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content audit, Content marketing, Personal Brand, Personal Branding: You and more

Are You Conducting A Qualitative Content Audit For Your Personal Brand?

May 20, 2017

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I will answer that for you: you must.

Wading through your twitter stream (especially), you’d notice a content pool flooding you with brilliant information – some repurposed (while still content rich); and some that is so fresh, just like that ideal Starbucks brewed cuppa aroma (cappuccino, I like). And you can experience the same with LinkedIn and other (your version of) content rich social channels, on a perfect Friday afternoon (if you are blessed with some ‘me’ time). Your piece of content is also somewhere in this stream, waiting to be read by someone relevant to your business or someone who could be potentially be aligned with your brand’s message.

So pacing up when it comes to writing contextually is the name of creating valuable, personalized and relevant content. Which leads me to ask you, are you present in your content creation journey where your readers are also present?

Is there a way you can analyze and monitor how can your content be acknowledged and consumed by your customers and audience in general?

Well there are some ways via which you can determine your personal brand is on the right path. And that is through conducting a content audit of your brand.

How?

  • By closely studying your brand narrative that is spread across your areas of influence, it could be your social networks, your content assets, like your Web site, to a blog or an e-book, to even a paper book. Your audience’s built up opinion after an engagement with you – online and off – can help you decide what form of content narrative has worked with your audience in the past, arriving up till now.
  • I have recommended Buzzsumo earlier in my posts as well, and it really works! Find out what is most liked and shared by audience and bring your version of the topic even better when it comes to audience relevance.
  • Adhere to your personal brand’s manifesto: that outlines the brand guidelines and basic consistent brand tonality.
  • Create content that communicates your brand’s key purpose of existence keeping the audience appropriateness in mind. As mentioned by Gerry McGovern here, your content should have ‘customer care’ words’: that speak the language of your audience, to your audience. Assess if your content has been audience-centric, instead of a fluffy series of gobbledygook.
  • Study your content destination – is it giving your audience a call to action or moving them to do something because of your writing? Back it up with strong SEO to determine if your audience is able to find you through targeted keywords and phrases.
  • While metrics gives meaning to the process, but analytics is powerful and effective: see what kind of content your audience engages with the most.

Your customer journey should be your content journey via always conducting a content audit to see if you two are in synergy or if your content has slipped through the cracks.

Learn and speak your audience’s language.

Do you conduct a content audit? How often?

Brand Experience, branding, Content marketing, Personal Brand, Personal Branding: You and more

Your Personal Brand Needs a Real-Time PR. Here’s How

May 6, 2017

Personal branding has become a common phenomenon. And with commonality in every individual taking the plunge into personal branding comes a need for differentiation in positioning your brand as a trusted thought leader. And there’s nothing better than an effective PR strategy to make your brand stick – and not stale – in your audience’s mind.

We have all been talking about the usual traditional PR – contacting the journalists and getting our spot in the already small space in the print. While that still works, although differently, you cannot always find your way out to market on such a massive scale. Journalists have their own writing purpose for which they search for a story angle that might not always be about your brand (personal or company).

So how do you create your brand’s coverage with so much PR already happening both in print and digital?

Leverage these – and see for yourself how it helps you create a lingering personal and business impact on your audience.

  • Use the new rules of PR. David Meerman Scott, in his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (5th edition), talks about this topic in detail. He mentions about how you can tap into the existing news in your industry or business area and write your own version of content commentary around that topic. For example: many global IT companies have a white paper for downloads on IoT, and so you writing another White paper(which is great for the content marketing part) may not always mean people will read what you publish. So what would be a good PR hack here? Create your own blog post on the research done on this topic and put your perspective on IoT differently: that way when people read these papers and also find your blog post in the Google news or search results, well you know you have readers and Web visitors as a result of your take on this real-time news commentary.

 

  • Adopt the Skyscraper technique. When I attended the CMS Asia 2017, B2B Masterclass, I had the opportunity to meet Katrina Too, APAC Marketing Marketing Strategy and Operations manager with HubSpot. She talked about the Skyscaper hack that you could use to make your content stand out from the pack on the Web. So what does this have to do with your personal brand’s PR? Find out the most shared content on Buzzsumo and tweak the title and write your own piece with even better research, insight, and slant. Result? Tap into an already existing audience and surpass the most highly ranked posts with more visitors on your Web site.

 

  • Conduct a content audit to see what works. Do an audit of your old content and see which ones drove the maximum engagement and shares. Repurpose your old content and break it down into sub-modalities. Analyze the ones that worked and repurpose them into content formats where your audience is at. A content audit will keep you wary of what types of content can be leveraged to create a news trigger or a commentary by studying the trends in the market.

 

  • Use different platforms; no confinement. Medium and LinkedIn are great publishing platforms for writers; however, it all boils down to your brand’s purpose. Going forward, native is the best way to reach out to your audience, which also means PR will be personalized and contextualized as per your growing audience’s presence on different platforms.

 

  • Find your community and amplify your content. Be it participating in LinkedIn group discussions or collaborating with bloggers and influencers in your field, look for ways to partner with like-minded people who can help you in amplifying your content. You best PR advocates are these set of bloggers and influencers who believe in your brand purpose.

 

  • Believe in owned media. Your Web site is your best PR platform. Publish blogs consistently with the right usage of the keywords – and over a period of gradual seeding of content, people will find you. While paid, search and earned media should also be used, but only once you have injected your efforts into authentic and useful content for your audience.

 

How are you crafting your real-time PR plan?

Let’s chat!

 

blog, Business, Career, Content marketing, Personal Brand, Personal Branding: You and more, Self marketing, social media, Solopreneur, Thought leadership

Think Like A Publishing Company (Because You Are One)

January 14, 2017

Social media has opened incredible avenues for anyone to write and publish. Let’s face it: we all are publishers. You’d see millions of people joining social networks and sharing their proud piece of work on the internet. Which, in a way, is not that overloading for others to read. Oxymoron? Not really. We have all heard about separating the wheat from the chaff, and that holds true even for your writing online.

 

There are people who have zero tolerance for gobbledygook or something irrelevant. They have some appetite for good content on the Web and ensure that they wear their blinkers on when they see/ read something, which doesn’t ring true with their filtering standards. They only look for a staple called wheat; rest everything else (no matter how much contextually ‘wow’ for others, doesn’t come under their scanner. It’s chaff, simple). The yardstick for reviewing content, although, depends upon many parameters, differing from a person to person.

 

Well, these people also happen to think like publishers. And so could you.

 

Your brand’s online presence hinges on how well you articulate your words with the right accent of emotion, rationale and a captivating narrative.

 

Thinking like a publishing company will help you connect with your readers in a no-nonsense way. Also, publishing companies can be really picky when they like a piece – and they would go on a reading stampede to ensure that when they are inundated with so many articles or pitches, they work like neat surgeons in keeping the substance and letting go of content that doesn’t resonate with them.

 

This approach can work for you in building an intelligent brand equity in your business realm. Once your brand starts gaining momentum via producing content for your readers, there will be more [writing, business, speaking] invitations – and you’d, then, have to think like a publisher to accept the most relevant and promising invitations while letting go of the ones that do not connect with your brand’s purpose and overall vision.

 

You have a voice to shine online across your intellectual properties by being neat about your writing and how you approach your influencers and your ecosystem in general. By neat, I mean crisp yet articulate, prudish yet personally opinionated, and fluid in subtly connecting with your readers.

 

Michael Brito, in his book, Your Brand: The Next Media Company also highlights the importance of honing your brand to think and to be like a successful media company. He has captured the meaning of content as a brand marketer brilliantly. And so, you can start developing your own media company like a mini-inc or a mini-Forbes via curating and creating excellent content on the Web, with your own set of guidelines and benchmarks when launching any form of content- be it blogs, articles, op-eds, case studies, Whitepapers, e-books, a paperback book, and lately, even a podcast.

 

As with building your personal brand, following the strategies of a publishing company, your content becomes more focused, enhanced with the right tonality and voice, and brings out more reasons for your readers to stay engaged with you for the long-haul.

 

Think and write like a publisher; have an outsized impact – in the form of more business, more writing and speaking invitations, co-branding opportunities, cofounding a business, co-authoring a book and much more.

 

Over to you. Do you think like a publisher?

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    Hello there – I’m Aditi, the founder of Let The Muse Flow.

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