The Brand Promise Definition for Content Marketing

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how brand promise and content marketing are closely intertwined.

After all, great content that addresses specific customer needs or pain points acts as a vehicle to help companies boost customer engagement and fulfill a specific promise.

On its own, great content shows your customers that you’re not only willing to provide them with a well-rounded product or service, but you’re also committed to sharing ideas and inspiration that can add significant value to their organization. In that way, brand promise and content marketing are two peas in a pod.

But let’s take a step back and answer this question first: What is brand promise?

Quite simply, brand promise deals with how your organization applies the combination of its values and capabilities to create distinct value for your customers.

But it’s more than just a tagline or logo. It’s the overall communication of your brand and customer engagement. As BrandToolbox defines it, brand promise is the crucial link to the day-to-day brand impressions that are delivered by an organization’s employees.

It’s also about being authentic, unique and genuine, as Newt Barrett points out at Content Marketing Today. If your company is crystal clear about the things it can offer and then deliver them, Barrett writes, then your authenticity will win customers over.

Creating content that fulfills your promise

Your entire content marketing strategy needs to be focused to deliver on your brand promise. It starts with knowing what that promise is, and continues with working hard to make sure that every piece of content you create addresses it.

After all, a promise only matters if you keep it. That’s the argument that branding and marketing services firm Hinge makes in its Pivot newsletter. If a company doesn’t fulfill its promise, then the resulting punishment is often a big blow to its reputation and bottom line. The article cites companies like Apple, FedEx, and McDonalds that fulfill their brand promises.

On the flip side, Sherice Jacob at marketing blog KISSmetrics explains why Dominos Pizza struggled for much of the last decade in a super-competitive market. As Jacobs writes, the company promised good, cheap pizza. It was cheap, but it wasn’t good and customers responded in kind.

So, what’s your brand promise?

If you don’t have your brand promise completely buttoned up, I recommend getting your senior management team in a room to flesh it out.

Here are three keys to keep in mind:

• Remember to think of the day-to-day activities that your employees deliver to your target audience or customer
• Tie your brand promise back into the overall aspirations for your company
• Connect and gather feedback from your most customer-facing employees (i.e. customer service or customer support) to get a better understanding of their day-to-day interactions

Now, how can you turn your brand promise into reality?

If you’re executing a content marketing campaign, the first step is to be certain that your strategy takes your brand promise to heart. That means creating content that consistently delivers on the promise you make to your customers. It doesn’t matter what that promise is, but it’s crucial that you deliver it with the content you provide them.

Amanda Maksymiw is a marketing associate at OpenView Labs, responsible for content creation and strategy for OpenView and its portfolio companies. You can follow her on Twitter @AmandaMaks.