Everybody loves to read a story…

And in today’s digital era, where a consumer keys in as she thinks about a product or service, the importance of building an online persona of your brand becomes very important. And blogs allow you to tell your story and position the persona of your brand. Thus the persona of the brand is now what your customers say and feel about your product or service or organization. Hence it’s the content you have on the social media that creates a significant impact.

Subsequently, your customers start engaging with you through your blogs. The personal interaction with them brings your brand closer to them and helps build trust in you! Getting the content viral is something which every marketer aims at. Viral is nothing but the positive effect of ‘word of mouth’. Until date nothing could beat the word of mouth marketing. And this is done by the readers of your blogs. The readers eventually become your best brand building evangelists!

Is it as simple as said? No, unfortunately it isn’t. Bad blogs can not only be ineffective but a bad content can totally delineate your customers from your brand. The dissociation can be damaging to the extent of completely destroying a brand.

The most essential and preliminary step of blogging aka branding is to understand the need of the customer. Each audience has need. You need to understand and empathise with their intents. And then you know the destination. Accordingly you need to ideate the content to connect to the core. The emotional connect that you create with your blog is what imparts the timeless unique identity to your brand, which in turn stands out and forms an indelible bond with your coveted customer.

Nonetheless, to achieve all this you need to understand the dynamics of the disruptive marketing and identify the intent of the leading customers. Once you can answer them with your well researched, well strategized and well curated blog, you have established your brand story.

Experience economy is believed to be the next economy after agrarian, industrial and service economy. The main characteristic of the ‘experience economy’ is that in this economy, ‘experience’ will be sold as a commodity instead of as a value addition to service or goods/product economy. Now many brands provide experience of the brand for free to customers so that they buy the product or take the service. For example, in Music World stores, you can experience music using headphones for free before you proceed to buy CDs. So as of now experience is provided as a value addition. But now the time has come to commoditize and sell the “experience” to buyers or guests for a price. For example, people go to Disney Land and spend hundreds of dollars just for the experience. Similarly, Hard Rock Café is a theme restaurant where people do not go to dine but to gather ‘memorable’ experiences.

In the experience economy, a place may be developed using infrastructure and props to enhance certain kinds of experiences. It is staged. People enter an experience zone having certain expectations. The developers have to ensure that these expectations of the guests are fulfilled and they get their money’s worth.

In the experience economy, people pay for sensations. The components of experience can be anything and everything under the sun. It depends on human nature and what they wish to experience: physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual. Moreover, as experience is subjective and personal and differs from person to person depending on attitudes, mindsets and culture, people will have different kinds of experience from the same place.

(1) The Character of the Target Audience: No communication is effective if you do not keep your particular audience in mind while designing it. You also have to understand the characteristics and behavior of the members of your particular audience, like their age group, gender, geographical location, their likes and dislikes, their culture and beliefs as well as their online behavior (if possible).

(2) Tonality and Purpose: Next thing to keep in mind is the purpose of your content. What do you want ‘your’ content to do? Do you want to inform your audience about something? Do you want to persuade your audience to take a particular step through your content, like say buy something, inoculate their children against polio or register for a forum, and so on? Or do you simply want to entertain your audience?  The tone of the content should complement your purpose of communication. However, it has been found that a friendly, conversational tone is suitable for most purposes.

(3) Choice of Words and Articulation: Right words articulated in the right context and in the right tone are very important for the content to be effective. Balance is the key here. Overdoing anything can be very harmful for the content.

(4) Structure: A simple structure makes it easier for your audience to grasp your content. You may follow the 4Ws and 1H structure to keep things uncomplicated. The 4Ws stand for ‘What’, ‘Why’, ‘When’ and ‘Where’ while the H stands for ‘How’. Answering these questions would roughly cover the topic from all angles.

(5) Visual Accompaniment: Since a picture always attracts more attention than a written text, always put a relevant picture along with your written content. And your content will never go unnoticed.

The ecosystem of Social with its different components like the platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on), the users who use the platforms, the content or the communication and the intelligence and analytical tools is very developed.

In the ecosystem of Social, today we can say that the ecosystem of Analytics is the most developed and is evolving constantly to become better and better. Analytics without doubt gives us an understanding of the success of the campaign running on the platforms and the ROI. To the layman the most recognizable sign of a content being accepted is the use of “like” or “share”. Besides “like” and “share” each and every channel provides a set of statistics independently to the publisher of content as to how the campaign is going. On top of that, there is a plethora of tools to help us demystify the acceptability of the content at the granular level.

There are social listening and analytics tools which provide a general perspective on how the communication is performing overall across channels. There are analytical tools and again some more analytical tools. The situation is such that the ecosystem of intelligence and analytics seems to be more developed than the ecosystem of the social as a whole.

But the important question here is that can intelligent analytics ever replace the need for generating the right content? Content still remains and will remain the basis for engagement with customers. Content is still the King.

1) Define the Topic: This is the first step to a great blog. Establish your topic and its scope properly at the beginning of the blog to create the right expectations in the mind of the readers. Then fulfill those expectations or surpass them but never let them down.

2) Contextualize with 4Ws and 1H: Explore your topic from all angles by following the simple structure of 4Ws and 1H. The 4Ws stand for ‘What’, ‘Why’, ‘Where’ and ‘When’, while the 1H stands for ‘How’. Answering these questions would put the topic in its proper context and make the readers grasp the topic well.

3) Tell a Story: People love to hear stories. Personalize your content with human touches and emotions. Your blog should touch your readers’ hearts. A blog that tells a story is always more interesting to read than a blog which is a dry statement of facts.

4) Design Roadmap: Design a compact structure for your blog. Haphazardly written, sloppy lines, unnecessary digressions or length make blogs uninteresting. Blogs are meant to be read fast. Help your readers by putting sub-topics. Be to the point and concise.

5) Conclude with an Invigorating PoV: The conclusion of your blog should reflect your unique point of view about the topic. This gives your blog its unique flavor. Simply repeating what others say or following run-of-the-mill trends will make your blog very ordinary. Blogs become great when you lend your unique perspectives to them.