Understanding the Relationship between Content and Branding and Its Impact on Sales

To understand branding, it is important to know what brands are. A brand is the idea or image of a specific product or service that consumers connect with, by identifying the name, logo, slogan, or design of the company who owns the idea or image. Branding is when that idea or image is marketed so that it is recognizable by more and more people, and identified with a certain service or product when there are many other companies offering the same service or product. Advertising professionals work on branding not only to build brand recognition, but also to build good reputations and a set of standards to which the company should strive to maintain or surpass. Branding is an important part of Internet commerce, as branding allows companies to build their reputations as well as expand beyond the original product and service, and add to the revenue generated by the original brand.

When working on branding, or building a brand, companies that are using web pages and search engine optimization have a few details to work out before being able to build a successful brand. Coordinating domain names and brand names are an important part of finding and keeping visitors and clients, as well as branding a new company. Coordination of a domain name and brand names lends identification to the idea or image of a specific product or service, which in turn lets visitors easily discovery the new brand.

Branding is also a way to build an important company asset, which is a good reputation. Whether a company has no reputation, or a less than stellar reputation, branding can help change that. Branding can build an expectation about the company services or products, and can encourage the company to maintain that expectation, or exceed them, bringing better products and services to the market place.

 Content Marketing is the New Branding

Branding isn’t your company name. It’s not a tag line. It’s not a logo. Branding is just another name for creating a perception. A brand is a promise. It’s an expectation of an experience. The company and tag line and logo and brand colors only exist to call that experience to mind. Brands can meet that expectation, exceed that expectation … or in the worst cases, fall short of that expectation

When marketers ask, “How do we want to brand this product?” what they’re really asking is how they want their audience to think about that product once it comes to market.

Content

1. Content Marketing involves

• Educate
• Convince
• Entertain

2. Content communicates your purpose with

• Consistency
• Value
• Originality

3. Content aligned to your audience.

Impact on Sales

Using user generated content is recognizing that fact that digital marketing has changed: consumers takes now an active part in the promotion process. A recent study reveals that 70% of consumers prefer peer recommendations and reviews rather than professionally written content. Gone are the days when you could just sell with a one-fits-all marketing campaign. In fact, consumers are now in control of the entire digital message, they own their story and listening to what they want is far more effective than any typical marketing campaign. When used with brand content, UGC is very effective and leads to sales generation. Here are 4 reasons UGC and brand content should both be included in your digital marketing strategy.

They both create authenticity

Brand content, is the very voice of your company’s values and philosophy and it truly sets you apart from your competition. But when you integrate user generated content to it, you provide an authentic user experience.

As a result of this more personalized and engaging experience, your marketing campaigns will be more effective and more impactful. A perfect digital strategy is the right balance between the voice of your brand the voice of the consumer, which at the end, both contribute to improve brand image and sales.

Visual content is key

A recent statistic revealed that consumers only remember 10% of information they receive, after a period of three day. But if visual content is associated with that same information, people are said to remember 65% of the information after the same time period.

In that sense, people are more likely to remember your products and services if they saw relevant images of it, as in a social wall for example. Not only does social walls act as recommendations, but they also are advertise your brand without screaming: “buy me!”.

You should include UGC and brand content to rour digital strategy in order to increase your ROI.

Brand content proves your expertise

How many times when you Googled the definition of a concept, have you found yourself in the blog section of a website? Probably a lot. The reason is that the content you found is considered relevant by people who look for it, and therefore by search engines too. Blogging for your business is a very import part of your content marketing strategy. By doing so you are proving to future consumers that you are an expert in you are and that they should trust using your products/services.

Website benefits

By combining UGC and brand content, you are creating opportunities for visitors to stay on your website.

This will allow visitors to see how well you know your area of business and how your customers are. In a sense, you are responding to the visitors’ questions before they even ask them, which will develop a sense of safety in their mind. Another benefit of including UGC and brand content in your strategy is SEO. The more you are creating relevant content, the more visibility and indexing you will get on search engines.