Content Marketing: Can We Really Trust Your Brand?

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Can your brand be trusted?

Of course your first answer is to assure me that, of course, I can trust your brand.  You’ve been around for X number of years. You have The Most Amazing Social Proof Ever in the perfectly optimized position on your website.  You’ve even have declared yourself an expert in your field. 

But I want to know whether I can trust your brand at a deeper level. And here’s what I mean.

What does your brand stand for?

You might have a mission or value statement.  You might support a charity.  You might have had a company retreat and talked about authenticity, for all I know.

But if something suddenly happened to your website and I couldn’t read those carefully crafted statements, well, then what? If I couldn’t find your web page and couldn’t read the content that talks about your brand’s passion for providing fresh water in impoverished areas or I couldn’t see your links to Seth Godin’s posts on authenticity, but I could see the rest of the content on your site and your social platforms, would I really be able to tell that those things matter?

I recently read a story about a little experiment done at a corporate retreat. A brand wanted to see if who they thought they were and how they were perceived online matched up.

It was a simple experiment, and you could easily harness the exact same tool this multi-billion dollar brand used and examine the authenticity of your own content marketing.

They took a representative example of their content and put it into a word cloud tool called Wordle. Many people see it as a great graphic tool to make artistic images of text communication.  And it is.
But it also helps you dig a little more deeply into your word choices and see what you’re talking about frequently – and what you’re not talking about at all.

For this company, it was stunning. They discovered that there was a pretty serious disconnect between what they were parading as the “important stuff” and what they were communicating online.
You might think that your followers don’t care about that level of detail. But even if they can’t exactly put their finger on it, that’s one of the ways they decide if you’re truly authentic and if they want to do business with you.

If your content isn’t aligned with who you say you are as an organization (and that counts for single person brands all the way up to large multinational corporations), you’re telling a story that is disjointed, unclear, and possibly even flat-out contradictory.  The bottom line is this: over time, your brand will appear less trustworthy. And when your potential clients have a choice, they’ll choose your competitor whose message is more clearly aligned.

How to Align Your Content With Your Brand’s Story

1. Know your purpose
2. Use your purpose to formulate the core message of your brand
3. Evaluate every piece of content against your core message and purpose

Is your content supporting your brand’s story or are you missing the mark?