The Branding Guru

Do you think your company needs branding?

Do you think it needs a definite identity to boost its image?

Take a look at these.

• New company, new product
• Name change
• Brand revitalization
• Brand identity revitalization
• Creation of an integrated system
• Company merger

If your company falls under any of these categories, you probably do!

So, you would ask, why invest in brands?

• Make it easy for the customer to buy
• Make it easy for the sales force to sell
• Make it easy to build brand equity

All of these are obviously going to be beneficial for your company, with regards brand value and profits, as well as equity.

Important thing to keep in mind while branding

• Acknowledge that we live in a branded world.
• Seize every opportunity to position your company in your customers’ minds.
• Communicate a strong brand idea over and over again.
• Demonstrate a competitive advantage!
• Understand the customers. Build on their perceptions, preferences, dreams, values, and lifestyles.
• Identify places in which customers interface with the product or service.
• Use brand identity to create sensory magnets to attract and retain customers.

Brands are intangible assets and account for, on average, 75% of the value of a company.

-Blake Deutsch

Brand Strategy

The best brand strategy is developed as a creative partnership between the client, the strategist, and the designer.

-Connie Birdsall, Creative Director, Lippincott

Firstly, brand strategy needs to resonate with all stakeholders. These include external customers, the medis, and internal customers (e.g., employees, the board, core suppliers).

Brand strategy is a road map that guides marketing, makes it easier for the sales force to sell more, and provides clarity, context, and inspiration to employees.

Who Defines Brand Strategy?

Just a single person can’t define brand strategy, unless the brand is you. Even then, that would be difficult. It usually is a team of people. It is a result of an extended dialogue among the CEO, marketing, sales, advertising, public relations, operations, and distribution.

Global companies frequently bring in brand strategists: independent thinkers and authorities, strategic marketing firms, and brand consultants.

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Good examples of branding at work

Apple Think different	Harley Davidson Rider passion
Target Expect more. Pay less.	Disney Make people happy
eBay The world’s online marketplace	Virgin Mobile Life without a plan
Unilever Adding vitality to life	GE Imagination at work
Volvo Safety	Coca-Cola Happiness in a bottle
FedEx The world on time	Mini Cooper Let’s motor

So, will you invest in branding and make your company the best it can be?

 

Be The Content Hero!

Getting people thinking about content strategy?

Here’s some tips for getting it done.

Simple English over technical jargon

Make sure you talk in simple terms to help people understand content strategy. Halvorson and Rauch have this beautiful passage which you should NEVER use when explaining content strategy.

“In many companies, the content lifecycle is totally undefined and ignored. Content is constantly getting produced in silos, and no one is fully accountable for its governance. And the problem is just getting worse, because no one understands that content requires strategic consideration and dedicated resources. So I analyze, strategize, and implement solutions that help businesses realize their goals while ensuring users are able to successfully meet their objectives.”

NEVER, EVER use this.

Instead, say this.

“You know how, on lots of the websites you go to, most of the information is hard to find, or inconsistent, or totally irrelevant, or just really bad? I fix it.”

Who knows? This might help you land a job rather than being ignored by the listener.

Champion Content

When you’re thinking about redesigning or creating content for a website, don’t think about the design and template first. Generating the content on the website should be the most important thing that should be thought about.

Designing the content even before you get the actual words might lead to your site looking different compared to your expectations.

Designing templates around content is much easier because you have an idea about what the final product should look like.

Blog

The easiest way to get people interested and thinking about content strategy is to blog about it. Setting up a blog is easy and free. So many blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Blogspot, Tumblr, etc. exist which can be used to make content strategy interesting.

There are so many interesting people blogging about content strategy. Whether they just started blogging or are industry veterans, they are contributing to the content strategy industry. Some of these guys weave their magic here:

Ian Alexander – eatmedia.net/blog

Rahel Bailie – intentionaldesign.ca

Clinton Forry – content-ment.com

Matthew Grocki – grassfedcontent.wordpress.com

Creating a blog is also a great place to post your own ideas about content strategy, your experiences from conferences and presentations on content strategy and a whole lot of other things.

Make sure you help other people who crave to know that there’s an audience for content strategy (of course there is!)

Need help?

Creating a strategy for your company’s content? Afraid it is going to be disproportionately difficult? No reason to fear. There’s multiple avenues where you can seek help.

Groups

There’s online groups where you can get help, whether you want to be really active in them or just gain information.

The Content Strategy Google Group and LinkedIn Content Strategy Group two of these groups where you can gain invaluable information.

Twitter

Twitter is always the place for the best information. Most of this can be easily sourced by following #contentstrategy.

MeetUp

You can start your own MeetUp or look for one in your area that exists already.

To check if there’s a meetup in your area, go here:

http://content-strategy.meetup.com

If there isn’t one, start one up yourself. You’ll be doing all those interested parties (who weren’t motivated enough) a favor.

Even if a single person is interested, you can crib about how no one understands content at your company.

 

Web Content Audit

So, all you site owners, how many of you know what’s on your site?

I have been writing on this blog for 8 years, have a 100 posts, and I have no idea what every post on this blog is all about.

This is where a web content audit comes into place. Knowing what your website holds is invaluable information. A web content audit will give you invaluable information.

What does a content audit help you with?

• Know your budget for future content development
• Think about maintenance and removal of old content
• Help future content development by old content acting as a source point.

Content audit widgets might help, but is technology ever a replacement for an actual content developer? I’ll make it simpler for you. No, it isn’t. A developer provides substance, quality and accuracy. Technology might not provide all of these.

What technology is useful for is this:

• Understanding the amount of content you have
• Understanding what content you have
• Saving time

Things to consider before doing an audit:

• What you want to learn (and why)
• What you need to prove (and to whom)
• How long you have to get the audit done (don’t lie to yourself)
• How far are you into your content strategy process

Different kinds of content strategies to consider:

• Quantitative inventory
• Qualitative audit – Best practices assessment
• Qualitative audit – Strategic assessment

Auditing a smaller number of pieces (1500 might be considered small) can be done single-handed, but a 5 digit number of content needs a team to be able to do it quickly.

Making sure you have your criteria pre-decided is an important thing to do to make sure the team doesn’t disagree over different content and to make sure the content doesn’t need to be double-checked by other members of a team.

When you’re done with the audit, make sure you prepare an audit report. This is to make the data from your audit easy to convey to someone who might not understand the complexities of your tabulated audit.

The audit reports can be done in the following formats:

1. Formal reports
2. Casual summary reports
3. Presentation

Formal reports can be prepared by including a detailed description of how you performed the audit, graphic depiction of the results, data which references the data and the graphics, and the key analyses and findings from the content.

The informal reports are directed more towards team members who might be familiar with the content, so these only need to have a summary and some focus on the problem areas.

A presentation-style report is if you want to explain the key findings to someone higher up and you want to keep it short.

I hope you content developers are now motivated to audit content on your website and this post helps you do that.

 

 

Confused By The Job Hunt? Top Tips When Looking For Jobs

Know that guy in your department who only talks about documentation of your work all the time? Yes, that guy. Sometime, go and ask him what his other skills are. He’ll list down a number of skills you wouldn’t believe a technical writer could do.

That’s what most technical writers go through. We write pretty well, I can say, but it’s not the only thing we learn as undergraduates or graduates. Most of us are in parallel fields as undergraduates with the lure of technical writing pulling us into the field. Of course, the necessity is that we’re good writers but we need other skills to actually be employable.

Our undergraduate degrees also help to some extent with this. I’ve studied three semesters of mechanical engineering before switching majors and graduating as a journalist. Some people are naturally better at writing in HTML or JavaScript, which many of the employers ask for. Employers seem to want everything from the employee if you look at job ads.

Most students stress when they start applying for jobs just as they are about to graduate because the expectations of companies hiring for a job seem extraordinarily high. The most important tip for a job hunt is not panicking, because that makes it doubly hard to judge your true worth.

So here are Shri’s top tips during a job hunt:

• Start Early

The most important part is to start as early as possible because there’s a lot of candidates for the same job, so your application will be at the start of the queue of a number of candidates. This can also help you look for jobs before their closing date.

• Don’t Panic

Like we said earlier, don’t panic. This will help you analyze job ads better to see what the companies are looking for and also read between the lines. Keeping calm will also help you during the actual interview because hiring managers always look for someone who can keep calm under pressure.

• Be Optimistic

The most important part of looking through job ads is to understand that hiring managers aren’t looking for all the qualifications they list in the ad. They are looking for the top 4 in the list, and if you qualify for any of the others, that will work in your favor.

• Update Your Resume

Your resume is the first thing that represents you when you’re applying for jobs. Make sure your resume is the best it can be. Include all the stuff that is pertinent to the position and eliminate anything that doesn’t add value.

Finally, good luck with your job hunt. There’s a lot of jobs out there for different people, so I’m sure you’ll find your dream job.