3 tips to get your stakeholders on board for brand building content

Sometimes, you stumble upon something that captures all your words in one picture. Marketoonist hits the nail on its head. 

If you need help convincing your stakeholders of the importance of continuously investing in long-term brand building content, here are a few pointers that might help. 

• 60-40 brand building rule
• Essential for SEO
• You feed AI

Before we start, I realize that your peers in the C-suite are not stupid, and they know this type of content is indispensable. Yet, because of a lack of immediate results and no sexy vanity metrics, it's hard to get the urgency across to free up the scarce resources and budget. 

At best, you can squeeze in some of this content production on the side, but continuous love and care for this is very, very rare. But, it's necessary. It's consistency over intensity. And if you give your brand building content some daily love and care, you might even appear to care. A nice side effect is that once you have your basic content, it's quite an easy job to keep up; ~25% of the time, it needs to get started. 

So here we go. 

1. 60-40 Brand building rule by Les Binet

If you want to build and grow your brand, your content should balance a 60-40 balance between long-term brand and short-term campaign. This is based on research and data over 25 years. Please check Les Binet's brilliant work for more details. 

“… if you want long-term growth, what you've got to do is change people's minds in some way. You've got to build up memory structures that will bias their behaviour into the future, and that's a much more difficult and long-term job, because it involves training people's responses in such a way that you not only influence behaviour now, but you also influence behaviour tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and on into the future.”

WARC: “We’ve recently seen Adidas and eBay acknowledging that they had become addicted to performance marketing and were looking to make a change. How do you think some of these enormous brands have become over-reliant on performance marketing?”

Binet: “The addiction to the short-term is not a new phenomenon, but it has got a lot worse. One of the problems is that (for) short-term activities, you get immediate feedback: responses, clicks, or short-term sales. If you are a marketer who's spending money and nervous about what you're getting for your money, you can immediately see that this stuff pays back. It's become easier and easier to see these short-term effects, because we have more granular short-term data that comes through faster and faster."

Source: Les Binet on why long-term marketing matters in the age of short-termism (WARC)

2. Essential for SEO

Your long-term brand building content is, by excellence, your thought leadership content. Where you can make your claim, tell your brand's story, and show that you care by explaining how your brand and products are solving your customer's problem. 

This is where the SEO game starts. The better, more up-to-date your brand-building content, the higher your ranking. It's no secret that SEO is a great indicator of your content quality. The higher your quality, the higher your ranking, as your content answers your customer's search query. 

3. You feed AI

For this, I have no hard data, just common sense. AI uses public information on the web to create output. ChatGPT and other AI tools tap into your .com, searching for input and answers. So, the better your content, the more likely you'll pop up as one of the visible sources in AI. For this, it will use all content on your .com, from product detail pages to your corporate pages. 

For now, this will not be a huge traffic driver yet. However, it never hurts to feed AI with the correct information, as we know this is going to be big. 

Need help?

If you need any help with all of the above—and I’m not biased at all—I’m thoroughly experienced, have ruffled many feathers, and have learned from my mistakes, drop me an email. If I’m not the right person to help you, maybe I can recommend someone or an agency from my network.

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