How to reposition your brand with a content strategy
If your content isn’t performing the way your business needs, you should consider repositioning your brand.
Step 1: Get to know your best customers. What makes them love your product or service?
Make a list of your best customers and reach out to see if they’d be open to talking to you.
You want to know…
- Why did they choose you?
- Was there any friction in the buying process?
- Have they become your advocate? Do they refer other customers to you?
- What makes them your best customers?
- Can you use them for testimonials? After the customer used our service they saw an increase in results…
Use this opportunity to learn as much as you can about them.
Step 2: Consult colleagues
Taking the decision to reposition your brand is not an easy decision to make. But once you have, you need to understand how this will impact other areas of your business. For this reason, it must be an inclusive exercise. Often led by a content strategist, this exercise will bring other parts of your organisation together to learn what the consequences and opportunities are.
Depending on the scale of the exercise, you may benefit from an independent facilitator running these sessions.
Step 3: A unified position
This is a repositioning exercise, not a rebranding exercise. You will have arrived at this point because your existing content was not working. You and your team will be clear that you need to change your approach. With everyone onboard you are free to create clear and clear and consistent messaging. This unified position will make it easier for your content team to produce the necessary content.
Step 4: Research your value proposition
Remember why you are repositioning your content. It wasn’t working.From step 1 you’ll have some understanding of why your best customers use your products or services. Does this match your value proposition?
You should question your existing value proposition. Run a workshop or brainstorming session to generate ideas about what makes your business special. If you didn’t exist, what would your customers do instead?Would they use a competitor? Which one?Would they use a combination of different tools?
You want to get a better understanding of what makes you different. List everything you can think of.
Step 5: What makes you special?
This is where you drill down on the list you have created in step 4. Look for attributes that make you unique or give you an advantage over your competitors. Focus on features rather than the value you bring. Your content marketing will focus on the benefits at a later stage.
The purpose here is to challenge you to really dig deep and develop some really compelling reasons as to why your product or service is special. The better the feature, the better the benefit for your customer. And of course, this exercise really helps your content planning.
Ideally you’ll end up with a few core features that will allow you to redevelop your value proposition.
Step 6: Identify your audience
Your complete feature set will not appeal to everyone. Content marketing targets content to relevant audiences. This stage requires you to think about why a particular feature appeals to a particular audience.
This is a good exercise as it makes you concentrate on who your customers are likely to be. Remember: You only ever create content that contributes to your business objectives.Now is a good time to streamline your audiences. If your content wasn’t working before, it was probably because you weren’t creating the right content for the right audience.
Step 7: Your Value Proposition should answer a need
Be bold. Be honest. Place your revised value proposition at the heart of everything you do. Are you offering a better product than your competitor? Position your content to say that. Are you competing for a new segment of the market? Maybe you uncovered better features and benefits for a specific segment of the market. Target your content for that new segment.
Step 8: Content Strategy
You believe in your brand and you believe in your business. Now it’s time to put that belief to work with a content strategy. Not only will a content strategy keep your content aligned to your brand it will keep your value proposition front and centre.
A content strategy ensures you consistently create content that focuses on the benefits and problems your target audience wants and needs.
This article was originally published at https://www.highly.digital where I work as a Content Strategist. If you need help with your content strategy, connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
