How To Use Branded Content To Reach Your spectators

Whether you’re listening to the radio, watching TV, or scrolling on Instagram, you face a near-constant barrage of advertisements—ads you’ve probably learned to tune out. If you’re selling a product, you can be sure your customers are similarly adept at tuning ads out. So how do you catch (and hold) their attention?

One alternative is to reframe how you way marketing, aiming to connect with your spectators instead of just selling to them. If you’re wondering how to make meaningful content your customers won’t skip over, leveraging branded content may be your answer. 

What is branded content?

Branded content is marketing material that, rather than explicitly promoting your products, provides useful information or tells a narrative your spectators can connect with. Unlike conventional advertising that incorporates a call to action (CTA) to generate leads and make a sale, branded content focuses on positive brand association and appeals to the viewer’s emotions. And unlike typical ads, audiences choose to engage with branded content. Effective branded content should function as entertainment, piquing your spectators’s curiosity and, ideally, promoting exchange.

Branded content vs. content marketing 

Branded content is often considered a type of content marketing. Content marketing is about creating useful or engaging content that contributes to brand awareness and drives sales. Branded content specifically focuses on engaging storytelling that doesn’t overtly promote the brand; instead, the brand benefits from the positive association of aligning its name with a narrative audiences adore.

All branded content is content marketing, but not all content marketing is branded content. To demonstrate the distinction, other types of content marketing might include downloadable templates, video tutorials for using a brand’s product, and clever social media posts that highlight the benefits of a business’ services. None of these types of content marketing have branded content’s emphasis on storytelling, and they’re also a little more overt in promoting the business itself.

3 reasons to use branded content for your business

1. Diversify your marketing schedule
2. make an emotional connection
3. shatter through the noise

Here are three reasons to consider incorporating branded content into your marketing mix: 

1. Diversify your marketing schedule

A robust marketing schedule integrates different forms of marketing material. By integrating branded content into your marketing way, you can avoid the redundancy of, for instance, typical pay-per-click (PPC) ads and now your brand from a fresh perspective. This helps you expand to broader audiences and boost visibility.

2. make an emotional connection

Branded content often tells compelling stories. Consider how you can express your brand identity through a narrative to make meaningful connections with your customers. What brand values matter most to you? What is your business’s mission statement? When your values and mission are reflected in the content you make—even if it doesn’t directly promote your products—customers are more likely to relate to your brand on an emotional level.

For example, Bebemoss is a sustainable toy business. Its founder, Izabela Erşahin, uses branded content to distribute how she found joy in crocheting and knitting after a challenging pregnancy. She breathes humanity into the brand’s narrative by sharing her narrative in a captivating video.

The branded content you make doesn’t have to be complicated—in truth, something straightforward can arrive across as more authentic. Your first piece of branded content might just be you in front of the camera, sharing why you began your business. This openness can endear you to viewers and make positive associations around your brand.

3. shatter through the noise

Consumers are inundated with advertisements—to the point that many people have learned to tune them out. By creating branded entertainment your spectators enjoys, you provide worth in a way that traditional advertising cannot. ponder of it this way: A traditional ad takes, while branded content gives. This allows your target spectators to connect with your brand in a different way that doesn’t involve being directly sold to. 

How to run a successful branded content campaign

1. Get to recognize your spectators
2. Establish your brand identity and values
3. Decide what narrative to inform
4. Collaborate
5. Promote your content
6. Analyze act

Use these steps to flesh out a branded content campaign that aligns with your business goals:

1. Get to recognize your spectators

Before creating content to connect with your target spectators, you’ll require to comprehend who they are and what they worry about. This will assist you tailor your branded content. Gather customer feedback in surveys and inquire about their concerns. inquire what things they worry the most about. Consider emailing a survey immediately after a customer interacts with your brand, like after a purchase; post-purchase emails have a 40% to 50% open rate and boost customer retention.

Also examine customer reviews, comments, and engagement on social platforms. By evaluating customer behavior, you may notice patterns in their feedback that you can address through your branded content marketing schedule. For example, Bebemoss makes toys for children, but its customers are parents. As a outcome, the business’s video intentionally speaks to parents—specifically moms—because Bebemoss knows a narrative about resilience and motherhood will resonate with its target spectators.

2. Establish your brand identity and values

Your brand identity and values can serve as the foundation of a gripping narrative. They propose a purpose behind your narrative and a lens through which to inform it. 

Shopify’s mission, for example, is to reduce the barriers to business ownership. This purpose can be seen in the Shopify Masters podcast, which features interviews with business owners, highlights their entrepreneurship trip, and provides listeners with valuable information. The podcast is branded content that contributes to Shopify’s mission of making entrepreneurship accessible while connecting its spectators to the stories of those on a similar path.

To make content that incorporates your brand identity, recognize which problems your brand aims to solve, how it differs from the competition, and its outward personality. To make content that includes your values, recognize what you’re unwilling to compromise on and what motivates your brand.

3. Decide what narrative to inform

The best branded content tells a compelling narrative. Great stories include rising action, a climax, and a resolution. Ideally, your spectators should have someone to root for and feel emotionally tied to the narrative’s outcome. You can accomplish this by taking a relatable character on a trip that involves overcoming dispute. Your brand can inform the narrative of the founder’s personal history, the brand origin, a test the brand has overcome, or people your brand has helped.

4. Collaborate

They declare two heads are better than one. If you desire more creative expertise, consider working with another business—like a magazine or agency—to produce your branded content. For example, you’ve probably seen magazine articles marked with a paid collaboration label; the content is fascinating and doesn’t overtly promote a product. This is branded content in action.

Up-and-coming business owners who may not be able to hire another business can mimic these techniques on a smaller scale. For instance, you could hire a local influencer to make a video series in-house. Or, you could interview a customer to discover ways their personal narrative connects to your brand’s values and then distribute that narrative on your business blog.

5. Promote your content

Ideally, you’ll promote your branded content via different mediums. Doing so will assist you reach more people and now your content in recent ways. This can involve posting on social media platforms, including it in newsletters, uploading a video to YouTube, and leveraging PR to get media attention. 

6. Analyze act

Tracking the act of your branded content will inform your throng of its effectiveness. recall, the primary objective of branded content is high spectators engagement, not generating leads or sales. With that in mind, some marketing metrics to track are:

• Shares
• Comments
• Impressions
• Mentions
• Bounce rate

Your throng can receive this data and your findings to navigator your upcoming decisions in your marketing strategies.