How Community Engagement and Brand Messaging Define Thought Leadership

Most marketers, business owners, and professionals understand that there is a need for consistency within the content you are publishing. Consistency in your voice and tone should not only apply to your business blog or content offers. Consistency helps to (re)establish your brand’s message within every piece of content you publish while building an engaged community around your brand.

Especially with your thought leadership, you need to have a community to nurture, and you need to have consistent brand messaging in order to build that community. In today’s In-Sites, let’s define thought leadership by breaking down how community engagement and brand messaging work together for your benefit.

Your message is what defines your brand. It should be built into all of your communications efforts: your marketing, PR, social media communications, advertising, public speaking. Everything.—Jamie Lacey-Moreira

Revisit Your Style Guide

Brand messaging is the way in which you would like your audience to view your organization. From your products and services to the content you post on social media, consistency is necessary within the voice and tone of your brand. However, more often than not, consistency in a brand’s voice and tone is lost within the different aspects of the organization. In fact, in the following infographic provided by Kissmetrics, you’ll see just how brand unawareness, especially on social media, can really take a toll on your image and your community engagement.

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That’s why, creating and reviewing your voice and tone style guide is a necessary tool in providing foundation and ease to your content development process. In order to create a style s guide, you must establish direction. This can look a bit different between different businesses and industries, but it is still imperative to include. This guide will aid all content marketers, bloggers, social media managers, and anyone else creating content for you to represent your brand in the best light possible because it’s inline with your message. The more defined you can make your guide, the more translatable it will be for your audience.

As social media occupies more of a prominent role in our personal interactions, it’s important that we accurately reflect who we are. More importantly, it’s important to remember that the web is social, and the way we interact online is the way that we will be perceived, judged, treated, and approached by others.—Neil Patel

Stick to the Topics You Know

Make a list of topics that relate to your brand’s message. You might want to stick to at least three to five topics maximum. Focusing on just a small number of topics can help you establish notoriety within your industry, which is beneficial for your brand awareness and establishing thought leadership. Having a set list of topics also keeps your content on-brand while still highlighting the interests of your target audience.

Next, highlight your content niche, and decide how your content topics should be presented to your target audience. Once you have established your baseline brand messaging you can jump into the criteria for each of your content pieces. This can take many forms depending on what specific role your content serves. Some variables include: Where in the sales and marketing funnel will be introduced to the website visitor? How should the content be presented?

With all of the constant changes to SEO, it is a good idea to stick to what your company does best. Create a guide that is well thought out. Includes all of the necessary elements needed to produce the perfect content. Then take some time to review and deeply understand your brand before you create content for it.

Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.—Andrew Davis

Think like Your Audience

Put yourself into the reader’s shoes and define how they might feel when searching for your particular article. Use buyer persona data as well as your own industry knowledge to create questions, pain points, and their preferred means of consuming content. Personalization builds relationships with your audience, because it establishes trust through knowing their needs and solving their pain points. The more thorough your data is, the more personalized your content will be.

Writing Tips to Consider

This is the place to include any styling tips, examples, priorities, questions, language, and consistency your brand wishes to maintain in these areas.

• Questions to ask prior to writing: Why are you writing the piece? How does the piece further business goals? How do you plan to provide further information, learning resources, or related articles?
• Establish why you are creating this piece of content: Identify why your content marketers, copywriters, and developers are creating content. What goals are you trying to achieve with your content?

Your community is waiting to hear from you. So be true to your brand by knowing your message and being consistent with it. Your audience will thank you as they help you meet your business goals.