Branded Content
To ensure an effective content marketing strategy, you must engage with your target audience and gain their trust, then stay out of the way.
That is why brands today create branded content – content that can stand on its own as far as being entertaining and engaging, but is accompanied by the company’s brand that sponsors it.
Gain Consumer Trust
Beyond engaging with your audience, you must gain their trust. Gaining trust will take time, but the end goal is brand loyalty, which is well worth the wait. The way to win over your audience is to entertain or educate them while staying true to your core culture and brand values. If you stray from your brand message, you will inevitably lose customers. Once your audience has bought into your brand and its message, you must maintain brand consistency.
Branded content is not a new concept. When content is released as editorial and educational but is also sponsored by a company, that is branded content. Buzzfeed, for example, has an excellent branded content strategy. They release articles meant to be educational or entertaining. Many of those articles are subtly sponsored by an advertiser.
The most important part of creating branded content is instilling your brand’s value and message into that content. Once you have done that and published the content, you wait. Whether or not the content makes an impact depends on many factors, like timing, season, audience, your content, and more.
Branded content that does make an impact will be apparent by views, likes, and shares. For example, Extra Gum released a short film last year entitled “Extra Gum: The Story of Sarah and Juan.” In this short film, viewers follow two characters, Sarah and Juan. They are two strangers who meet by sharing a piece of Extra gum. We see them fall in love over time by watching their different life events, like prom and their first kiss, each of which involve a subtly shared piece of Extra gum. We fall in love with their love story. By the end of it, we’ve fallen in love with the brand as well.
Stay Out of the Way
The brand’s job is to do what they do best. In this case that’s producing and selling gum. It’s the content creator’s job to create the content. The two should stay out of each other’s way for the relationship to be most effective.
The best thing to do is to consult with experts. Hire a marketing company to do the content creating for you. You want to make sure that the content they produce for you is in line with your brand message. For this to work, you must enlist a company you can trust.
Looking to Hire an Expert Content Marketing Team?
We welcome the opportunity to help you extend your brand story with new content to improve your marketing efforts, gain more leads, and increase ROI. Learn more. Contact TotalCom Marketing today.