Defining and differentiating your brand is incredibly important to content marketing. More businesses than ever before are creating content, so content marketing is much more than having content and getting it out there. It's also about creating content that reflects your brand, that addresses the needs of your potential customers, and that tells the story of your business. To help define and differentiate your brand so that your content marketing reflects your brand and is on message, take the time to answer the following questions. We took these questions from chapter 5 of The Marketing Agency Blueprint: The Handbook for Building Hybrid PR, SEO, Content, Advertising, and Web Firm. We've also taken the time to answer these questions ourselves as an example (as well as a definition and differentiator for us).
- Who are we, in 160 characters or less, and without meaningless jargon? - We help businesses manage their online presence and put their best selves forward. By stirring the media pot, we’ll cook a stew with the flavors of your brand.
- What are the three greatest strengths/weaknesses of our brand? - The three greatest strengths of our brand are our solid online presence, our positions and messaging, and our record of satisfied clients. Our three greatest weaknesses are that we're still a new brand, limitations in labor, and
- What are our greatest opportunities for growth? - Our greatest opportunities for growth are with marketing agencies that need help with their own content marketing, or with marketing agencies that want to offer content marketing to their clients.
- What keywords would people search to find our agency services (or your own products/services)? - St. Louis content marketing, St. Louis marketing agency, content marketing services, business blogging services, blogging agency, online presence management, managing your online presence etc.
- Who are our buyer personas? - small business owners, owners/marketing directors at marketing agencies, marketing managers/blog managers at small to medium-sized businesses
- What makes us different? - We are different in two ways. First, we create content with the client's customer in mind, so we ensure that the content we create is of value to people instead of search engines. Second, our retainer model allows us to work with clients on a long-term, personal level. We get to know them and to create long term content strategies that consider growth and the bigger picture.
- How do we express that differentiation in words, images, and actions? - We practice what we preach, which is a motto of our company. We follow the same content marketing best practices that we incorporate into all of our client work and that we discuss in our own lead generation content.
- What is our sustainable competitive advantage? - Our sustainable competitive advantage is our increasing experience and specialization in content marketing. Since we've been doing content marketing longer than most, it'll be hard for marketing agencies and businesses incorporating content marketing now to match what we know and do.
- What value - expertise, resources, guidance, and tools - can we bring to our audiences? - Our value is in the fact that we've been specializing in content marketing well before content marketing became a buzzword and became something that everyone is doing. Therefore, we understand how content marketing has changed over the years and what needs to be done today to be successful. We also know how our audience is struggling with content marketing, and what's necessary to get started, to find value in content marketing, and to take these specific marketing efforts to the next level.
- What are we doing to innovate and move the industry forward? - We're specializing in content marketing at a time where businesses and marketing agencies We are also working on ideas that will add value to content by coming up with additional ways to amplify content and to help tell our clients' stories.
- What problems and pain points do we solve? - We're trying to solve two specific pain points: creating enough content and creating engaging content.
- What makes clients buy from us the first time (acquisition)? What keeps them coming back (retention)? - Clients buy from us because of our proven record and experience. They keep coming back because we deliver results and they become part of that proven record and experience that has made us successful. They also know that we do our best every time, and that we create content that the audience of our clients would find valuable, no simply stuff to meet quotas or to rank for keywords.
