Can your brand be a golden egg of content? Talk differently Creating a unique (and consistently unique) brand voice should be your first port of call. Create a brand personality and voice that makes you stand out. Define your brand personality as you did with your competitors, and then choose five adjectives to describe your unique voice. TIP: Your brand voice should be authentic and relevant to your audience as well as consistent across content and touchpoints. Go back to the spreadsheet and jot down the design style of your industry competitors. Or “content marketing through the letter box” as we like to call it. What are the most common content mediums/types/formats in your industry? Just adopting this experimental zig-not-zag attitude will put you in the “top 5%” and make you a golden egg in the making. You will find and form strong bonds with an audience who shares your values.
I opened a carton of eggs yesterday and one of them was gold. Solid gold.
Crazy, right?
Picture it. Eleven plain egg shells and one glorious dome of gold, glinting on my kitchen counter. I picked it up and, sure enough, it weighed a ton.
I called the supermarket. Apparently, there was some mix-up with the department that supplies golden goose eggs to Jack and Beanstalk land or something.
Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details. The point is, this got me thinking …
Why do most blogs look like boring, identical, everyday eggs?
Everyone’s a thought leader these days, regurgitating the same tedious content like a gaggle of vomiting geese. The online community of every industry is oversaturated, it seems.
And yet, every now and then, one of them shines.
Only 5% of content creators get loyal followers, traffic, and dominating positions at the top of Google. (I made the 5% figure up, but it’s a small percentage all the same.)
They are the golden eggs of content. They differentiate themselves in the right way. In a way that customers love. In a way that makes them gleam with value. In a way that makes them the go-to resource for the topics they delve into because they stick like heavy duty contact adhesive in the minds of their readers (or listeners or viewers).
Can your brand be a golden egg of content?
Yes, it can!
The key is: to truly be unique.
Now I know you’ve heard this time and time before, but marketers rarely explain how to make your brand content unique. And that’s exactly what this article is going to reveal.
But as you soak up these tangible tips to content differentiation, please remember: EVERY golden egg content creator got to the top over time, with careful tests, tweaks, and attention to their audience. Differentiation is just one part of the content marketing equation; but an important part nonetheless.
Here are five practical ways to make your content zig while your industry zags.
1. Talk differently
Creating a unique (and consistently unique) brand voice should be your first port of call.
Thug Kitchen is a great, albeit very extreme, example.
In the heavily saturated world of food and cooking blogs, most content creators adopt a gentle, sophisticated brand voice with descriptive language and long, detail-heavy sentences. And yes, an air of pretentiousness often floats around the foodie arena.
But Thug Kitchen took a different route.
It offers no-nonsense vegan recipes and “bad ass” cooking tips in the voice of a rapper or “gangsta.” Seasoned with profanities, short punchy sentences, and a tongue-in-cheek twist to the culture of veganism, this brand content REALLY stands out.
The target audience? Probably not a 60-something grandma. But millennials with a sense of humor who just want to cook some nice grub fast and forget the fluff eat up this content for breakfast (and lunch and dinner). Oh – and apparently celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow do too.
In the B2B world, Copyhackers is a prime example of a brand voice that perks up ears.
Joanna Wiebe and her band of merry copywriters keep their marketing tips extremely down-to-earth, jargon-free, funny, and personal. They throw in some tongue-in-cheek street talk for good measure.
At the end of a Copyhackers article, you feel like you’ve been chatting with a mate in the pub (yes, I’m British). And it’s a refreshing change to this land of B2B corporate speak and dullness.
Joanna discusses swearing, euphemisms, and writing something that actually sounds like you (plus the controversy that might come with it) in this post.
How to do it
- Do some competitor analysis. Find the top 10 to 20 brand blogs (or vlogs or podcasts, etc.) in your industry and pop them on a spreadsheet. This step helps with the practical differentiation techniques I’ll delve into.
- Write down three to five adjectives that best describe the tone of voice of each brand. Is it hip? Playful? Sophisticated? Cheeky? Authoritative? Sassy? This list of adjectives will help.
- Describe the “person” speaking – gender, age, job title, and personality traits. Personify your competitors’ brands before you create your own.
- Note the commonalities across the group.
- Create a brand personality and voice that makes you stand out. If everybody in your industry speaks stiffly and corporately, be the chilled one your audience can relate to. Or if every brand talks like they’re your best friend, be the consummate pro. Or talking in a natural way might be all you need given its rarity these days.
Define your brand personality as you did with your competitors, and then choose five adjectives to describe your unique voice. To do things even more thoroughly, create a tone of voice axis, as explained in this Buffer post.
TIP: Your brand voice should be authentic and relevant to your audience as well as consistent across content and touchpoints. (I will explain in depth at the end of this post.)
2. Format and structure your content uniquely
Is everyone in your industry writing 500-word listicles? Then why not consistently create 2,500-word value-packed pieces? Or 200-word nuggets? Or reveal your lessons in the form of gripping stories, not lists? Or include a Buzzfeed-style interactive quiz in every post?
Differentiating the structure and formatting style of your content (i.e., the way it is organized) is another opportunity to lay that golden egg.
Bernadette Jiwa’s blog about brand storytelling,…
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