In recent weeks, our blog series has looked into the intricacies of Digital PR and how to optimise your brand’s online presence through conversion channels, mastering your owned channels and leveraging social media for success.
Now, brands are required to create a greater omnipresence of communication to leverage their audience and increase their exposure across a range of owned channels. However, it isn’t enough to just regularly communicate with your network or have a consistent presence online, you need to ensure the content that you’re putting out is working for your brand, and not just becoming another post or email that viewers scroll past.
Evaluating your content is an important part of communicating with your audience, and not something that should be done once, and then forgotten about. To best evaluate your brands’ forms of communication, we recommend the following process:
- Define your brand values
You can’t clearly communicate your brand values if you don’t know what they are. Beyond what you’re trying to achieve through your product or service, you need to define why you want to achieve it and how you intend to do so, and then form your brand values around those reasons. Having clear brand values is a great way to differentiate your company against competitors, especially in highly saturated markets.
For instance, one of our core values at Agent99 is that we are results driven. So, to communicate this value to our network and any prospective clients, we demonstrate the ways that business impact drives us across our social media channels, website and emails.
In all forms of communication, we represent this value. From sharing our client’s successes on our LinkedIn account, to including the results and business impact from previous PR campaigns in client proposals, we are consistently communicating how much we value results and the impact of our PR efforts on our clients and their businesses.
Let’s say a core brand value is approachability, you could invite your network to reach out and offer solutions where possible. If you value communication, you need to represent this through curated and consistent communication rather than sporadic interactions or auto-generated marketing.
- Define your tone of voice
One of the best ways to reach the right demographic is through the tone of your content. So, before communicating to your network, you need to clearly establish how you want your business to be perceived and the tone you’ll use to achieve this.
Brands that have a clear tone of voice across all marketing and communication channels are able to better connect with their audiences by establishing a clear brand ‘persona’, which helps cement long term relationships between brands and their clients, as they feel connected to the brand and its identity.
A great example of this is Zoe Foster Blake’s Go-To skincare line. Zoe is known for her witty communication and the way she shares her own persona online, so when she founded Go-To, consumers loved that she aligned this persona with her brand, giving it an identifiable personality that resonated with its audience.
What makes Go-To’s communication so successful, is its refreshing use of brand voice and personality. Unlike the juggernauts of the skincare industry that offer bland messages and a grocery list of ingredients that no one understands, Go-To’s use of wonderfully witty, silly communication and cheeky one-liners make the brand memorable against its competitors that use a generic tone of voice.
This communication tactic is done in such a clever way, that consumers would seek out Go-To for its fun branding alone, and interact with its owned channels just to enjoy the witty banter.
So, once you’ve established your tone of voice, aim to keep this tone consistent across all channels of communication. Your brand’s network shouldn’t receive messages from one distinct persona on LinkedIn and something entirely different through EDM marketing. Having a clear tone of voice allows your audience to feel a better connection to your brand, as they know exactly what to expect from all interactions.
- View your content as an impartial onlooker
A great way to evaluate your content is to look at it with an impartial mindset, and consider how your forms of communication would look to someone who isn’t involved in the business.
Try to take yourself out of the equation, and step into the mind of an objective onlooker. Is your content relevant to your business objectives? Is it content just for content’s sake, or providing value to people that come across it? Would someone scroll past it and recognise that it’s coming from your brand, or could it be another generic marketing tactic?
Having an impartial frame of mind when creating content can allow you to strategise better and create smarter content that adds value, so your network is given communication they’d actually want to receive.
If you’re after more tips on evaluating your content or need help communicating your brand’s values to the right audience, please get in touch. We promise we’ll get you the results you’re after (duh, it’s one of our values).
Agent Emma
