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December 23, 2025 | Monica E. Oss
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how organizations’ marketing teams maintain internet traffic, score high ranks in search results, and continue to get high-quality referrals. The question is what to do …
One recent analysis—Why Content-Driven Branding Is The Real Fix For Zero-Click Traffic Loss—points to the increasing importance of great content—and a great content strategy—to maintain those referrals. For most organizations, this means expanding their public-facing persona to the “branding through content” concept.
This concept is the practice of aligning all written, spoken, and visual communications with an organizational brand’s personality. That includes website copy, blog posts, articles, webinars, and marketing materials plus newsletters, podcasts, and videos. To be competitive in an AI-ruled online environment, branding needs to go beyond visual design to stay competitive. This means that marketing teams need to curate, maintain, and evolve their brands through the written and recorded word.
To do this, the author recommends expanding your brand style guide to include content and content tone. There are three key points to include: personality, content choices, and customer commitments.
To guide content strategy in terms of personality, the brand guide should standardize the descriptions of the organization’s original story and its services. It should include the words or phrases to use or exclude and preferred experts and advisors to quote. The brand guide should also outline preferred content choices—including a content calendar and discipline in content strategy execution.
Finally, there is the issue of customer commitment—what is it that the organization is promising its customers? The organization’s logo, website, color scheme, and written content should reinforce these brand promises. Successful branding is making intentional brand promises and sticking to it with every customer communication.
I asked my colleague, OPEN MINDS Senior Associate Lydia Kerr, for some advice on how executives can make this transition to a new set of online marketing parameters. Her comment: there is no one-size-fits-all advice. Rather, executive teams must diagnose their problems and challenges—and develop a specific prescription for success. To illustrate the range of problems and solutions, she gave three examples:
Organization #1 has beautiful branding. But its customer service and communication were lacking, resulting in a struggle for customer retention. Her advice: focus on consumer education through marketing. The organization could explain the health benefits of what they do as part of a structured content strategy. Also, commit internally to embodying the brand at every touchpoint, including customer service and communications.
Organization #2 has been in business for 10 years and has steady growth and customer engagement. They have strong search engine optimization—even with outdated visual branding. The executive team wants to launch new services and needs to raises prices but doesn’t think the current customer base would be on board with that. Her advice: create a refreshed go-to-market strategy—learning more about current customer base needs and competitors while refreshing the visual brand identity.
Organization #3 has an outdated marketing plan and internal misalignment about the goals of their marketing initiative and their content strategy. In addition, the marketing team had a series of disconnected social media posts without a high-level content strategy that ties to those overall objectives. Her advice: create a structured organization-wide content plan, reorganize the marketing team to implement that plan, and assure that every content element has a cross-platform marketing communications plan.
The effect of AI on marketing is in its infancy and executive teams need a strategy to maintain revenue. Ms. Kerr noted, “The common denominator between these organizations is a disconnect between who they are, how they show up, and what their audience actually experiences … Your brand is your foundation. Marketing is how you bring it to life. When those two aren’t connected, nothing feels right—not to you, and definitely not to your customers. And just for the record: A rebrand isn’t a Band-Aid, but neither are a handful of social posts. If the foundation isn’t aligned, the execution can’t save you.”
For more information on branding strategy, check out these resources from the OPEN MINDS Industry Library:
For more, mark your calendars for June 9, 2026, in New Orleans for The 2026 OPEN MINDS Strategy & Innovation Institute for the best practices seminar Best Practice Marketing Planning: The 2026 OPEN MINDS Seminar On Making Your Growth Strategy A Reality with OPEN MINDS Executive Vice President Emily Harris. This seminar, tailored for executives of specialty provider organizations, offers skills to craft a robust yet adaptable marketing plan to complement growth strategies.
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