How to build a brand through content

What makes a brand?

3 main pillars make a brand and they are:

1. Brand voice and identity

2. Consistency

3. Trust

Customer centricity is key to building quality content which engages your target audience and builds a relationship over time. And you can only be customer centric if you know your audience well and you can only know your audience well if you talk to them every chance you get.

How does content create and strengthen a brand?

When you create a piece of quality content that entertains, informs or solves a pain point for your audience, you build social capital with your target audience. And if you maintain consistency in building a pipeline of quality content, you will eventually come to occupy a mind space with your audience.

For example, Traveloka Vietnam aspired to become your travel buddy who speaks and acts very much like a best friend you have that knows a lot about travel.

Such brand images will become closely associated with your core selling proposition and propel you to the top of the consideration funnel whenever there is a trigger associated with it.

For Traveloka Vietnam, the trigger could be “I am burned out at work, let me dream a little about my next getaway” and instead of going to Google, they land on one of Traveloka’s owned channels to discover their next destination.

This is something paid marketing tactics cannot achieve as you remain beholden to the Google and Facebook ad ecosystems, playing by the same rules as countless other marketers vying for the same audience, trying to outbid each other.

Push vs pull:

• Quality content over time builds a relationship with the audience which forms the foundation of your brand and creates a pull effect.

• Paid marketing tactics are pushed to your audience and have to compete with thousands of other ads everyday to get noticed.

How do you measure performance?

Google trends is a simple and free tool to quickly get a pulse on your brand’s traction for word of mouth. See screenshots below for Traveloka Vietnam’s journey.

From Zero in 2016…

To challenger in 2017,

And hero in 2018!

Bonus trivia!

What is the most successful piece of content marketing ever made that is 90 minutes long? Join me and my guest, Chi Ngo who used to lead Traveloka Vietnam’s content team in the podcast to learn the answer!