile-first website strategy that delivers a user-centric experience must be the norm. This is because most people visit websites using their mobile phones. Small wonder, as there are 5.34 billion unique mobile phone users globally.

  1. Make accessibility a priority:

In 2022 WebAIM surveyed 1-million of the world’s top home pages. Most (97%) had accessibility errors, the majority of which (86%) were due to low-contrast text. Besides violating the basic tenets of good design, such an error can also cause non-compliance issues. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a good place to start. It covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible for all.

  1. Test your website’s usability:

Users visit your website to fulfil a specific need. If the experience is frustrating or time-consuming, potential customers will move on. Conduct tests to evaluate your website’s usability. Test early, test regularly, and always focus on your unique audience and their needs in relation to your brand and its offerings.

In this age of multi-choice and immediate online convenience, your website needs to stand out from the crowd. If your website’s UX is not spot on, and if the experience of visiting is frustrating, you’ll end up losing business.

Your website is not just a home for your business, but a home for others. Make sure they will want to visit again and again.

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The importance of brand engagement - social media listening and user-generated content (UGC)

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The importance of brand engagement: social media listening and user-generated content (UGC)

Listening and engaging as a brand on social media will help you keep and grow your core community. And that community is then primed to do invaluable work for your brand behind the scenes.

Since the pandemic, social media has become the most preferred marketing channel. Pre-pandemic, it ranked second to business websites, which topped the charts back then.

Websites are now second, followed by email marketing, content marketing and influencer marketing. Search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing and virtual events come next.

As an aside: virtual events are being reinvented, thanks to the Metaverse.

But when it comes to connections that drive brand value, social media is set to stay top of the pack for now. Leveraging its power is an opportunity to foreground your brand on the world’s social stage.

But connecting with your audience on social media takes effort and dedication. Through engagement with their social media audience, brands can foster brand loyalists. This goes hand-in-hand with social listening.

Social media listening

Social media monitoring involves direct engagement with your community. Social media listening is about interpreting the online sentiment towards your brand.

Monitoring tells you ‘what’. Listening tells you ‘why’. Both are crucial for brand development.

Social listening involves extracting data from your social media platforms. This allows you to assess how your audience interacts with your brand. How do they feel about offerings, the industry as a whole, and your competitors?

Research shows that most businesses (61%) now have a social listening system in place. More than 82% view it as a key planning element in their social media marketing strategies.

Brands which don’t practice social listening lose out on valuable data. Data which could help drive brand awareness, trust, and drive conversions.

It’s through social listening that a brand can answer questions such as:

  • How does my audience feel about my brand and its projected values?
  • How do they feel about the ways in which it tries to connect with them?
  • What are my audience’s passions and what do they view as social responsibilities?
  • What are their needs, and how can I connect with them more effectively to meet those needs?

The two biggest impediments to effective social listening are cost and time. This is according to research by Meltwater and Social Media Today.

The actual process also remains challenging for many brands. That shouldn’t stop brands from seeking innovative ways of social listening.

Being more in tune with your social media communities is a step in the right direction. But being aware of what they say – and seeking concrete answers to why they perceive your brand as they do – is not simple.

Investing in social media management tools is critical. Start with HubSpot, Sprout Social, Hootsuite or Awario.

They can be helpful when developing your social listening strategy. But they don’t tell the full story on their own. The data is just too much and don’t reveal everything about brand engagement. They show the bricks, but not the building and surrounding sky and landscape.

Simplified processes for social media information gathering are still lacking. Effective social listening is also not just about data gathering and analysis. It’s an art, a continuous process of developing your receptiveness to your audience’s voice.

Try embedding listening into your brand’s DNA. Make it foundational to your marketing strategies. You’ll love the new insights gathered to optimise your brand’s presence and potential on social.

Building healthy social media communities

People want to connect with brands that are earnest and energetic social listeners. They want to be part of that conversation.

It means that brands can no longer approach consumers as outsiders. They need to see consumers as active participants in a brand’s community building. This is where user-generated content (brand-related social content developed by your audience) helps.

Here are four reasons why user-generated content (UGC) should be part of your brand’s social media plan:

  1. 60% of people wish brands would tell them what type of content to create and share.
  2. 64% of consumers are likely to share content about a brand. But that’s only if that brand is sharing content by other customers.
  3. 60% of marketers feel their audience engages more with UGC than branded content.
  4. 61% of marketers plan to incorporate more UGC in 2022 and beyond.

Building an engaged community means you’re creating a team of marketers. They will do invaluable work for you behind the scenes. Furthermore, research shows that brand trust is today driven by communities.

For instance:

  • 75% of consumers are likely to search for reviews and testimonials before buying
  • 72% of consumers regard reviews and testimonials as more credible than brand promises
  • 76% of consumers have purchased a product because of someone else’s recommendation

Consumers have spoken. They want to be part of your brand’s development.

Your brand’s identity no longer sits in your hands. Its soul is now highly visible to all, and people are talking. It’s time to start listening – and to take a deeper dive into social chatter.

The Metaverse and how social media amplifies your brand’s voice

Social media is where your brand expresses its deeper voice. It allows for greater assertion of your brand’s sentiments, insights and achievements. It’s where you engage with your community on current issues relevant to its unique market.

Social media gives your brand an opportunity. It can build on a voice that resonates beyond your unique audience.

Social media has changed our perception of brands. Think of the likes of Nike, Gucci, L’OrΓ©al, Spotify, and Samsung, to name a few.

You might not buy from these “hyper-brands”, but you’re aware of their status and, most likely, would engage them.

And that’s not even thinking about the effect of the metaverse on social media and marketing. When the metaverse is active, social media will be even more exciting. It will also be even more relevant for brand building.

The social media experience itself will be more interactive and intense. Such an immersive experience means heightened emotions. What we like now, we’ll like more then. What we hate now, we’ll hate more then.

But one thing that won’t change for brands is the importance of social listening. Effective social listening will always be foundational to developing a faithful brand community. Your brand’s audience will always want a voice and to play a part in developing your brand identity.

Active social listening and monitoring shows that your brand is human after all. And humanising your brand makes it more relatable, approachable, and likeable.

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Fostering brand intimacy through storytelling

Fostering brand intimacy through storytelling

Telling your brand’s story is an opportunity to connect with your audience intimately. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on how aware your organisation is of your brand’s identity and purpose.

Humanising your brand allows for deeper intimacy with your target audience. As with any relationship, intimacy is dependent on making meaningful and memorable connections. If you can capture the heart of that connection, brand loyalty will follow.

AΒ  Capgemini study shows 70% of emotionally engaged consumers spend up to two times or more on brands they are loyal to.Β 

Emotionally connected consumers also have a 306% higher lifetime value (LTV) to brands. They will stay with a brand for an average of 5.1 years (as opposed to 3.4 years if not emotionally connected).

Emotional brand engagement and personalised brand experiences are key to driving brand loyalty post-pandemic. It’s more than corporate messages, offers and recommendations or basic predictive customer experiences.

Touch, pause, engage

Today, there’s a demand for that human touch and one-on-one familiarity. No wonder 83% of customers prefer solving complex problems by speaking to one person only.Β Β Β Β 

Consumers now expect companies to go deeper and to understand and connect with them as individuals. They want to be recognised as special and having unique lifestyles – not approached as customer types or segments.Β 

And as brands try to connect more intimately with consumers, consumers want to know more about a brand’s character and backstory. They hope to find an appeal in the brand to their perception of self.

Marketers are more aware than ever that storytelling anchors emotional connections. This is regardless of whether your brand is a service, a product, or a host of products with different identities.

Story stirs memory

Telling your brand story creates a memorable moment for your audience. It’s a moment in which you project your brand as personal and human, not cold and disconnected.Β 

In a 1969 Stanford study students were tested on their ability to memorise lists of words.Β  Half had to create a narrative around the words, while the other half simply had to memorise them.

For those who memorised the words in list form, the average recall was 13%. Those who memorised in story form had an average recall of 93%.

Show confidence

Storytelling is also a chance to show your brand’s confidence in its identity, mission, value and virtues, and its broader market.

Above all, telling your brand’s story is your first step towards showing how well you resonate with its community (your target audience). This is foundational to fostering deeper brand intimacy, and, correspondingly, brand equity.

And to note: Brand resonance and brand intimacy are not the same (as some claim). Rather, they’re interdependent.Β  Greater resonance stirs more intense intimacy. This compels audiences to welcome a brand into their lives.

The only constant in telling a brand’s story is that every business should do so.Β  And while there is no one-size fits all approach to the telling, there are markers for brand story mastery.Β Β Β 

Authenticity is key

Telling a brand’s story is not as simple or straightforward as it seems.

You might know your history well, and you might have an ironclad idea of how you want to script your next chapter. But are you of how your brand is perceived by others?

Telling your story presents an opportunity for such introspection.Β 

Six key questions to building an effective brand voice

  1. What does my brand truly stand for?
  2. How effectively does this set me apart from the competition?
  3. What is my distinct brand voice?
  4. How am I developing this voice?Β 
  5. What are the tenets of my brand that will stand the test of time?Β 
  6. Will the telling of my brand story stand the test of time?Β Β 

Such questions merely skim the surface.Β  Maybe now is a good time to also do an internal and external brand value and perception appraisal.

Without having a strong grasp of your brand’s identity and influence, its story will lack authority and authenticity.Β 

Knowing with whom you’re sharing your story further impacts on how you’re going to tell it.

Four questions to help you know your brand audience better

  1. How well do you really know your target audience?
  2. What are the values they look for in a brand?
  3. How do they perceive your brand?Β 
  4. How is your brand’s voice interpreted by them?Β 

What deeper impact do you expect from this voice? Think about the people or businesses your brand wants to help.Β  How does your brand help your audience β€œsurvive and thrive”?

There is power in the way your brand’s story is told. But if the telling doesn’t strive for resonance and intimate connection, it is fruitless.

Today there’s also greater appreciation for content that is meaningful and authentic. Communicating honestly and transparently is more important now than before the pandemic, a Salesforce survey shows.

People want to trust brands (not just their offerings)

Trust can only be achieved if brand communication is humanised, so your audience doesn’t feel lost in an unrelatable narrative. This will also help expand your market reach – by attracting consumers outside of your target audience.

And remember, your brand story is not an Instagram highlights reel. Tell people about the obstacles you encounter and how your brand navigated those tricky times.Β 

In other words:

  • personalise your story,
  • make it real,
  • drive resonance,
  • forge deeper emotionalities

Give your audience a voice

Even better, make your audience part of your story.Β 

If you’ve received glowing testimonials on the impact your brand has made, share them. But don’t go overboard.

Keep things humble and authentic.Β  Let everything you say and the authority with which you say it inspire brand trust.Β Β Β Β 

Let others do the telling

Your brand’s story should leave your audience feeling good. Research shows that word-of-mouth and user generated content (UGC) are immensely powerful resources.Β  So, share your story in such a way that it will be remembered and that others will want to share it in turn.Β 

If you do this, then you’ve taken the biggest leap in humanising your brand and creating trust, intimacy and loyalty among your customers.

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