What might the habits of superheroes have to do with impactful brand building? Well, from the Justice League to the Powerpuff Girls, we find that even those with the most impressive capabilities prefer to work together rather than going solo. Our caped crusaders are really onto something here, because there is power in unity—and their tried and true tactic is just as relevant to building your brand strategy as it is to saving the universe!
Yes, creating a unified brand across all touchpoints is absolutely key for today’s most masterful marketers. However, it is a feat that can be just a little more complicated than many savvy business owners imagine, not least because there are more potential angles of approach than first meet the eye.
In today’s digital era, the combination of a brilliant brand story and consistent presence across all platforms can move mountains when it comes to engaging an audience. However, branding must serve a greater purpose than enticing consumers alone. These days, it must deliver a trifecta of triumph, speaking directly to investors and stakeholders, employees and industry talent, and potential customers alike.
Far from being something to be daunted by, this multi-faceted quest should have your best marketing maestros excited. Because, when navigated knowingly, unlocking the potential of a unified brand strategy means gaining access to untold advantage—a boon that may well elevate you above the competition. So, read on as we swoop right into the thick of how to create content that will power-boost your branding, as well as why it’s so worthwhile to pursue the same unity so often sought out by the most beloved caped crusaders.
What Is Branding?
What do you think of when you hear the word branding? Perhaps color palettes, logos, and font choices come to mind, or even the vital importance of emotionally compelling brand storytelling. However, while these factors are intrinsic elements of the thing that is branding, in and of itself, your brand is actually something much less tangible.
Ultimately, branding is the way that consumers perceive your company—it is the sum of many parts, but also something that you can only steer by showcasing your unique offering, sensibilities, and resonant values to the very best of your ability. The role of your branding strategy is to carefully curate and influence how the world relates to your enterprise. If the job is done well, audiences will draw in, customers will remain loyal, investors will be keen, and your industry’s innovators will be sending over their CVs in droves.
Of course, not all companies hit the mark first time, and it’s not only newcomers that struggle with getting their brand messaging on point. For many scaling businesses, trouble arises when different employees, teams, or departments begin to silo toward varying branding strategies. The result is inevitably diluted messaging and a confused audience, providing opportunity for an arch nemesis to gain headway.
So ask yourself, is the brand experience you are currently offering as unified as the Power Rangers’ most prosperous combat sequences? If not, now is the time to practice your group fist-bump and together transform your brand into its most unbeatable iteration yet!
Why Unified Branding Requires Three Angles of Approach
Many of our favorite fictional adventures involve a heroes’ triad of some kind, and the very same thing can be said of legendary branding. As businesses connect more and more with their audiences online, a diversity of eyes fall on their every action as never before. This means that your marketing tone, consumer interactions, and moral stances will all bear scrutiny from anyone and everyone who might have an interest in your brand, either repelling or magnetizing along the way.
Interestingly, it is not only the evolution of the digital era that has upped the stakes when it comes to multi-faceted branding, but also the lasting impacts of the pandemic. Most have heard of the ‘Great Resignation’ which saw millions of workers quit their jobs in the hope of attaining roles that would better align with their growth and values. Well, not only is the World Economic Forum reporting that the Great Resignation continues into 2023, but experts have found that consumer behavior has also shifted, with audiences seeking a greater sense of shared purpose with the brands they choose to invest in.
So, is it possible to send out a far-reaching Bat-Signal that conveys your brand’s convergence with the wants and needs of both modern consumers and top-tier employee talent? The answer is absolutely yes! However, as that branding strategy signal is constructed, another set of eyes should be kept in mind too.
Inescapably, a brand’s messaging and reception can substantially influence how existing stakeholders and potential investors perceive its potential. What’s more, there are advantages to be leveraged in blending signals geared towards all three of these critical character sets—and hopefully, they’ll all answer your superhero call with equal enthusiasm.
Great Branding Forges Iron-Clad Customer Loyalty
These days, companies earn lasting consumer loyalty by consistently delivering branding that mirrors the personal values of their customer base. Making space for people to identify with your brand starts with things like the delivery of consistent quality, encouraging strong positive associations, taking a moral stance, and forging a sense of trust that consumers will return to again and again.
Adding even more promise to this portion of your branding strategy triad, research from LinkedIn reveals that exposing the consumers within your brand audience to messaging tailored towards both recruitment efforts and corporate spellbinding can increase the click-through rate (CTR) of consumer campaigns by 14% and reduce the cost-per-click (CPC) by 18%. So, a brand strategy that is unified in more ways than one is truly something that your customers will appreciate seeing in action.
Strong Branding Drives Recruitment by Attracting Top Talent
Just as an epic brand strategy will entice would-be customers, it can also help you attract and keep the kind of employees that will propel your business toward greater success. When your brand messaging is authentic and tells a tale of stellar, diverse, and values-driven company culture, you can reap the rewards of higher-caliber applicants, reduced cost per hire, and the retention of teams who wear superhero costumes in spirit.
Better yet, that aforementioned LinkedIn research also highlighted that when you ensure that your industry’s talent gets to see the best of your corporate and consumer brand messaging too, amazingly, you can anticipate a CTR increase of 138% and a CPC decrease of 32% for your recruitment campaigns.
**Epic Branding Builds Confidence Among Stakeholders and Investors **It’s impossible to launch or grow a business without timely access to capital and continuing faith from your key stakeholders. In this area, sending relevant branding out into the wild can be much more motivating than even the tightest of business plans alone. What better way to demonstrate that you understand your audience than to proactively converse with them? How better to showcase how you can trump your competition than with a brand story that hits home?
Once again, LinkedIn’s data tells us that tackling all three areas of strategic branding in unison is the advantageous approach. In fact, they found that exposing corporate brand audiences to campaigns intended for both consumers and potential recruits resulted in a CTR increase of 32% and a CPC decrease of 22% for corporate-targeted branding efforts. Now, that truly is a trifecta hat trick.
6 Content Creation Tips to Unify Your Brand Strategy Having covered that a unified brand strategy should draw together the power of branding towards consumers, talent, and stakeholders—and that doing so can multiply rewards—let’s dive into what else goes into the creation of content that will help your brand stand out for all the right reasons. Perhaps yours is among the many businesses asking several different teams to churn out specialized content across numerous marketing channels, so let’s look at how to ensure that all remain in sync.
Crucially, now is the time to decipher what your brand’s central DNA is composed of so that the various caped crusaders of your marketing team can contribute to a shared goal. When everyone engaged in content creation truly understands that DNA’s structure, they’ll be able to ensure that their marketing messages always chime with the brand, no matter which chunk of your audience they are speaking to or what responses they are ultimately hoping to encourage.
1. Make Your Branding Memorable and Consistent
Whether driving past billboards or scrolling on social media, have you ever noticed that it only takes a second to recognize content from the most influential brands around? From universally known logos like the Nike tick or the MacDonald’s ‘M’ to brand-associated color schemes like Coco Cola’s red or Facebook’s blue, these consistent signals help the desired neurons fire in the brains of viewers every time.
However, consistent branding goes much further than a dedication to thoughtful aesthetics. It also involves cultivating a dependable voice across all marketing channels, from big press releases to tiny social media comment responses. That voice should convey your brand’s mission and values so effectively that audiences begin to perceive and recall a trustworthy personality whenever they encounter it, because research tells us that 81% of consumers need to trust a brand before they’ll buy into it.
2. Harness the Power of Social Media
Social media is ideal for extending the unified branding that you have already established on your website and other marketing materials. However, this dynamic domain provides something else too. Alongside providing an outstanding avenue to send regular signals to all the right folks, social media also provides an opportunity to connect and converse with your audience in real-time, building trust even further.
As it turns out, 77% of consumers prefer shopping with brands they follow on social media. However, keep in mind that in a world of shares and screenshots, even your team’s most seemingly insignificant posts and replies can have an impact for better or worse. But, if your marketing gurus can keep that all-important consistent brand personality in mind, their all-for-one strategy is sure to pay off.
3. Don’t Be Afraid to Blend Your Branding Efforts
We’ve already explored the fascinating data on the value of cross-exposing customers, stakeholders, and industry talent to the campaigns coming from your brand’s HQ that target each of them respectively. The great news is that this information can be leveraged to help keep your feeds even fresher by mixing up your brand messaging with different audiences in mind.
A diverse spread of content types is always handy for keeping digital followers interested and engaged. However, now you also know that you don’t have to be afraid to mix exciting brand milestones and recruitment advertising in among your regular content—whether it’s shaped by show-stopping images, informative blog posts, contests, exciting data, or promotions.
4. Keep Referral Generation in Mind
When branding really resonates, customers are usually keen to spread the word. You can encourage this among your audience by generating content that is geared toward referral generation. Sharable content might be ultra-stylish, funny, relatable, or provide instant value by being useful in some way.
Crucially, it’s important to remember that content doesn’t only have to compel its viewer to buy. It can also help to forge greater brand authority and trust—or even better, take on a life of its own as your audience shares it far and wide. In this area, the familiarity of a unified brand experience will certainly boost the confidence of your customers to encourage others to check out what you’re offering. Plus, when your branding kick-starts growth that doesn’t cost you a dime, you’ll feel as if you’ve just unlocked a new superpower!
5. Balance your Organic and Paid Marketing Efforts
If you’ve followed our explorations of branding so far then you’ll likely guess that consistency between organic and paid marketing is a must for propelling your brand effectively into the collective consciousness. What you might be surprised to discover is that audiences actually respond favorably to a mix of both organic and paid brand messaging.
Another investigation from LinkedIn found that users exposed to both organic and paid content were 61% more likely to convert compared to those who saw paid content alone. The platform concluded that the two content types prime and compel audiences to seek out the other, increasing the probability of brand familiarity and recall in the process.
6. Offer Your Audience a Human Connection
As much buzz as there might be about the recent explosion of AI—and as useful as these kinds of high-tech tools might be to your business—it is important to remember that humans are fundamentally hardwired to connect. Way back at the beginning of the pandemic, researchers found that 85% of their respondents felt that organizations had become impersonal and lost their ‘human’ touch.
This is why making rich and emotionally charged storytelling central to your unified branding is so essential, and it’s also why communicating with intention is invaluable. Your audience needs to not only see but also feel the impact that your brand has on the people it serves and the people who drive it. In this way, you can distribute those superhero capes among not only your whole team but your audience members too, because you’ll all be engaged in pursuing the very same mission—which is the success of your superhero brand.
