Irrespective of the platform you’re posting your content, the type of content you share can either build or destroy your brand. If your goal is to build a strong personal brand and create visibility and trust around it, your brand goals should shape the content you share. That is to say, building a strong personal brand requires you to share only contents that align with and promotes the values of your personal brand.
For example, if you’re building a leadership brand that positions yourself to become a thought-leader in leadership skills, sharing posts directly associated with fitness goals will have little or no value addition to your brand.
It might look good to share a funny meme or what catches your fancy at the moment. However, if these contents do not add positive value to your personal brand, you shouldn’t share them. Therefore, whether you’re an intrapreneur building a personal brand or an entrepreneur building a brand for your business, you must understand that there’s more to sourcing content than randomly posting links or tweets of articles. it’s important to stay within the guidelines of creating content that helps to build your brand.
Do you want to improve your content strategy?
Here are few curated guidelines that will help you navigate through the crowded digital space to create and share contents that build the right perception for your brand.
Understand your audience
Building a personal brand means you already know who your target audience or market is. Therefore, to make your brand appealing to this audience you must share content that projects you as a thought-leader.
To do so, you must first understand:
Who these people are
Their expectations
What they do online
The problems they are trying to solve
What interests them and
What they find entertaining
A solid understanding of these points is what will guide you in creating the right content for your target audience. If you’re sharing your content on different platforms, do remember that audience expectations may vary across different platforms. So, take time to study your audience on each platform so you can optimize your content accordingly.
Research for high-quality sources
Sourcing your content doesn’t have to be hard anymore however, a little more work is required to get the best ones.
You can start collecting sources by setting up google alerts for content topics that will interest your audience. Keep track of these articles for updates even if you’ve shared them in the past. Sign up for industry blog notifications and newsletters.
After gathering your sources, take the time to sieve through the content they post before sharing them to your audience. Take the time to evaluate links based on credibility, accuracy, and audience interest before sharing them. In trying to find the best content, be prepared to read many articles.
Don’t be fast to share, make sure your sources are reliable, and avoid sharing links to pages with too many ads. Remember, even though Google provides us with lots of information sources, a lot of junk is part of the content provided. So, take time to filter them making sure they’re healthy for your audience and also puts your professional brand in the right perspective.
Make sure your content is meaningful
Before you share that video, article, social media post, or email campaign, ask yourself an important question, “Does this post show a true representation of my brand?” Your content strategy should align with your personal brand or business goals. It must add value to your audience or customers, and project the right perception about your brand. So, avoid being carried away by the numerous content you’re able to create from different sources. Always make sure your content is meaningful by sticking to what brings value to your audience and properly represents your brand.
Discover what message voice and format works best for your brand
Content can be delivered as videos, white papers, infographics, case studies, blogs, podcasts, and many more. These formats are all great however, finding the best format that resonates with your audience will help your content to sink in, become more acceptable and shareable amongst your audience. Therefore, it is best to find out which format works best for your brand by conducting competitor research. Use qualitative and quantitative data to support your choice of format.
Once you decide on what works best, make sure that your content voice aligns with your brand by making sure your content tone is in sync with your brand voice. If your brand was human, how do you think it would sound? It could be warm, authoritative, edgy, or sound scholarly. Make sure your message gets out in the right voice that aligns with your brand voice.
Share timely and relevant content only
No matter how important and interesting your proposed content sounds to you, a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if that content is relevant to your audience at the moment. For example, if you’re building a personal brand on the fitness niche, sharing content on the best ways to work out in the cold when it’s summer is very untimely and irrelevant.
Take advantage of trending topics on social media platforms to decide what content works best. However, avoid sharing controversial or sensitive ones like politics.
Focus more on your audience and a little on yourself
In as much as you work hard to create contents that interest your audience, it’s not out of place to do self-promotion from time to time. Always share what interests your audience but include a healthy amount of self-promotion so your audience won’t forget that you’re also there to provide a service to them. A good rule of thumb will be to do an 80/20 split. Let your content strategy include 80 percent of helpful content for your audience while the other 20 percent directly promotes your business.
Conclusion
Content can come in different formats. Whether video, blog, vlog, or press release, what matters most is its alignment with your brand values, perspective, voice, and the value it adds to your audience.
Always find new ways to create unique contents that harbor the right message and interest to your audience. While doing so, it’s important to avoid sharing links from your competitors as they could contain the promotion of similar services you offer. Be conscious of sharing content with paywalls. Your audience won’t like to open a link that requires payment before reading the full content.
And finally, try not to overwhelm or underwhelm your audience. Don’t post multiple times in a day, at the same time, posting once in a month will be unserious and unrealistic for someone who wants to get their personal brand stand out.