Why do some entrepreneurships manage to connect why people and others do not? The success of many companies today is due to a content strategy that shows their essence and purpose. And in this way, they establish relationships with people, who, by feeling identified with the brand, become their followers.
As users we are constantly surrounded by content: stories, reels, tiktoks, lives and other social media formats allow us constant communication with our favorite brands. Therefore, as users we must ask ourselves what those brands do to connect with us.
The answer is not the amount of daily posts or their avant garde graphic design: it is what they convey to us through the content. A brand that allows us to know its essence generates a sense of trust in us and allows us to identify with it.
Think of the feeling you get when you interact with a specific brand: for example, when thinking about Coca-Cola we can relate it with happiness, if we think about Poker; we think of friendship or if we talk about Disney, magic comes to mind.
That is precisely the brand essence: an intangible attribute that consumers perceive and acts as a differential element compared to competitors. It is the brand DNA and brings together within its elements the objectives, purpose, principles and reason of being. Thanks to a built brand essence, businesses can emotionally connect with their customers.
But, how to achieve a content strategy based on brand essence? One of the most effective exercises to build it is the essence pentagon, a tool that will allow you to establish what you are as a brand and convey it correctly to your audience.
What is the essence pentagon?
The essence pentagon is an exercise designed to find and define the essential elements of the identity and essence of a brand, which give it personality and as a result, generate a better positioning in the market. Within the essence pentagon 5 elements are established:
- Purpose: It is the reason for the existence of a brand, the difference that it wants to achieve in the lives of its customers and their surroundings. It represents the mission and impact it seeks to generate.
- Vision: It is what the brand aspires to achieve, a representation of a long term objective. The business makes decisions based on achieving this future image.
- Values: What does the company believe in? What are its principles? These are the factors that govern the behavior, ethics and culture of the brand.
- Personality: It is the way in which a brand relates with the audience, those attributes and human characteristics that represent the business.
- Value promise: It is the differentiating factor of the brand, a declaration of benefits compared to other competitors that seek to meet the customer expectations.
Develop a content strategy based on your essence
Every brand, personal brand or product currently needs a content strategy that allows it to have recognition in the market, but having so many competitors requires creating valuable content.
It is very easy to make the mistake of creating content following the trends of different social media to have greater reach, and although sticking to some trends can help, dedicating exclusively to replicating formats does not allow to convey to the audience what you are as a brand.
For this reason it is fundamental to develop a content strategy in which priority is given to topics that communicate the brand essence. Doing it using the essence pentagon is one of the best ways to achieve this objective, I explain how to do it:
A story with which everything begins
The first step is giving your brand or product a story: why did it arise? What motivated you to create it? How was the process? Structure this narrative well, since all the content for your digital assets will come from here.
For example, let’s think that you have a woven clothing brand, your story begins with the feeling of happiness that woven wool clothing gives you because your grandmother dedicated herself to this, you grew up among sewing machines and yarns. Wool clothing is your safe place, and as a tribute to your family legacy you developed a business with products in this material.
You decided to work with imported wool to create your products, and the people in charge of weaving them are reintegrated from armed conflict who are trained in your company to have this skill. Your brand is inspired by family, happiness and belief in second chances. Thanks to this brand a dream that supports many families was born, since your purpose is to provide products of the best quality while working to build a better future for society.
With this story, your brand has a way of connecting with your customers on an emotional level and is not just another brand with pretty products. By structuring how your brand was born and what its context is you can break down a great amount of topics related to your essence.
What are the keywords of your story?
You already have the story of your brand or product written, now it is time to read it and find those keywords that are around your brand and represent it. I recommend you choose 15 keywords for this phase of the exercise.
Continuing with the previous example, we can say that the keywords are: wool woven clothing, family legacy, happiness, safe place, imported wool, reintegrated from armed conflict, social reintegration, demobilized, family tradition, etc.
From all of these keywords, you should choose five that completely represent what your company is. We could choose, for example: imported wool, social reintegration, family legacy, happiness and wool woven clothing.
Each of these keywords will become a mantra, which will be an essential factor for the brand essence and also will serve as a content axis for your strategy. Thanks to this you will be able to convey through different channels your brand essence. You are not just a wool woven clothing store: you are a brand that works with demobilized people to improve their social conditions, and use imported wool to continue a clothing legacy with which you are going to give happiness to your customers.
Each time you develop a content grid you will have to verify that the publications adjust to the keywords and are related with the mantras of your essence pentagon. In this way, you will give your community an emotional reason to prefer your brand over others.
By focusing your content strategy on showing your essence, you will be able to give your audience valuable content, which beyond showing your product, communicates all the context around it. Remember that although content is king in marketing strategies, it must be content that benefits you and not just allows you to get likes.
