Writing and Creating Authentically: Ensuring Your Brand Reflects You

Your brand’s identity is an essential aspect of your business. It ensures that you’re attracting the best customers—in quantity and relevancy—while distinguishing you from the competition through a one-of-a-kind tone and style. Your brand voice reflects what you do, and why you do it, and establishes your company values. The question then becomes: how do I ensure that I accurately and authentically reflect my brand through my content? Well, that’s what we’re here for!

You can build a strong brand identity in many ways through copy, design, and illustration by creating authentic content that tells your story in a genuine way. We’ve put together a list of tips to help you ensure your content reflects your brand’s unique voice and identity. From staying consistent and transparent to using your authentic style and keeping focused, we’ll go over how you can create content that will help your brand’s identity shine through and benefit your business.

Try To Stay Consistent

The most important thing you can do to develop your brand’s identity is to stay consistent. Whether this includes a particular style for your designs or one specific sentence structure for all internal and external communication, it’s key to stay consistent throughout all of your materials. Come up with a brand strategy by asking yourself the following questions: What is the tone I want to use? Who do I want to attract? What are the most important company values? What method of communication does the product itself align with? Once you have an understanding of the answers to these questions, consult with your colleagues and research to have a brand direction in mind. 

It’s important to note that consistency doesn’t mean that you can’t experiment with your content. In fact, you should always try new things and keep your customers excited! Brand consistency means having a few unshakeable elements that all communication conveys. For example, Coca-Cola’s logo has been mostly the same since the 1950s. While they change a few things, such as the shape of the entire logo and the placement of the bottle, the vibe as a whole is identical. Such consistency allows customers to instantly recognize your brand and build their own relationship with it. Consistency should be one of your priorities when building your brand identity.

Don’t Chase Trends 

Another important part of building and maintaining a solid brand identity is to stay true to your tone, values, and mission rather than chasing around trends and hot topics. Trends, by their very nature, are fickle. You won’t be able to build a lasting brand voice if you’re constantly switching your content based on current trends. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t participate in trends; you definitely should! Trends are a great way of constantly getting content ideas and usually improve your brand visibility.

However, constantly following trends can destabilize your brand, leaving customers confused as to what your identity stands for. For example, if you’re an interior designer, you could be torn between maximalism and minimalism. While the former surged because of Gen Z’s 2000s revival, the latter is relevant to millennials following the Kardashian minimalism shift. If you constantly post pictures of both trends, you could confuse your audience about your brand’s signature identity. Instead, find your skills and what you want your brand to represent, and curate content accordingly. This will strengthen your brand’s voice while also allowing you to reach a more niche audience, which can be helpful to your marketing strategy.

Be Transparent 

To have an identity is to be transparent — with yourself and with others. Representing your brand authentically involves being as transparent as possible, especially with your audience. Sharing more information about who your team is, how you work, and what you aspire to achieve creates commonality between your brand and its customers, thus allowing for intimacy and genuine interpersonal understanding.

This transparency can come through in something like an Instagram series where employees share their personal highs and lows working in this field, or maybe something more fun, like everyone revealing a funny work secret on a Twitter takeover. It’s a myth that a brand voice has to be cold, formal, and corporate. In fact, the very thing that could set you apart from others is a different way of speaking and creating. Everyone knows that people make up companies, so why shouldn’t you highlight that in your brand voice? You can definitely play around within the scope of your brand’s identity and have some fun!

Tell Your Story

A huge part of the framework of your brand’s identity comes from your brand’s story. People love compelling material, and who doesn’t love a good story? This suggestion goes hand-in-hand with being transparent because it involves a degree of vulnerability. Once your audience understands your background and vision, people will truly understand why your brand exists and why it’s different from everything else out there. Share your brand’s story with your audience, from its conception, struggle, and rise. For example, you might have had difficulty starting your company or attracting clients. This isn’t something that should be necessarily hidden from your customers. Acknowledging the fact that you might have struggled will humanize your brand and will ensure that you are more accurately represented in your communication. Telling your story plays a big role in shaping your brand’s identity and how your community perceives that identity.

Stay Focused

Last but not least, it’s crucial to stay focused when building your brand’s identity. As your brand grows and time passes, you might get distracted by other things. Perhaps your brand started out as a marketing agency for sustainable fashion brands, but as it got better, large designer companies that didn’t believe in sustainable fashion started approaching you. Shifting your focus and moving away from your niche might alienate the loyal customers who have valued your brand and been a source of true support for several years. To maintain your brand’s identity, it’s important to stay as focused as possible and be true to yourself, the brand, and your community who has invested their time, attention, and money in you. Find out what your core values are and stick to them — this is an integral part of your story and identity.

Creating an authentic brand identity and strategy is something that develops over time. The most important thing is to stay true to your vision and transform your content into a representation of these values and your brand identity. By staying consistent, transparent, focused, and true to yourself, you will stay on track to best represent your brand to the world! You’ll figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what feels the best for you and your team.

Always in your corner,

The Content Queens