If your content and your brand got married...

Your content is literally YOU and YOUR BRAND. It should be dripping with your personality and infused with your unique voice!

Transcript

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Hello, Recovering Perfectionists. I'm Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode number 79 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. Today I'm talking about how your content and your brand work together. I had a beautiful conversation with someone around this recently, and I thought I'd come over and share some of the key takeaways with you. I think it's a really important part of your brand strategy. So I will be sharing all the links to the other content and the other person who I've had a chat with and everything else at clairy.co forward slash pod forward slash 79. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alrighty, so let's jump into it. So as I mentioned before, I had a um I was interviewed by the beautiful Julie Gibbons recently for a show on her in her platforms where we talked about, she does branding amongst other things, very, very gifted. But she we were talking about the um the ways in which content and our content strategy overlaps and works with our brand strategy. And it's something that we probably don't talk about all that often, but something that I'm pretty passionate about. So I wanted to come over and just share some of the thoughts and some of the things that we kind of talked about on that episode here as well. I will add the link to Julie's show in the show notes as well. So you can go and check out the full um the full information over there as well. So look, I guess for me, one of the big things about how content and brand work together is I you see it quite often that people go and spend a lot of money or certainly a lot of time and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears most of the time getting a beautiful brand created, which may include elements such as logo, the colours that you're going to use, the typography and fonts, the imagery, sometimes a photo shoot and the portraits of the person who works in the business, and as well as the words that are used and the whole look and feel of your brand. And I think that's a really important piece of work to do somewhere in your business. Usually at the beginning, I feel like it's probably not super necessary because there's always more iterations, and you know, we start our businesses and six months later they look different, and then six months after that they look different until we kind of finally settle somewhere. And that's where I feel like brand becomes really, really important to have something that's recognizable and looks and feels like you want it to look and feel, right? Um, however, it doesn't matter how beautiful and cohesive all of that stuff is if you're not connecting with your audience thereafter. Um, unfortunately, it doesn't work where we create a new brand and we get a beautiful website and then they flock to us. That generally isn't a thing. There's other things that need to go into it, whether you're doing ads or you're writing blogs or you're going on speaking gigs or you've got a podcast or you're sending newsletters or all of those elements that make up your content, those are the things that you're where how you're um continuing to reintroduce your brand in new and exciting ways all the time. But if you've got a brand that's just sort of sitting there and you're not sharing any content, it's no point having a brand, right? So having um content that is consistently and sustainably um going out and getting in front of the right people and getting in front of some of the wrong people so that you know who's, you know, who's not your people is really important. So um the ways that your brand and content work together are multiple. There's so many different, there's so many different elements of your content that needs brand and brand that needs content. So one of those things is purely just what you talk about. So we talk a lot about um in Batch It Crazy, we talk a lot about social media strategy. And one of the things that we like to talk about in social media is how to post uh content that's really engaging, that people, your audience, are more likely to engage with, so that you can continue the conversation, etc. The algorithm loves it and so on and so forth. Um, and what I see a lot of businesses doing purely to get their engagement is to ask these viral questions, which have absolutely nothing to do with their business. They're not in the context. If I only read those things, I wouldn't have a clue what you did with your business. Like one here and there, maybe one a month, I'm totally cool with because it's fun and you know it does what it needs to do engagement-wise. But if you're only doing those sorts of things, it just becomes confusing and it doesn't really make sense. So what you talk about forms part of your brand, right? Um, and when you do branding work, whether you do it yourself and you follow some um some steps or strategies or you work with the professional branding expert, um, a lot of the time they will help you define, or you will be able to go through a process to define what sort of words um resonate with your audience, what sort of uh language do you use? Are you um up the super professional, super casual end, or somewhere in between on that spectrum? Um but what it is that you talk about definitely forms part of your brand. What do you do? What space do you play in? What things do you care about? What do you know about? What's your experience? What are your qualifications? All of that sort of thing. So the content that you talk about forms part of your brand about what you're talking about. The next part of it is how you publish. So when we are publishing content, sometimes we don't have control over the format, i.e. on Facebook and that sort of thing. When we're using copy, we pretty much have to copy and paste into Facebook's format. On our imagery, however, we definitely have space to put in our brand elements. So when you're maybe posting something on your Facebook page, you may have a link that will link it and that will bring in some of your brand elements because it may link to your website, which will have branding on it, right? Um, it may also include things like your newsletters and infusing your brand elements into your newsletters. So that just to sort of digress for a second, they say that, in fact, this is probably four years ago, they said that uh people need, I think it's 37 points of contact with you online before they choose to buy. And only 12 months before that it had been 12, and 12 months before that it had been three. So you can see like we are much less trusting these days, and there are so many more options coming at us that we really need to be sure that you're the right person for us. So, most recently, let's just go with 37. So 37 points of contact we need to have with the brand before we can decide if we know, like, and trust them. It's certainly that trust section. So if they are, if your audience is seeing a different uh inconsistent version of you in those 37 places, it's confusing. And we know confused mind doesn't buy. So when you're putting your content out there, whether it's newsletters, webinars, speaking gigs, um, maybe things in the post or printed materials, they're looking at your website, they check out your blog, they uh follow you on social media, all of those sorts of things. It's incredibly important to have a really familiar and consistent look and feel for all of the in all of those spaces so that people are like, oh, there she is again, oh there she is again, oh there she is again. Not like I think I've heard that name, but I'm not sure where she's from. And I thought she had green and pink in hers, and now she's doing black and green, you know, that sort of thing. So we want to keep it really consistent, your content with your branding, right? You can see how that works really, really beautifully together. The um the next thing um that I'm gonna talk about is your flavor and your voice. So what um, and we've all had this, I guarantee everyone has had an experience either as the doer of this thing, but certainly as the receiver, where and I'm gonna use a specific example um in a second where we've connected with someone and we've seen a photo of them or we've read some of their copy, maybe we've read a blog, we might have even watched a video or something like that, and we have booked a call, whether we've paid for it or we are just checking them out to see if we want to sign up for whatever the thing is and whatever. And they that person might come on Zoom and there's a real disconnect with our expectations versus reality, and that immediately breaks trust and immediately makes us think like, oh, I don't know if I want to part with my hard-earned cash here because I'm not sure that I trust you. So, some examples of that is when um you might write a blog or something that's super professional and it's in very corporate speak, and it's um, you know, I certainly did this when I first started my business. Everything was very corporate, everything was very professional and polished. And then I'm sure people would get on the phone with me, and I'm a bit of a swear bear, and I was probably a bit more cash than they expected. And there's a bit of a disconnect, like super profession, super cash, not quite sure which one you actually are, so I'll leave it. Thanks very much. So having um the courage to be yourself, and um there's another episode coming about magnetism and being yourself, and unapologetically infusing yourself into your business and your brand is really important. But being consistent with that and being honest about who you are and what you want your brand to stand for, which could be a little bit different to how you are in your personal life, that's totally cool as long as it's consistent, right? Um, there's there's definitely a different feel when you see someone super polished on social media and then you get on a call and they're sitting on the couch with the laundry basket in the background, that might make it feel a little bit different. Whereas if you're talking about I'm like I'm a mum and this is how I run my business, and then you're sitting on the couch with your laundry basket, that's totally cool because that's what we were expecting, right? When there's a difference between what we see and what we get, that's when we have that disconnect and a lack of trust. So how your brand and your branding is set up, and that how that uh relates to and is consistent with your content is really, really important. So that what we see is what we get when we finally get to that next step that you want us to take as well. Cool. And lastly is about frequency and consistency. And this probably seems like a bit of a silly thing to put in with like what's frequency and consistency of content got to do with branding? Well, a lot, right? Because when um again, if we have set ourselves up uh brand-wise to be where we're um we're trustworthy and we're consistent and we're always be here and we're very predictable, blah, blah, blah, but then we're not sending, we're sending an email here and then we don't send one for three months, and then we do a blog here, and then we don't do a blog for another 12 months, and that sort of thing, again, there's that disconnect. So one of the things that I really love doing, and something I think Julie and I talked about on her show recently was um if you uh you if you can think about what sort of words and how you want to be described by people who've worked with you or who've who are just in your business world and start to infuse those things. So if you want to, if you want your um, if you want your clients or your followers, your audience to feel empowered, that might mean that you are less in their face and you're like, here's the thing, go and do it. And that's the empowerment part because you're not hand-holding. If you want them to feel like they've had that 100% warm, huggy accountability sort of thing, then you'll definitely be contacting them more often because you want them to feel like you are with them every step of the way. So, how uh some of those brand elements and those brand feelings and emotions of how you want your audience to feel and how you want to describe the experience of having worked with you absolutely plays into the frequency, consistency, and content and content of what actually gets out into the world. It's a really, really big one. So there's lots of things in there, and I've talked very fast, and I've definitely run out of my voice by the end of that episode. Um, but it is a really important thing to consider that content and brand and branding are not separate. They are integral together and having that consistency and having it in both ways. Content informs brand, brand informs content, and we work together is absolutely critical for building that no like and trust factor with your audience. I hope that's been helpful. That was a bit of a longer episode. So thanks for sticking with me. I hope it was helpful. Leave me any comments, questions, suggestions, ideas, thoughts, anything in the comments. I'd love to know how you feel about all of that. Um, otherwise, I'll see you on the next episode. Bye for now.