How to create authentic marketing content
Every brand is telling a story. When first establishing your organization’s branding, you’re turning your story into a series of recognizable hallmarks that represent it - visual branding (logos, patterns, colors), and communication standards (messaging, mission, values, key words). This is the first part of telling your story in an authentic way to your audience.
The second part is through your marketing. After your branding is established, you’re moving into weaving that brand story into your consistent messaging. Every time your organization posts on social media, creates a new brochure, sends out an email, or creates an event, your story should be consistent with the narrative created with your brand. And beyond consistency, it should be authentic.
Authenticity is queen in the world of branding and marketing. More and more, brands are eschewing the idea that they need to be on a pedestal, and are instead looking to be relatable to their audience. After all, people are looking to buy or work with a humanized brand.
As we head into 2020, here’s a few tips from our team on how to humanize and create authentic marketing your audience will connect with:
Be transparent with impact. Show your audience what their support means to you through sharing impact. Depending on the business, this can be different things - sharing numbers of beneficiaries or services sold; sharing stories of what their support means to beneficiaries or employees. Sharing impact is an opportunity to show what your audience’s support actually means - moving support from transactional to intentional.
Give your audience a peek into day-to-day life. What does your organization actually do? When your staff is working hard each and every day, it’s not always first nature to think what about your job might be interesting for your audience to learn about. But, what’s your process? How does a service get done from start to finish? Would your audience want to learn about your staff retreat? Learning more about how your team makes things happen will make your audience even more invested in your organization.
Show the humans behind the business. As we mentioned above, buyers and supporters want to interact with a human, not a faceless brand. By showing the humans behind your business (whether that’s employees, beneficiaries, board members, past clients, etc.), putting a face to what your brand represents helps humanize what you do - and shows what your audience’s support means.
Consistently fall back onto your brand for stories. With any robust branding, you have a mission, values, and messaging to describe what your company is all about. When you’re working to market your business, always come back to these tenets. They will provide you with guidelines to craft your brand stories, and will help gut check the direction to pursue.
This is part of our Building Your Biz series, providing tangible, simple ways to begin creating a brand foundation that your business can be built on.This series will cover everything you need to know about creating your own branding, from strategy, to design, to marketing. It's for DIYers and dreamers who are creating their own business and want to be efficient, gain clarity, and do something that matters.
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