Mastering Brand Content Strategy Development

Doing more with less seems to be in the cards for the foreseeable future. This is why CMOs are leaning into taking advantage of digital marketing or traditional means. According to Gartner, marketing budgets continue to tighten, with most companies reporting a 15% decrease in already slim budgets. 

Digital marketing is anything through digital channels, including mobile, online platforms, social media marketing, and content creation. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, refers to any kind of marketing that happens off-line. For example, face-to-face, phone, print advertisements, television commercials, or radio advertisements. A mix of both is necessary. 

This is good news for content strategists who can adjust to meet digital marketing demands. Here’s what you need to know to create a brand content strategy that attracts the right audiences. 

A winning brand content strategy starts with understanding the relationship between your brand’s promise and your audience’s needs. Then you create ‌content that meets both of those values. 

What’s branded content marketing?

Branded content marketing is about creating content that meets the needs of your audience and which frames your brand. Further, branded content isn’t sales-y content. Rather it’s content that’s useful to your audience because it is informative or entertaining. Your content marketing goal is to created high-quality content that adheres to your brand voice and meets the needs of current and potential customers.  

In contrast, “brand marketing” is a term used to describe content that’s strictly about the business. It’s about how your brand started, who founded your business, what is the story behind your company. Both types can work to build brand awareness and should be part of your brand strategy.

A third type of content is campaign content — this is content that’s pushing for the sale by telling customers it’s cheaper, faster, and better. It often directly asks customers to take ‌action (sign up, download, call). A conversion page is considered campaign content, not branded content marketing.  

This article is about planning and executing branded content marketing — content that meets the needs of your current and potential customers. 

Why is branded content marketing important for digital marketing? 

For years, analysts have stated that B2B buyers have long started their sales journey before you even know they’re looking. And that’s not surprising. A B2B sale is complex, with often 6–10 stakeholders involved in decision-making. Each of those stakeholders is looking for information, which is often then shared between multiple stakeholders. This means the customer journey flow is neither linear nor confined to one persona. 

That’s what makes B2B content marketing so challenging. You need a tremendous amount of content ideas to satisfy the many stakeholders.

An effective content strategy also has to ensure that your brand’s identity‌ is properly reflected. Its voice and values must be tailored to each stakeholder to build trust and engagement. Since such a strong variety of content is required to educate these personas, digital marketing is far more affordable to produce and deliver than traditional marketing. 

 Usually, digital content can be created and available on demand. According to McKinsey, companies selling through digital channels drive five times more revenue growth than their peers. 

Understanding Your Audience’s Needs 

Potential customers have a multitude of options out there vying for their attention. How are you going to break through the literal noise and make your message heard? 

My father had an adage—“Go where the competition ain’t.” You need to offer something that’s fresh and unique to your brand offering. Find that area where you are the expert‌ — ‌the go-to.

I already mentioned that your brand’s identity is based on your company’s offerings — and your audiences’ needs. I like to start with your audience.

The first thing you’ll want to do is think through the different personas for your brand’s offering and conjure up buying scenarios. This can be hard, especially because there may not have been anything available, until your brand’s offerings came along. How will you get their attention? 

Ask yourself questions about your audience. What is going on in their workplace that will make them want to find a new solution? Are they seeing employee churn? Are they doing the same repetitive tasks that create endless opportunities for errors? Is ‌physical pain being experienced that could be eliminated? 

What’s their mood? Marketers call it “pain,” but I prefer “mood,” or state of mind. This could also be described as “what keeps them up at night.”

As a content marketer, you are trying to use your power to convince people (who often don’t believe you) to like your creation. So, what is the typical mood of your audience? 

If you are writing an educational piece for an IT security persona — they’re literally terrified that some product they put into their system will create a breach and their company will be in the news. The type of content you create for this persona needs to build assurances that they can trust your brand. 

Audiences aren’t a monolith of a single mood. We have good days and bad days, and different people of the same demographic can view the same challenge? As a hill to be climbed (and get a promotion!) or a reason to lay low and not risk being fired. 

Finally, your job as a content strategist is to decide whether to gate content, and to offer a follow-up call to action. To do that, you need to understand their intentions. When they search for something — what is the intention behind their queries? Is it simply to learn? Is it to validate a decision? Or is it to buy? Tools like SEMRush and MarketMuse can help understand audience intent.

You shouldn’t be asking for their email on a purely educational piece. But if they are asking for a comparison between two products — you might want to see if they want to talk to a sales person.

You need to repeat this process for each type of stakeholder — at whatever stage they are in the sales funnel.

Understanding Your Brand’s Identity and Goals

Your brand’s identity reflects your brand’s promises. A brand’s promise is the public-facing claim about their offerings. Does your brand stand for: 

• Innovation
• Best prices
• Best value 
• Most extensive partner network
• Assurances on quality

Disney’s brand promise is “the happiest place on earth.”

Apple’s promise was to “Think Different.” All product innovation came from the idea that it was looking to solve the problem differently. And it gave customers the tools to do the same.

The brand’s identity is both a truth and a feeling. You aren’t selling a new medicine — you are caring for patients. You aren’t selling fitness — you are providing confidence.

To align content with the brand identity, you need to identify stakeholders who can deliver that message with authority — and sincerity. You’ll want to incorporate testimonials from customers (even if they are anonymous), as well as quotes from analysts and internal stakeholders that can be proof points for each persona. 

It’s also important that any authoritative content offers personal experiences. You can’t build this type of content with artificial intelligence. Your audience will see right through it. Instead, you’ll need to reach out to others to provide testimonials and quotes, and use your own personal experience while writing your content piece. For example, to make sure an IT security expert knows your product is safe, have a peer explain how they made sure the product is safe.

Long and Short-Term Goals

You are going to want to understand your organization’s long and short-term business goals. Long-term goals might be to focus on a new vertical or build a pipeline around a product offering. In my planning, I usually factored in longer-form content like white papers and ebooks for long-term goals. The campaign teams would want these assets for tradeshows or campaign expenditures.

Short-term goals might be to increase SEO, or to steal traffic away from competitors. B2B blogs with educational content get 52% more organic traffic than B2B blogs with company-focused content. I’d look to create top-of-funnel blogs that people will read before they buy. Think of topics centered around something relevant in the news, trending at a tradeshow, or education around a new product offering.

To create content that matches your audience’s needs, brand promise, and long and short-term goals, you’ll need to research what they want and how they are looking for information.

Content Pillars for Brand Strategies

When you are planning content, you need to meet your audience where they are. 

What this means is, if your customer is looking to buy cheesecake — and you sell a better type of cheesecake — you still better call it cheesecake.

This flies in the face of a lot of B2B companies. They want to stand apart from the competition and use different messaging. I worked for a database company that was purpose-built for search — but it didn’t want to use the words database or search. Yeah. You can imagine how successful we were in getting organic traffic.

Once you know your customer and your brand solutions, start creating a list of topics and subtopics you want to win. Conduct a content audit to see what assets currently exist. Brainstorm ideas to create new content. 

One of the first things I do with any company I work with is finding what keywords or topics are currently driving traffic to their site. Then I look to see what keywords are driving traffic to competitors’ sites.  

Determining topics is a critical first step to creating content pillar pages. 

One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of companies don’t use a noun when describing their offerings. “We provide better recommendations.” So an ecommerce architect might want to buy a recommendation engine. Again, if you aren’t using the nomenclature of your audience, you aren’t even in the ball game.

A content pillar page is a single page on your site that covers all aspects of a topic. It’s the foundation for a topic cluster. Subsequent blogs on subtopics should link back to this pillar page. You are telling Google that this is the most important page on your site on this given topic. Some people use it as a conversion tool. 

I tended to use it as an educational page. For example, at Coveo, we had a pillar page on Enterprise Search — which was top of the funnel. We used MarketMuse to tell us the most sought-after questions about Enterprise Search — and addressed them on this page. 

As we created blogs on subtopics, we’d link from the original pillar page to that subtopic blog — and vice versa. 

The number one question tends to be “What Is” – what is enterprise search? We found that the added benefit of creating pillar pages that answered these high-volume questions meant that definition might get chosen by Google. 

It’s critical when creating pillar pages that you answer questions that are relevant to your brand’s promise and/or offerings. This helps you streamline your content creation process. 

Since no content strategist can do everything at once, I usually look to see which topics will fulfill either short or long-term goals (lots of eyeballs, or something that aligns with a new product rollout) and start my content planning there. 

You can create your content roadmap by weighing content pillars against long- and short-term goals. That’s the best way to know you are creating relevant content.

In any case, you’ll need a content calendar. Or maybe two.

Actionable Content Calendars

When I ran content for companies, I used a couple different planning tools. 

Longform Planning Calendar

This was a monthly ebook/white paper calendar that I created in a deck. It listed the target Persona, Stage in the Funnel, Title, Gist, as well as a picture of the cover. I found that both campaign managers and digital marketers liked this content calendar from a planning standpoint, as it gave them all the tools they needed.

Topic Cluster Planning Calendar

I had a second deck that laid out a funnel flow by topic. This way we could map out the journeys by persona and ensure we had created topic clusters. It looked like a mind map. I might have multiple top-of-funnel pieces around a given topic for various stakeholders (e.g., What Is Content Strategy, Best Practices in Content Planning, Building Content Plans Around User Intent). 

The next stage down might be on The Impact of AI on Creativity, Content Planning and Operations (all stakeholders could read that). And final piece, Simple Content Planning With MarketMuse.

Speaking of which, tools like MarketMuse do a super job of showing what topics still need to be covered. 

Content Operations Planning Tool

A third tool was a project management tool like Asana or Wrike that listed all content types broken out by vertical. We listed every article or ebook that was in the works, what stage it was in (assigned, edited, approvals, art, etc) – and with an approximate delivery date. Deadlines shifted as resources were available.

Evaluating and Refining Your Content Strategy Performance

You’ll want to determine how successful your content marketing strategy is — but that’s hard. Content isn’t a coupon that results in a direct sale. Still, there are some metrics you should look at — traffic and engagement. Engagement, of course, can mean total time on page OR clicking through to another page OR triggering a conversion. You can run these queries using GA4. 

This will allow you to categorize your existing content into various buckets. Andy Crestodina, CMO and Chief Content Officer for Orbit Media, suggests looking at content performance through these four lenses. You’ll find that  “some content is good at winning clicks and attracting visitors. Some content is better at holding attention and engaging visitors.”

A successful content marketing strategy understands that content creation can be iterative. Low engagement for existing content might mean you should re-write it. 

Be aware that low traffic might be the audience you’re really looking for. Again, if you are selling content marketing framework software, the traffic for that’ll be much lower than if you are looking at content marketing software. Potential customers looking for that distinction likely have the intent to buy. 

Another caveat is that good content needs to be promoted — and the promotion has to be aligned with the content offering. For example, if you have heavy digital marketing buys that drive traffic to a page, but don’t result in a download, then the promotion was likely wrong.

Also, look at your cost per download. We’ve run campaigns where heavy promotional dollars resulted in many downloads — but which wouldn’t be appropriate in the marketing funnel.

Work with marketing operations to see what content prospects in your sales funnel have consumed. You can be assured that this is high-quality content that should be promoted and polished up from time to time.

Finally, the best approach to assessing your content performance is by seeing if your sales funnel is growing. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of companies say their organizations integrate content strategy into the overall marketing/sales/communication/strategy.

Summary

With digital advertising projected to reach $876.1 billion by 2026, and 80% of online buyers already purchasing through social media ads, businesses must prioritize a digital content marketing strategy to stay competitive and connect with their target audiences.