When developing a content strategy, you need to consider how your brand will inform and influence the decisions you make. If your content team isn’t working on clear guidelines, you’re at risk of creating content that won’t resonate with and appeal to your audience effectively.Customers expect consistency when dealing with brands. Deliver this to them and you’ll find it helps with brand loyalty.

Here are a few things you should consider when looking at how your brand should guide your content strategy.

Your target market

Finding the right audience can be difficult. But it is a keystone for your success. Of course, your target audience depends on your type of business, service or product. To really understand how your brand can appeal to your target audience, you need to conduct some research about your audience.

Get to know the people you are talking to by encouraging them to share feedback. You can do this by engaging with your audience on social media, for example, where you can give space to people to talk about their experiences and share their thoughts.This can help you understand the language they use to describe a certain problem, need or challenge, and you can use this language to inform your own vocabulary.

Language subconsciously helps people to decide if your brand is a right fit for them - so make sure your content speaks the language of your target audience across vocabulary and tone!

What demographic does your brand target?

Talking to teenagers is much different than middle-aged professionals. The platforms you choose are just as important as your tone.Whether you post content to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest will largely depend on the demographics of your target audience. This is a pretty exhaustive list of the demographics of the biggest social media platforms. You can use that to guide you in the platforms that are best for your brand.

Is your brand specific to a geographical area?

Engaging with a local community can be a major advantage for a brand because there is always potential to run a more localised campaign where it is easier to effectively research your audience. The bigger the business, the harder it is to run effective localised campaigns that reach your total target audience. If you have this advantage, use it.

Many small businesses use the local angle to their advantage. Check out how Denver Brewery integrated their brand into the local community with their content. They still have a distinct voice, but their content is community oriented.

The Tone of Your Brand

The tone is important. Do you sound like you’re yelling, or seducing the audience? Mountain Dew has long been high energy and extreme while Cadillac is softer in tone and understated.It’s important you determine what your own brand sounds like as that will inform your content and have a significant influence not only on what you say, but how you say it.

What does your brand sound like?

Is it playful? Aggressive? Funny? Serious?

How you talk to your audience should align with your brand. No matter what you do, you need to write something that can engage your readers. If you’re not consistent in tone, you’re really not using your brand to guide your content strategy. If one piece of content is hilarious, the next is serious, then you do some hard-sell aggressive content – no one knows what to expect. Volkswagen does playful and funny. Pepsi is just fun. Red Bull is aggressive yet playful. They’ve all set the tone and ensured their content matches it.

Is your brand shy, or talkative?

Do you like to say a lot or a little? Red Bull is a brand of few words. In fact, they rarely create content around product at all. They let the extreme visuals do the talking. McDonalds is extremely talkative. They explain everything about their product. The type of content you create should be similar across the board.

Getting visual with the brand

Don’t just think about your writing style, think about the visual style of your brand. YouTube and Instagram are very visual content platforms. You’ll want them to align with your brand.Are words a better fit (articles/blog posts) or pictures (Instagram/Pinterest)?

A lot of this depends on your product or service. If you’re an information service, articles are the way to go. If you’re selling skydiving adventures, get visual.

This doesn’t mean you can only do one or the other – you should do both. Just put an emphasis on your assets.When you look at the type of information you’re trying to get across with content, can you make it visual? Any should make the effort to visually represent information, using the visual content marketing service which bests suits their needs.

What makes your brand different?

Letting your brand guide your content will really help this portion. You don’t want your content to be the same as everyone else – after all, your brand isn’t the same, why should your content be?

What makes you special? Uber does a great job of standing out among taxis and car sharing services. All of the branding for their content is clean and impressive. They want you to know they’re different than taxis. Lyft, on the other hand, is more playful and eccentric with their content. They use those characteristics to stand out – just like their brand.