When we talk about digital marketing strategies, whether focused in social networks, expert spokespersons or personal brand creation, we must keep in mind that there is an absolute king: content. And to make strategy work, it must provide value to your community.
But, how to create valuable content? To do so you must take several aspects into account: the industry in which you operate, the context of your community, the objectives you have set, the platform on which you communicate, etc. You should always keep in mind that your content must entertain or educate, because for people to be interested in it, it must provide them something.
On LinkedIn, for example, it is essential that your content makes it easier for you to connect with the industries of your interest, to generate a positive impact and position yourself as a reference of knowledge, in this way, you will ensure that your LinkedIn profile is seen as that of an expert leader. I will teach you the steps that you must follow to start creating valuable content on LinkedIn.
Identify your community correctly
The first step in a content strategy should always be knowing your community, since you need to understand your audience to be able to impact them with the right message. a content that is focused on the needs of the target audience is more likely to generate conversions, engagement, and eventually, build a community of followers.
To develop your personal brand you must define who you want to target: who are those ideal collaborators? With what type of profiles do you want to generate a relationship? By answering these questions you can develop a “buyer persona” or a wishlist of contacts and adapt your message effectively to impact them correctly.
In addition to achieving your objective, which is positioning yourself as an expert leader, by identifying your community you can bring together people that share similar interests and unite around specific causes or problems, thus encouraging collaboration and action to seek solutions among all.
What can a strong community of a personal brand achieve? First, educate and raise awareness, since you can share knowledge and experience to socialize relevant information, defy stereotypes and allow to better understand different realities of the same problem.
In addition to this, personal brands can achieve direct support for a cause, whether through financial support, donations. collaborations with NGOs and other initiatives to truly impact a certain issue.
Finally, a personal brand with a solid reputation can influence others, achieving the promotion of ideas and social changes through personal experiences, relevant data and the action of motivating others
For example, Laura Ribas is a renowned digital marketing blogger who has used her personal brand to achieve different objectives: first, she is an important figure within the industry, but in addition to this, she has created a platform that teaches entrepreneurs how to start their business correctly by sharing her marketing knowledge, strategic thinking and productivity.
Choose a tone of communication
Now that you have identified your community, it is important that you define how you are going to address them. The tone of communication is essential to a personal brand because it becomes an aspect of its identity, its voice, in the way you communicate with the audience. The tone of communication allows you to convey the personality of your personal brand.
So, how do you want to speak with your audience? You can use a friendly, informal, humorous tone, or perhaps you prefer to be informative and corporate. Choosing your tone of communication should be aligned with your communication objectives.
Which are the communication objectives? They are those points that you want to achieve with your community: your strategy may be in a stage in which generating engagement is important, or perhaps you want to educate on a specific topic; you may also choose to entertain your audience, or you can simply communicate relevant facts.
What is important is that you define your tone based on your objectives, because in this way you will know how you can convey a message in a better way: for example, if your objective is focused on engagement you should use a close, informal and simple to understand tone, since in this way people will react more to your message.
An excellent tool to set the tone of communication of your personal brand is to create a style guide, which will also allow you to appropriate your voice in a better way. To develop your style guide you must understand what you want to convey and how you want to do it, you can guide yourself answering some questions:
- What kind of emotions do you want to convey to your community?
- Which words would your personal brand never use?
- How do you relate with your community?
- Are you going to use buzzwords or slang?
It is also important that when creating your style guide you choose a group of words that will serve as ‘keywords’ since they will be the flag of your personal brand. These words must be associated with the values of the personal brand and will be integrated in your posts and hashtags constantly.
Why create good content?
Content on digital channels is essential for the development of a personal brand, because through it you can connect with profiles with similar interests and create a strong community, therefore creating relevant and quality content is key for success within any strategy.
It is important for you to take into account the needs, desires and tastes of your community to develop content that is interesting to them. There are many types of content that allow to increase the presence of a personal brand, some of the most common are:
- Educational: It focuses on informing and educating the community, when talking about a personal brand, it should be focused on topics related to the industry of which you wish to position yourself.
- Entertainment: Although LinkedIn is a network of professional contacts, it does not mean there is no space for fun. A Little entertainment allows you to humanize your brand and make it more closer.
- Brand content: This focuses on the construction of identity, in transmitting who you are, your values, goals, etc.
- Product: Is there a new launch in your company? Is your entrepreneurship releasing a new product? Under this type of content you can promote its features.
- Trends: What are the latest news in the industry? What relevant events are there at the moment? It is important that your community sees that you are up to date and you can do so through this type of content.
The pillars of content emerge from the types of content, that is, the topics that your personal brand is going to periodically address. According to your industry and objectives, you must define these pillars to know what topics you are going to cover.
Develop a content plan
Now that you are clear about your community, your objectives and the type of content that you want to share, it is the moment to create a content plan, that is, a guide in which you detail what type of content you will create, in what format will it be developed, when will it be published and where will it be shared. It is important to have an established plan to develop a consistent communication aligned with the objectives of your personal brand.
Thanks to this planning it will be easier to catch the attention of your audience and make them prefer your personal brand thanks to a correct communication of your valuable proposal. Your content plan must be created based on:
- Plan topics that are interesting and fit your content pillars, as well as being aligned with the purpose of your personal brand.
- Catch the attention and impact profiles with similar interests that can be part of your community.
- Highlight the value proposition and make your community feel attracted to your content, increasing the credibility of your personal brand.
Remember that although content is the king of digital marketing strategies, it must be a content thought and focused on the user: in the end, they are the ones who will decide if your content adds value to them. Therefore, within all content creation you must always ask yourself: What do I contribute to my community with what I am communicating?
