Introduction

Let's take stock: we've seen how to build a consistent brand. Now it's time to use all that's been said so far to look at your brand's performance, and see how a powerful content strategy is one of the key elements in attracting and retaining your customers. The final stretch on the road to brand success! Are you ready?

1. What is the purpose of a branded content strategy?

Being interesting before being interested‍

Branded content strategy, otherwise known as inbound marketing, is an approach that involves creating and distributing relevant, high-quality content to attract, engage and retain a specific target audience. It's the opposite of traditional marketing, which is more top-down and brand-centric. With the advent of social networks, brands now have to be interesting before they are interested, and this means providing content that is informative, entertaining or useful to its audience, even before trying to sell a product or service.

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Content strategy also serves to increase brand visibility: By producing quality content, a brand can improve its online visibility. This means that consumers are more likely to find the brand when searching for information related to its industry, products or services (this requires content that is adapted to the media you use and SEO optimized!).
A well-executed content strategy enables a brand to demonstrate its industry knowledge, share useful information and become a trusted source of information. In this way, it positions itself as an expert in its sector, boosting consumer confidence and contributing to credibility.

Finally, quality content, whether blog posts, videos, podcasts or other formats, can generate interest and engagement among your audience. Comments, shares and discussions around content can help create a community around the brand and engage your audience.

2. How to align content strategy with business objectives and branding

Please note: this part of our guide is extremely important. Often, our customers tell us that they are having difficulty building their content strategy because of their different business objectives and their different targets.
The question to ask at this point is: what is my priority objective, what is my priority target?

 "Everyone is my target" is not the answer. It's an expression of great ambition and the desire to reach a multitude of people. But this is about strategy. You have to be clever, surgical and, above all, prioritize. During our conferences, Marie-Anne likes to use a simple projection exercise. Imagine that someone is standing in front of you, challenging you to catch a pen they're throwing at you. The person throws a multitude of pens at you at the same time, and you catch none of them.

A second time, she challenges you to catch a pen, but this time throws just one. Even the clumsiest of us can catch it. Why is that? Because our concentration is focused on a precise objective, and a precise element. It's the same with content!

This time we'll take the example of our client Bagel Corner, for whom we worked on the brand platform and content strategy.

Bagel Corner is a national fast-food brand focusing on bagels, launched in 2010. 10 years later, the brand has decided to make a major shift in its brand identity and communications in order to achieve its ambitious goal of 100 franchises in 5 years.

Initially, our strategy with Bagel Corner was to reposition the brand in line with consumer and franchisee expectations. Through Bagel Corner's history and the various avenues open to us, we developed a warm, colorful concept that would stand the test of time, be easy to adopt and continue to renew itself.

Once the brand platform was delivered, we thought about the content strategy that would reveal the brand and the launch of the new KolorBlend catering concept.

As a reminder, the brand's primary objective is to increase its number of franchises, i.e. franchisees = B2B target.

On the other hand, we all agree that without end consumers, the concept cannot live and be carried = B2C target.

So we put together a strategy that respected the prioritization of the B2B target, built a key message and identified the relevant contact points to reach this audience. What's on the agenda? Reveal the new concept at the 2023 Franchise Fair. But not all at once, we imagined a reveal on the various relevant distribution channels such as Linkedin, Youtube and the trade press before, during and after the show. We produced video content and a fresh, dynamic digital communications campaign to unveil the Kolorblend concept step by step.

This process paid off handsomely, putting the brand on track for effective commercial development!

In conclusion, we'd like to remind you that content meets each of the objectives of the conversion tunnel. It enables you to distribute relevant content at every stage of brand discovery, turning strangers into leads, leads into customers, and customers into loyal brand ambassadors!

Examples:

• Generate leads: Content can be used to attract leads to your website.
• Customer loyalty: Once a person has become a customer, the brand can use content to maintain contact, providing useful information, advice and special offers.
• Educating potential customers: Informative content can help educate potential customers about the brand's products or services, answer their questions and overcome their objections.
• Talk about your products/services from a different angle : provide additional information that won't be found on your website, showcase them, highlight their technical qualities or specific features, etc.

3. The foundations of a successful content strategy

Less said, more done. Creating an effective content strategy requires careful planning and a thorough understanding of your target audience, business objectives and niche. Here are the key steps to achieve this:

1. Define your goals: Great strategies usually start here. Start by clearly defining the objectives you want to achieve with your content strategy. These objectives can include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, improving customer loyalty, etc. Your objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART objectives).
   
   Being clear about your objectives and the time you can devote to them, 20% of the content you produce serves 80% of your objectives.
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2. Know your target audience: we keep repeating ourselves, but it's important, okay? Identify your target audience and understand their needs, preferences, problems and online behaviors. Create personas to get a clearer picture of your audience.
3. Benchmark...but not too much! Study what your competitors are doing in terms of content. Identify gaps you can fill and opportunities you can exploit. Rather than looking too closely at your direct competitors, we recommend that you look outside your own industry for inspiration. This will enable you to maintain your originality in your sector: it's important to do things your way, not because others are doing them!
4. Identify your content pillars: Identify the key themes or topics you want to focus on in your content. These are your "content pillars" - the topics that are at the heart of your strategy. For example, if you're a fitness company, your content pillars might include nutrition, training, mental health and so on. These pillars will guide the creation of content consistent with your brand universe.
5. Identify the right channels to distribute your content: Once you've created quality content, you need to decide which channels to use to distribute it. Identify the platforms where your target audience is most active and adapt your strategy accordingly. Remember our Bagel Corner adventure, where we prioritized the restaurant press, Linkedin and Franchise Expo attendees. To broaden the scope, this can include social networks, your blog, a newsletter, videos, podcasts, white papers, etc. The choice of channels will depend on your audience and your content.
6. Be realistic: as content production is time-consuming, it's important to set objectives that you can reach, both in terms of the number of tools you need to activate and the quantity of content you need to produce. Adapt your objectives to the time you have to devote to them, or to the size of the team dedicated to producing your content. Precise, high-quality content is preferable to irregular, low-quality content.
7. Establish an editorial calendar: Yes, because it would be a shame not to maximize the impact of that great content you've just produced. The idea is to create a calendar that details the types of content you plan to produce, the topics, the publication dates and the responsibilities within your team. The aim is to maintain a regular frequency of publication, so that you can meet your audience on a regular basis.
8. Monitoring, of course! It's very important to stay on top of trends and analyze what your competitors are doing. This keeps you informed and enables you to adapt quickly to changes in your market. Monitoring can inspire you, give you content ideas and help you anticipate the needs of your audiences, but it can also help you keep up with trends.

3. Dissemination and promotion of branded content

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engines place great importance on quality content. A well-developed content strategy with relevant keywords can help improve the brand's ranking in search results, which in turn can increase organic traffic to the website.

Using social media to amplify reach

It's a fact: producing content takes time. That's why we advise you to make the most of all the tools at your disposal! Use social media, e-mail marketing, online advertising and other channels to promote your content and reach a wider audience.
The rule here is to adapt your content to the medium you're using: a white paper could be the subject of a podcast, a Linkedin post, an Instagram reel. The idea is that a piece of content can be a real subject of communication, a highlight in which you've invested energy and on which you can capitalize.

Co-branding with influencers and partners

A basic rule: if you say your brand is good, it's good. If others are saying it, that's even better! We advise you to forge solid partnerships with brands that complement yours, with whom you can create co-branded content.

Conclusion and transition to the next section

In short, a branded content strategy is a powerful tool for establishing and developing a company's online presence, attracting a target audience, creating lasting relationships with customers and achieving various marketing objectives, such as lead generation and improved SEO. It contributes to building and managing a brand's reputation, as well as achieving its business objectives.

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