Excerpt from Gartner.com
Activating strategic brand content across marketing messages can be a struggle for brand leaders with siloed teams and decentralized content operations. A more collaborative approach with cross-functional inputs can help tie content back to the brand position.
Key Findings
Content creators are often overwhelmed by decisions related to how and where to apply brand elements in content, which leads to disjointed brand experiences and audience confusion.
Activating and maintaining brand voice across channels can be a struggle for siloed teams who do not follow the same processes.
Brand and channel teams don’t have visibility into the content that each creates across the organization, so their ability to impact and connect to the other’s content is limited.
Recommendations
- Expand and update the brand standards, and teach teams how to apply the brand strategy and a consistent brand presence across the organization.
- Establish brand adherence with collaboration and a cross-team center of excellence (COE) for content planning to unite previously siloed teams.
- Employ a more federated approach to engender more collaboration and give the brand a stronger position with diverse inputs.
Introduction
A brand’s voice is only as strong as its content. However, articulating the brand voice across content in the face of proliferating channels and assets has become an increasingly difficult task. A fundamental disconnect happens in the content production process despite strategies, guidelines and roles in place. This is due to a lack of centralized brand oversight, and disparate content often comes from various teams with differing processes.
In today’s fast-paced omnichannel environment, brand leaders must lean into cross-functional collaboration across all organizational teams to achieve a cohesive voice that resonates with audiences.
Most brand leaders acknowledge the importance of collaboration across teams to ensure the brand voice comes through. However, when asked to rank activities in the 2023 Gartner Brand Leaders Survey, they consistently ranked collaborative activities lower than other activities.
Instead of the collaborative activities at the heart of successful content creation, brand leaders ranked more siloed activities, such as focusing on scenario planning and brand vision creation, most highly.
Brand strategy guidance and adherence are two main areas that brand leaders need to focus on to get genuine, effective collaboration moving that will help express brand topics in the brand voice. Over 80% of brand leaders agree that improving how marketing strategy guides channel choices is a top priority, and having a strong brand requires that all employees consistently follow brand guidelines.1
This note will focus on best practices for communicating the strategy and guidelines and developing effective cross-team collaboration to enhance the brand presence throughout all content and assets including:
- Defining the strategy in a brand guidelines document
- Communicating and training employees on brand strategy and guidelines
- Providing consistent and frequent checkpoints to articulate the brand voice and tone for content creators
How to Ensure Strong Brand Presence in Content
Brand leaders are charged with defining and documenting the brand strategy and guidelines. Too often they rely on disjointed teams with different processes, agencies, freelancers and creators to consistently develop “on-brand” content. Best practice requires a concerted and ongoing effort to ensure the brand presence comes through.
Define Brand Strategy Across the Organization
It’s essential to clearly understand what you want to achieve through your brand content by setting clear goals and objectives in strategy documents. Brand guidelines establish a brand’s personality and help create a unique and memorable brand identity consistently (see Improve Your Brand Resource Center Using This Maturity Framework).
Strategic brand documents can include:
A brand strategy: This formal document presents a clear and compelling articulation of the company in the audience’s minds that differentiates the brand from others.
Brand voice and tone: Voice and tone are how a brand communicates with its audience through messaging. It’s the interplay of personality, substance, tone and style. The voice is constant regardless of who or where the message lives. Tone, however, can be adapted — from casual to formal — to fit the “tone” of the message.
Visual identity: Visuals include guidance on logo usage, photography, graphics and typography.
Teach Teams How to Apply the Brand Strategy
Having excellent brand documents is not enough to ensure their consistent adoption. Ongoing employee training is necessary to develop cohesion across the organization.
Gartner’s 2023 Brand Leader Survey results indicate that there are two keys to successful integration: a variety of teaching methods and touchpoints paired with a firm stance on staying true to the brand.2
Brand leaders should ensure that employees are trained and retrained annually or as brand updates occur. Retraining should involve brand leadership reviewing brand goals and vision, updating staff on any changes, and showcasing best examples. There must be links and easy access points to all materials when and where employees, agencies and freelancers need them, and employees should be involved in regular reviews of their work for brand consistency. This ongoing support and guidance also helps employees build their own judgment on how to apply brand attributes.
Once all content-creating teams clearly understand your brand, you can develop a plan for activating it across the organization.
Establish Brand Adherence With Collaboration
Establishing a culture of collaboration will help develop a stronger brand presence within content and channels. However, doing so can be easier said than done, especially across disjointed or siloed teams. Too often, we’ve seen brand teams establish the documents, train employees at a high level and then go away to do other work. Over time, they see more and more communications where the brand voice is barely noticeable or absent.
Creating a Team to Lead Branded Content
To solve the lack of brand adherence in content, you’ll need to establish collaboration teams, a COE, an ideation lab or a similar group to bridge the gap between brand and content creators. The leader of the COE, or central team, should be a strong leader of the brand or be able to advocate on its behalf. This will ensure alignment, encourage collaboration and aid in creating more composable cross-channel content to strengthen the brand presence (see Centers of Excellence in Marketing: A Guide to Understanding and Implementing COEs).
The three steps to setting up a cross-collaborative COE are:
Identify your cross-functional partners. Who in your organization creates content or messaging that represents the brand? This may include people from marketing, sales, product development, customer service and other teams. It’s important to receive executive buy-in and sponsorship.
Build relationships with content-creating team members. Once you’ve identified your cross-functional partners, building relationships with them is crucial. This means getting to know them, understanding their priorities and building trust. You may receive pushback from people, or groups worried you will get in their way, slow them down or try to establish time-consuming procedures. Gain support by establishing ground rules and explaining mutual benefits at the outset.
Communicate regularly. Give quarterly presentations, meet with new employees individually, incorporate brand questions and prompts on intake forms, and establish weekly content meetings.
Setting the COE’s Agenda
Meetings of the COE should comprise cross-functional members representing all content-creating groups.
Establish an agenda where specific individuals representing each group present at each meeting. Require contributors to bring the concepts to the team early enough that they can affect the outcome. This may be weeks or months in advance, depending on the publishing cadence at your organization.
Ask questions to focus teams on planning and ideation to impact the content before production. What are some ways we can extend this to another channel? Is there an opportunity to more clearly show brand value? While content strategists should have answered these questions already, that’s not always true, and the team’s collaboration can strengthen the outcome. Although this approach may feel like being the “brand police,” it’s an effective way to meet brand standards.
Share successes. Collaboration, ideation and establishing ways of working will be slow initially. Use the time to share internal success stories or examples from other brands. Conduct quarterly recaps and review of the most “on-brand” content you’ve published over the last quarter for inspiration. Share what makes it stand out as a means to highlight best practice.
Watch out: Don’t let the meetings devolve into status updates on works already in process. Instead, a strong meeting leader will push teams toward collaborative decision-making with pointed questions, compulsory feedback and resource sharing for new projects. For example, ask questions like, “How will this content incorporate brand voice?” or “Which brand pillar or point of differentiation does this content tie to?”
Streamline Process by Structuring Like a Newsroom
Great guidelines and training are insufficient to ensure brand consistency across teams and all organizational content. Teams who create large amounts of content will benefit from “thinking like a newsroom.”
Newsrooms have long created massive amounts of daily content that is on-brand, audience-centric and satisfies advertisers, publishers and readers. They do this repeatedly on tight deadlines, with minimal resources and competing priorities. They’re successful because their centralized structure allows them to:
- Meet frequently to discuss content
- Have rigid editorial processes
- Employ specialist editors with authority to guide the content from ideation to publication
- This process ensures they get consistent, high-quality output every time.
Conversely, most brand teams create content across distributed teams with varying processes and differing adherence to brand standards. The output they get at the end can vary, and the brand may or may not have a strong presence or come to life in the same predefined way.
Lean Into a More Federated Content Approach
In addition to establishing a COE, you’ll need to embrace a more federated approach by refining your production processes. When content flows through the same teams of people familiar with connection points, they will quickly see opportunities for more collaboration and brand cohesion.
A federated approach allows for the COE to have some decision-making authority. The extent of control can be adjusted, and the decisions can be split between groups as needed. The idea is to engender more collaboration and give the brand a stronger position (see How to Choose the Right Content Governance Model).
The same group of people may undertake different functions:
Use a cross-functional content editor. This high-level role resides in content with a cross-reporting to the brand leader. They are responsible for ensuring that content in development will meet brand standards. The content editor should have a strong understanding of your brand guidelines, audience and products so they can guide teams with ideas to meet brand standards better.
Use a content review board. While the editor focuses on content as a whole, this group, made up of COE members, will focus only on brand voice. They should see all content before publication. The content review board should consist of content, brand and channel team members with a strong understanding of your brand voice. They should be able to identify content that does not meet your standards and make recommendations for improvement.
Ensure the content review board also monitors content and does monthly or quarterly reviews as a cross-collaborative team with various channel and unit leaders. Compile and share published content and discuss the brand presence. Where did it succeed? How could it have been better? This allows the team to learn and grow and establishes real-time best practices (see How to Scope, Plan and Execute a Content Audit).
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