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Coca Cola, Apple, Tesla, IKEA. These four companies all operate in different industries. One is in the soft drinks industry, another in the tech, third makes electric cars and fourth sells read-to-assemble furniture.

So why are we talking about these four companies in the same sentence if they are so different? Because, despite all their differences, they still have one thing in common that connects them.

They all have a clear and unmistakable brand identity.

There’s almost no person in the world today who hasn’t at least heard of these four companies, or even bought something from them. When people think of refreshments, they grab Coca Cola; when they want a new computer, they buy Apple and when they need new furniture, they buy and assemble IKEA.

People don’t simply buy their products for taste, quality or design, although they certainly don’t lack these. They buy their brand.

Of course, these four were quite easy examples of brands. But what of the millions of other companies that are trying to develop a brand identity for themselves? For instance, how can you showcase your brand identity on your website?

Well, this article will give you some tips on how to create website content that reflects your brand identity.

What is Brand Identity and Why it’s Not the Same as Brand or Branding?

Before we get into how you can make website content that reflects your brand identity, it’s important to understand what brand identity is in the first place.

Fortunately, for something like this, we don’t have to look very far and a simple Google search reveals the answer we are looking for.

For instance, Crowdspring defines brand identity as “everything visual about a brand, including color, design and a brand’s logo”. In other words, what the customer can see.

Although “brand identity” often gets mixed up with “brand” and sometimes “branding”, these three terms are different.

The brand reflects the name, design, symbol, logo or some other feature that differentiates one company or seller from another in the minds of their customers and prospective customers.

Branding, on the other hand, is a process of creating a brand. This includes what the customer can see (logo, visual design, name…) and what they can’t see (loyalty, awareness…).

How to Create Content that Reflects Your Brand Identity

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at how you can create website content that will echo your brand identity.

1. Understand how your brand stands out from the rest

This is perhaps a no-brainer, but it’s still crucial to understand how exactly does your brand differs from its competitors. What is your unique selling point and why do customers trust your brand?
This is often difficult to do with content, as it’s very easy to fall into the trap of making generic content. However, while it may be easier to just churn out content like everyone else, keep in mind that for 80% of people, the “authenticity” of content is the main deciding factor in following a brand.

2. Can you identify the company from its content?

Every time you create content for your company, I want you to do a simple text. Remove any visual characteristics that can be used to identify the brand, like logo or name and leaving just the bare content, ask yourself: can you identify the company from its content?

Visuals are still important for separating brand A from brand B, but it’s easy to become too dependent on them and neglect the content you write itself.

If you or another person consuming that content can’t tell it from the competitor’s website, start again.

3. Connect with your audience

Brand identity doesn’t happen without an audience to follow that brand. That is why your focus should always be on connecting with your audience.

You need to deliver content that your target audience finds informative and useful and you need to be consistent with it. It doesn’t help your brand identity much if you do this from time to time.

If you deliver content periodically every month, it will be much harder for the audience to connect with you. However, that doesn’t mean becoming a content production factory either. You also need to put serious thought and plan your content that the audience will want to engage with.

4. Use different types of content

Website content isn’t just articles and blog posts. It’s not enough to just write a 1,000-word blog post every week and call it a day.

Content comes in many forms, and text is just one of them. For instance, perhaps your message would be better served to your customers as a short 1-2 minute animation, or a 10-minute video, or perhaps an infographic?

While the text is often easiest to make, you shouldn’t ignore other content formats either.

5. Use social media wisely

While not directly on your website, content that you create or share on social media should work together with your website content to reflect your brand identity.

Of course, you need to be strategic with social networking as well. Although there are plenty of social media platforms out there, ask yourself this: “does this work for my brand?”. Is this somewhere where your audience hangs out?

Social platforms will often have quite different audiences and trying to cover them all is not only difficult but can also dilute your message.

The same goes for timing. Finding out where your audience hangs out is only the first step. To engage with them, you also need to be there when they are as well. If you’re not there when your customers and prospects need you, you are missing a big opportunity to engage with them.

Conclusion

Producing content that displays your brand identity clearly and concisely is very important. However, as you can see from thousands of online examples, it is also difficult to do.

The most important thing from the consumer’s perspective, however, is whether that content is useful to them. According to TextMagic, 91% of users opt to brand’s text messages because they see it as “somewhat useful” or “very useful”.

Hopefully, these 5 tips will help you create content just like that.