#10: Guidelines or the Sidelines - The Importance of Consistent Branding
The MessageUp Newsletter | Edition 10
Hello There!
If it’s Wednesday, it must be time for a newsletter from MessageUp.
This week we’re writing from spectacular Snohomish, about an hour north of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. The climate is spectacular and the pace of life is noticeably slower - two much-appreciated improvements over Houston.
Speaking of improvements, we spent the week pondering how branding contributes to the success of B2B content marketing efforts.
It begins with the modern B2B buyer’s preference for companies that are authentic and trustworthy, to which they feel an emotional connection.
Evoking an emotional response—and sustaining it across multiple touchpoints—requires consistent application of effective branding.
This in turn requires establishing clear brand guidelines, communicating them to your content team, and ensuring they are followed every time your company publishes something. Read more in our latest blog post: Brand Guidelines - Key to Successful B2B Content Marketing.
This week, we read an interesting article about Information Gain, Google’s latest innovation aimed at changing the way search traffic is ranked.
You can find a link to the article—as well as insightful pieces on creating knowledge banks to fuel content creation, writing effective case studies, the PAVE approach to creating customer-centric content, and the dangers of content marketing without a coherent strategy—by scrolling down to What We’ve Been Reading.
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~ Team MessageUp
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
July 13, 2022 - Brand Guidelines - Key to Successful B2B Content Marketing
July 6, 2022 - How to Make B2B Content Marketing Part of Your Day-to-Day Business
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that you might enjoy and find helpful:
The Winner Doesn't Take it All - Information Gain and the New Future of SEO
Ryan Law, VP of Content at Animalz, reports on an important new search ranking solution Google has patented called "information gain", which would reward articles that bring new information to the reader. Rewarding content for being different rather than comprehensive would have far-reaching implications for B2B content marketers.
The Knowledge Bank: Your Marketing Content Team's New Favorite Tool
Kelsey Raymond explains how MarketingProfs uses knowledge banks - repositories of insights gathered from the company's subject matter experts - to provide content and context for the material it publishes. Sounds like something many companies ought to adopt.
Sharing Winning B2B Customer Stories: How to Showcase an Effective Case Study
Case studies form an important part of most B2B companies' content marketing strategies. This helpful piece by Megan Thudium, writing for Entrepreneur.com, explains how to put one together effectively.
A Framework for Customer-Centric Content Creation
We can't stress it enough - content marketing is about writing what the customer needs to hear, not what we want to say. As Yolanda Valery of ClickZ writes in this nicely organized piece about the PAVE approach, it's time to "abandon self-centered content creation."
Where's the Disconnect for B2B Content Marketers?
In this short but poignant post, Kelsey Voss at eMarketer sounds the alarm about content marketing without a coherent strategy - as well as strategy decisions being made based on other teams' (often executive's) requests.
Until Next Time
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