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How to Do Corporate Branding Right

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how to do corporate branding right via juliaemccoy

What comes to your mind when you see this?

Twitter bird logo

If you’re like me, it’s funny memes. Twitter chats. Short, succinct messages. Rants from celebrities in three sentences or less.

Or how about this?

Apple logo

For me, it’s “the best technology to date.” Creativity. Quality. Being part of a special group.

This is exactly what branding can do for a business.

A powerful brand is recognized, whether or not its name is printed out for people to read.

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So, how can you achieve successful branding for your business?

Branding vs. Logo: How Are They Different?

A ton of people confuse branding with a company’s logo.

When they hear the word “branding,” they immediately picture designers hard at work choosing the perfect shades and template for a new logo.

But although a logo is part of branding, it’s not the whole package.

Let’s look at the definitions.

  • Logo: A graphic element that symbolizes a brand.
  • Brand: A company’s promise to customers.

When you design a logo, you’re coming up with a creative image people can recognize and tie back to your product.

But when you talk about branding, it’s much bigger.

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Branding is finding out who your audience is.

It’s about knowing what they want and how you can help them achieve their desires.

It’s being consistent and promising customers you’ll always deliver what they expect.

Branding is important and when it’s done right, it can grow your business into empires like Apple, McDonald’s, and Amazon.

5 Steps to Successful Branding

Do you feel like your branding is all over the place right now?

Maybe your message is different on each of your marketing platforms.

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Or maybe your website doesn’t carry your specific style across all its pages.

The good news is it’s never too late to start.

Follow these five steps, and you’ll be over the hardest part and on your way to a stronger, more recognizable brand.

1. Audit Your Brand for Consistency

Imagine what would happen if McDonald’s suddenly started serving gourmet food. Or packaging their burgers in glossy, expensive bags.

What would happen?

Lovers of the fast food chain would be confused.

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McDonald’s isn’t about a fine dining experience, so why the sudden change in the food or packaging?

To avoid a situation like this, you need to be consistent.

Dig deep into the who and what of your brand.

  • Who are you, as a company?
  • Whom do you serve?
  • What’s your main promise to customers?
  • What’s your brand’s purpose?

When you answer these questions, it’ll be easier to:

  • Weed out confusing elements on your website.
  • Stay consistent with the tone of your social media posts.
  • Be consistent with color, images, packaging, and other elements of your brand.

2. Create a Style Guide, Then Share It with All Members of Your Team

A style guide is an easy reference everyone on your team can use when promoting your brand.

Here’s how to create one.

Create a Story for Your Brand

Running a business isn’t all about making money.

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It’s also about making the world a better place and enriching people’s lives.

In what special way can your brand accomplish this?

The answer is your unique story.

For example, look at Facebook’s mission statement:

Facebook's mission statement

Facebook's mission statement

Set Your Brand’s Color & Font Guidelines

Don’t go for a wide range of colors when setting style guidelines. (Unless you’re a creative company in love with rainbow unicorns.)

As a rule of thumb, stick to the colors in your logo.

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Use a combination of these colors in your website, promotional materials, packaging, and merchandise.

Also, stick to one font with everything you write.

The result will be people associating a color and style with your brand.

Think Facebook blue, Starbucks green, and Snapchat yellow.

Stick to One Tone

You can’t be light and goofy on one social media platform, and professional and serious on another.

Determine your tone of voice, and add it to your style guide.

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Remember, involve all members of your team when you create your style guide.

When you do, you’ll gain valuable input from other creative minds.

Also, members of your team will do better sticking to your style when they’ve had a hand in crafting it.

3. Inject Emotion into Your Branding

People buy things for emotional reasons, not rational ones.

For instance, think of cake. Cake has no benefits. It’s high in calories. It makes you fat. It’s unhealthy.

So why do people buy cake?

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Because cakes stand for celebration, happiness, and special occasions.

Cakes make people feel good. It evokes an emotional response.

When working on your branding, ask yourself how you can touch people emotionally.

Can you make your audience feel secure? Loved? Part of a special, closed-off group?

4. Build Loyalty with Existing Customers

Your existing customers are people who already love you.

Why not give them love back?

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Make your loyal customers feel special.

  • Offer special promos and discounts to people who regularly buy your products.
  • Shout out to them on social media.
  • Hold contests and offer unique, valuable prizes.

Remember, giving back should be closely consistent with your brand’s voice.

For instance, if you’re a fun, creative company, you can celebrate reaching 10,000 customers by releasing 10,000 balloons into the sky.

Doing this will not only get you attention, it’ll also be another piece in your puzzle of branding strategy.

5. Spy on Your Competitors

Let’s face it. What you’re offering isn’t unique.

If you sell pizza, there are thousands of other companies selling pizza.

If you’re offering organic skin treatments, yours won’t be the only ones in the market.

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So what you need to do is to become a detective and closely watch what your competition is doing.

  • How are they working on their branding?
  • Is their brand powerful, recognizable, and emotional?
  • What are they doing right?
  • What are they doing wrong?
  • Can you improve on their best practices?

Corporate Branding: The Only Moat in Today’s Business World

Marketing in the past was all about coming up with a “moat.”

A moat is a company’s unique selling proposition – the thing that sets it apart from the competition.

But this is almost impossible to do today.

No matter what your moat is, it can be copied by another company in a minute.

So how do you keep standing out and growing your business?

By branding.

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With successful corporate branding, you’ll have a steady stream of loyal buyers coming your way.

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Image Credits

In-Post Image #1: Twitter
In-Post Image #2: Apple
Screenshot taken by author, February 2020

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MARKETING

How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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