Brand identity is like fashion; it’s a culmination of the features that separate you from other companies and how you are perceived by clients. It’s not enough to have a business – you have to dress it up to make your company memorable, attractive, and relatable to your target audience. What marketing elements do you need to define your brand identity? Let’s break it down and accessorize.

Content
Content marketing strategies are primarily social media based, and as the name suggests, involves sharing content with your followers. The videos, blogs, images, and posts that you put out there helps to shape your company’s personality so that you can expand and maintain a clientbase that identifies with your brand, and your product. However, content marketing only works if your content is relevant, valuable, and consistent.

Value

• Informative content is more likely to be shared, engaged with, and most importantly, valued by consumers.
• Content like how-tos, news, life hacks, interviews, FAQs, etc. are useful and more interesting than constant sales pitches.
• Valuable content is a way to give back to loyal customers, and attract new ones. Some inbound marketing strategies can be useful here, such as sharing podcasts, blogs, newsletters, and videos.

Relevance

• Your content won’t make any sense or do anything productive for your company if it isn’t relevant to your business.
• For example, a cosmetics company shouldn’t be posting about the weather. It would be better to opt for content like seasonal trends and makeup tutorials.

Consistency

• It’s important to post content regularly. If you post every day for two weeks and then go MIA for a month, you probably won’t have a whole lot of followers left to post for.
• Consistency in the type of content you share is vital to your brand identity as well. If your content is all over the map, your brand identity will lose its definition which does nothing to keep the attention of your target audience.

Explain Away
In fashion, you need the right accessories to make the impression you want to create. When it comes to your brand identity, it’s just as important to make the right statement. If your target audience is parents with young kids for instance, your image needs to be family friendly. Start by considering the following questions.

• Why does your company exist? In other words, how does your company improve the lives of customers?
• To give you an idea, Hulu’s purpose statement is “we exist to captivate and connect people with stories they love by creating amazing experiences”.
• This statement is efficient because it’s geared towards any and everyone who loves watching movies and tv shows, and said in a meaningful way that draws people in.
• What future are you striving for? Do you have a mission?
• For example, Walmart’s mission statement for 2021 is “helping people world-wide save money and live better – anytime and anywhere – in retail stores and through e-commerce”.
• Walmart’s future vision statement is “to make every day easier for busy families”.
• How is your product/service good for your customers?
• Gatorade’s webcopy holds a perfect demonstration where it says “Gatorade provides scientifically formulated products to meet the sports fueling needs of athletes in all phases of athletic activity”.

3, 2, 1, Lift Off
This cannot be stressed enough; your brand identity should be relatable to your target audience. Campaigns are designed to accomplish a specific goal, such as increasing profits, expanding your client base, or rebranding. By launching marketing campaigns that are specific to your target consumers, you reinforce your brand identity while achieving your objective.

• Use personalized incentives. Think about what your customers want, and what would motivate them to participate.
• Promote your campaign using channels and platforms that will reach your target audience. Channels are ways of communicating with your client base such as TV, social media, mail, email, radio, etc. For example, if your target audience is college students, mail is definitely not the way to go.
• Create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a description of a fictional customer that matches the wants, needs, and characteristics of your target audience. This is a great technique to help you brainstorm effective ideas.
• Track and measure the results of your campaign to discover what works and what doesn’t, so you can apply your findings and generate a better outcome.

Defining your brand identity is an absolute necessity for a successful business. You would dress your best for an important meeting, right? Make sure your company’s image is just as well put together so you can make the right impression on your current and potential customers.