The Importance of a Cohesive Brand, Brand Messaging and Content Mix

Welcome to episode 135 of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento and I have today a very special guest, it is Steph Hilfer of VIIM, who is the owner and creative director. I am very excited to have her here because we are going to be talking about the importance of having a cohesive brand messaging and content mix.

So before we get into what we’re going to talk about, I want to ask you how you got started in what you’re doing, how you started VIIM, how the whole thing came about, and also what does VIIM mean? 

The name in itself is pretty unique and I knew when I was naming my business, there were a few key things I’m going to throw some weird stats at you, but 70% of and I think they base this number off of an ock. So the stock market businesses that are profiting 70% of the highest performing businesses are single-word names or acronyms and so it stands for Visual Intentional Integrated Marketing.

What are the importance of having a cohesive brand messaging and content mix? 

When we’re talking about brands, people get off-topic on what it means to have a brand, let alone a cohesive brand. Most people think a brand is your logo, maybe people will take it a step further and recognize color; However, when I’m talking about brand cohesion, it’s also the messaging, the language, the words, the imagery, the experience and so with brand cohesion and values of your brand. 

Let’s say you have a magazine that you put out, email marketing, print media, all of those channels, you do that cohesively. Just the simple fact of doing that increases your revenue by 23%. That’s huge and I like to have you start thinking about the brands you experienced. When I’m talking about messaging.

I’m talking about the words I’m talking about, the story I’m talking about, the shift, that rebellious act of taking something and putting your stamp on it. Take notes along the way, go through all of the channels that you market through, and put some key things on one side of the column and say, okay, logo, font, colors, just some basic things, and then maybe pick some keywords that are a part of your brand.

If you don’t have a defined brand, just go with your gut and pick some words and about 6 to 10 things and go check off and see where they all lie. Do you have your logo on everything? Do you have those keywords across all of those channels? Are you using the same font? That’s a really fun, free, quick exercise that you can do to give yourself a little grade on where you stand with cohesion and brand profusion. 

When you write your brand messaging or when you have your brand messaging, it needs to help identify things that are of value to you. You have to recognize there are personal brands and there are corporate brands and then there are some which are ‘hybrid’ brands and a mix of both or evolving from a personal to a corporate.

A personal brand is going to truly be you and what matters to you. And that’s important for personal brands because you’re wanting to work with people who value what you value.

Let’s go back to this idea of just simplifying it and doing it simply. Find your word within your message. Now, if those words are cohesive and they align with what you value, then you’re going to attract people who also value those words and there’s the cohesiveness there with that brand messaging is you’re going to enjoy this process. 

I want people to realize right off the bat, you are going to evolve and redesign and rebrand over and over and over again, and oftentimes that is coming from a place of not established brand or brand fatigue. You feel stuck, you feel limited, it feels old, it needs a refresh, and a lot of times it’s a band-aid fix for a bigger problem. That’s existing in a business. So Pepsi for a great example, we still know who Pepsi is and it has so much to do with that messaging.

Every evolvement they’ve had, they’ve made a very conscious effort to still make sure that you know, that the core values of who they are and what they do and what they deliver and the experience they want you to have when you experience their brand, the crispness, the pop of the can, the intensity of the flavor when you first have it, right. No matter if it’s Mountain Dew, we’re talking or Pepsi, it’s important to create the right messaging and experience.

What is the easiest way for a brand to determine its content mix? 

So when I say Content Mix a lot of people are like, what does that mean? So I’m going to frame it in what almost everyone right now is thinking about ‘What do I post today?’ Content Mix is the content that we put out and at what ratio or percentage of what content are you going to talk about?

The first thing I say is to look at what you’re already doing. Now, if you’re a brand new brand and you’ve never posted anything and you’re wanting to be strategic and proactive and go about this differently, then that’s a different kind of content or topic but if you’re like probably most, you have a business and you’re wanting to see it grow and have more structure.

You can create different personas for your brand that align with your target audience. You can post an altruistic or donation-giving side and also a fun side to using your product or you can post memes that may align with your brand etc.

Figure out a theme and some consistency around what you put out. When you have made some types of posts you can study the insights to see if it resonates with your brand. Does it perform well? Is it important? Is it part of your value structure?

I use a social media scheduling tool that I love called SocialBee and they have a way that you can create categories. So for all of those categories that you had, I created ones that, you know, fit into my brand and all I had to do was schedule them.

When I want to post what kind of category throughout the month or throughout the week and then it’s going to literally just go through and just auto-post because I’ve put them in this category and then I don’t even have to worry about it, it just takes care of it.” 

You have shared so much information and made it so easy for us to understand what we need to do to get our stuff together. So I truly appreciate you being here.