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To emerge with one’s brand and value proposition in a more or less saturated market, amidst an infobesity context exacerbated by AI, and facing increasingly demanding audiences. This is the daily challenge that marketing departments, whether in B2B or B2C, must tackle.
How to leverage branding and content to make yourself heard, stand out, and serve the business objectives of the company? This is the overarching theme that we explored with Marion Cousin, Director of Infopro Digital Stories and Studies.
What is branding? What is its importance for a company?
Branding encompasses all practices and elements that shape a brand’s image and identity. This includes visual aesthetics such as logos, colour palettes, and iconographic codes, as well as how the brand communicates: its editorial tone, messaging, discourse on values and mission, and the overall experience it delivers across all touchpoints (advertising, customer service, packaging, online presence, etc.).
The goal of branding is to create a strong and consistent identity that allows the brand to differentiate itself, amplify its voice, and demonstrate its uniqueness in often highly competitive markets that may also be somewhat homogeneous.
A brand strategy should be considered a strategic lever because by directly influencing how the brand is perceived, it enhances trust, and desire, and ultimately impacts its commercial success.
In essence, the ambition is for the brand to be identifiable, recognized, preferred, adopted, and even recommended, with the direct impact that this has on overall performance.
What are the key elements of a good branding and brand awareness strategy?
The starting point is to have a thorough understanding of the market, competitive landscape, and your brand—its identity, values, attributes, and tone of voice.
It’s also crucial to develop a deep understanding of the expectations, questions, aspirations, and concerns of your target audience to align your brand communication with both real and perceived needs.
Once these elements are mastered, the next step is to measure brand awareness within the market and its positioning relative to competitors. This involves conducting a brand awareness study to establish a baseline « T0 » and then tracking its evolution over time based on the strategy and actions implemented.
From an operational perspective, a brand awareness strategy will rely on various levers such as:
- The brand identity (logo, colour palette, typography, guidelines, etc.);
- Traditional and digital advertising;
- Public relations and communication: press releases, media relations, events, influencer marketing;
- Partnerships and sponsorships;
- A content strategy for storytelling;
- Social media;
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search (SEM, PPC);
- Email marketing.
Depending on the prioritized objectives, actions will be prioritized on specific levers. Monitoring and measuring KPIs then allow for real-time management of actions and adjustments.
To create a complete and coherent brand experience, companies must consider a 360-degree communication approach to “surface”. This involves activating all meaningful levers in relation to the business, target audience, and benchmarks, so that each interaction with the brand reinforces and enriches the overall perception.
The 360-degree approach enables a natural amplification of the brand’s messages. By integrating and aligning communications across various channels, each marketing effort reinforces the other, creating a leverage effect that maximizes the reach and impact of every campaign. This establishes a brand presence that is not only more visible but also more influential.
What challenges are companies facing today?
From a business point of view, the main challenge facing companies today is competitive intensity. There has been a post-Covid rebound and, when you listen to our customers today in all the major sectors of the economy in which we operate, the recurring theme is competitive pressure.
In terms of communication and marketing, the challenge is to make each brand stand out and make its uniqueness heard in the midst of a multitude of content, media, blogs, social networks… where there are all kinds of content, interesting or not, with added value or not.
This famous “infobesity” that we’ve been talking about for several years is still with us today, and it will continue to be exacerbated by the democratisation of generative AI tools. Brands and the agencies that work with them therefore face a daily challenge: to emerge with a unique voice and genuinely interesting content.
What is the role of content creation in branding strategy?
Content creation nurtures a brand’s identity and contributes to its storytelling across different audiences.
Content enables showcasing expertise, deciphering complex business issues, integrating non-financial performance into value creation, engaging employees, embodying brand responsibility and commitments… and thereby, showcasing its uniqueness through specific discourse and original formats.
There are numerous fields of expression, diverse topics, and varied formats. One challenge of content creation is to create the right editorial mix to capture the brand’s audiences with interesting and engaging content, sustaining their engagement over time.
Content makes it possible to play with all types of grammar (textual, visual, digital, audio…) to reach diverse audiences who consume information in differentiated and asynchronous ways.
A fundamental aspect of any content strategy is distributing content on the right media and platforms at the right time, with a focus on performance.
At the same time, the content created by marketing provides sales staff with the tools they need to support their sales pitches. Case studies, technical sheets, white papers, and market studies enable them to substantiate their discourse. Prospects exposed to such content earlier in their buying journey are more receptive to sales efforts. Conversely, the input from sales teams is crucial in content creation, given their direct interaction with prospects and clients.