Unlocking the Power of Branding: How to Establish a Clear Identity and Content Strategy for Your Business

Welcome to the ASC Blog! If you're new here, we're excited you've found us. The ASC Business Consulting Blog is designed to be a hub that shares tips, tricks, how-to's, and more for small business owners, growing business owners and entrepreneurs.

We really are focused on this blog being a one-stop-shop for entrepreneurs and owners to be able to expand their knowledge so they can grow their businesses.

What specific information do we share on the blog? Well, we focus on things like:

• Marketing
  

• Book reviews & reading

• Learning & education

• How-to's and guides

• Leadership & ownership

• Technology for growing businesses,

• Entrepreneurship coaching,

• And more!

We always encourage you to explore the blog to find information that's pertinent to your business!

Can't find what you're looking for? Leave a comment in the blog to have us make something just for you.

However, moving on to today's topic, if you have seen our YouTube channel and social media, you'll have seen that we recently underwent a pretty big re-brand.

We wanted to really update and improve our overall brand voice, brand identity and content strategy to better provide for our existing clients, and soon-to-be clients, like you!

So, that's what we're here to talk about today... How to develop a strong brand identity, and how to create an effective content strategy for new and growing businesses.

What is a Brand Identity?

First off, what is a brand identity?

A brand identity sometimes gets confused with things like brand voice and brand image. All are slightly similar, but with some key differences.

Brand Identity

A brand identity are the unique visual aspects of a brand that are used to differentiate it from competitors, and influence the perceived personality of a brand.

In other words, it's how a brand visually sets itself apart and attempts to be perceived by customers.

Brand Voice

A brand voice is sometimes called a brand personality, and is simply the personality that a business or brand tries to convey through engaging with customers.

That is, the brand voice determines if the brand is casual and fun, serious and professional, or somewhere in the middle.

Brand Images

A brand image takes the voice and identity both into account, and is truly the overall perception of a brand based on the identity, voice, and experience that a customer has had with that brand.

A brand can have a clean image and professional voice, but if someone has had a poor experience with a company (let's say they were disorganized and inconsiderate), their brand image is not a good one.

What is a Content Strategy?

Now, let's shift gears to talk about: what is a content strategy?

If you haven't checked it out, we recommend viewing our latest YouTube video, because we take just a couple minutes to talk about what a content strategy is.

In short, though, a content strategy is simply how you plan, manage, create, and share content - along with how you align that content with your brand voice.

See? There's a reason we're talking about this all together.

In other words, you have to first establish a brand voice and identity. Think about how you want your business portrayed, and how you want it to "sound" in your marketing.

Then, once you've created your brand voice and identity, you can develop specific topics or types of content you want to talk about.

Let's visualize this with an example... And what better way than to share about how the ASC team just rebranded and created our own content strategy!

The ASC Business Consulting Content Strategy

From our inception, we've focused our brand voice and identity on being professional, clean, and knowledgeable.

That meant lots of jargon and buzzwords, minimalist designs, and not very friendly-sounding content.

However, we realized that with this rebrand, not only did that not portray who the ASC team is, but it also didn't align with how we wanted to interact with clients, and likely didn't give us a very good brand image.

We also knew that we talked about just about everything under the sun without much direction.

So, here's how we created a new brand voice and identity and content strategy in a few steps:

1. Our target market is entrepreneurs and owners of small, local, and growing businesses. We need to interact with them on a more personal level, so our voice should be professional, but informal, and more relatable and enjoyable. (Brand voice)

2. We should focus our content less on promotions and talking about what we do, and focus more on simple education in order to demonstrate our knowledge instead of using big words to look smart. (Brand voice & image)

3. We'll make sure that our designs and imagery is still professional, but more engaging, fun, and relatable - while sticking to our core colors and identifiable logo. (Brand identity)

4. Our content strategy should focus on delivering valuable, insightful, and relevant content to our specific demographics - professionals, business owners and entrepreneurs. We know these people are busy, and not always just on one platform. So, we want to make sure our content is accessible, consistent, and on multiple platforms. Lastly, we want to make sure content is easily digestible and shorter for readers and viewers so they can learn on the go. (Content strategy)

When it comes down to it, your brand identity and content strategy are simply a part of a larger marketing (and, overall business) strategy.

When developing a marketing or business strategy, it's important to develop your brand identity, voice, and image, as well as a content strategy. Not only does this ensure consistency, but it also helps break a strategy into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Questions, comments? Let us know in the comment section, or reach out to our by visiting our contact page.

Disclaimer

The ASC Business Consulting Blog is a resource to help support, guide, and teach entrepreneurs and business owners. It is not meat to solely be used to develop business strategy or provide legal advice to businesses and owners.

If you are interested in working with our team to have a strategy or solution custom made for you, to be used to develop and guide your businesses' strategy and success, please contact our team.