Brand content

Are you spending advertising budget to generate new customers but struggling to retain new users who visit your website? There may be many reasons why people come to a website but leave immediately.

One valid reason is content, because… content is King!

In other words, content is the essential element of a communication strategy. Regardless of the theme, B2C or B2B, or a short-lived brand. Your content is your magic wand for everything! In this article, we address the topic of Brand Content, which can be one of the fundamental communication strategies to communicate about your products, generate quality leads, and turn them into loyal customers.

Focus on Brand Content.

What is brand content?

If we want to define ‘Brand Content’, we should start by telling a little story.

For many years, consumers purchased products based on price, value for money… and that’s it! There weren’t really any other strategies or arguments to sway the balance in favor of any particular brand. However, today price arguments are not enough, and this is where brand identity becomes crucial! To win over consumers, product price remains an influential factor in the final decision, while being combined with stories around the brand. Thus, to make the brand stand out, we talk about Brand Content.

We know that millions of content pieces are published on the Internet every day, which is why it’s essential to think about brand identity and its development strategy. Brand Content, or branded content, refers to all strategic content produced by a brand, either content discussing the brand’s products and services.

Brand Content focuses both on a story, a brand’s specific expertise, and its core values to showcase the brand in its entirety. This helps to establish a special relationship between the consumer and a brand’s products. It’s important to note that Brand Content is far removed from traditional commercial messages.

Brand Content is a storytelling strategy aimed at highlighting products as well as the brand’s story and its human side. It involves creating a universe where everything mixes: product presentation, the brand’s story, daily actions, and small stories that evoke emotions in consumers. The goal of such storytelling is to connect with potential consumers to create an emotional bond.

What is the purpose of brand content?

Branded content has several objectives. The main goal is to be noticed and attract more customers. The advantages of Brand Content are numerous:

• working on a brand’s positioning;
• demonstrating a brand’s expertise in a particular sector;
• increasing visibility and being more visible to the public;
• being useful to consumers;
• retaining existing customers;
• promoting brand products in ways other than traditional advertising campaigns.

Brand Content cares about consumer needs and presents them through stories. Communication must deliver an important but appropriate message to the target audience. When communicating about the brand, originality is key to presenting the brand, speaking to consumers who will recognize themselves and find something useful. Branded content helps create an emotional bond with consumers and approaches them without using a 100% commercial approach.

However, Brand Content is often confused with Content Marketing and other content creation techniques. You must not confuse them.

What is the difference between brand content, content marketing, storytelling, and inbound marketing?

There are many editorial strategies that are often complementary. However, it’s important to understand the fundamental differences between these strategies to know how to use them.

Brand Content

The content of Brand Content focuses on the brand and its values. The brand (not the products) is the main subject of all content. The aim of Brand Content is to create an emotional and affective link between the brand and its potential future customers. With Brand Content, the goal is to enhance the brand image rather than initiating a real exchange with internet users.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing focuses on the ‘useful’ aspect by trying to bring users back to everything useful that the brand and its products have to offer. Content Marketing is responsible for interaction with the content and the acquisition of leads.

Storytelling

Storytelling is one of the key elements of good brand content. However, it is just a technique used as part of a Brand Content strategy.

Storytelling is the art of telling stories designed to capture the attention of a particular audience. It is often seen as a persuasion tool where a story is built around a situation to make people embrace the ideas. Storytelling can be used for Brand Content as well as Content Marketing (in this case, it involves making Content Marketing content interesting).

Narration is strategic because it allows users to be convinced through emotions. With a narrative structure, the human brain experiences strong emotions that, in turn, influence our decisions. These can be positive emotions (Nike is the official sponsor of the French team), or negative emotions (Zara and the striped pajama with the yellow star).

A variety of tools are used to create an imaginary world, convey an idea, generate an emotion, and encourage users to go further in their ‘customer journey’. Storytelling is the foundation of advertising communication that helps all consumers identify with a brand’s values.

Inbound marketing

The main goal is to attract users to the brand. While Brand Content and Content Marketing create an atmosphere and relationship with future clients, Inbound Marketing focuses on transforming them into real leads/customers. Inbound is often seen as an effective tool for traditional marketing (advertising). Its goal is to generate interest from prospects by ‘nurturing’ them with interesting and useful content. When talking about Inbound, we imply a marketing strategy of personalizing the customer experience.

Brand content vs product placement: are they the same?

Brand Content is often confused with Product Placement strategies. Indeed, both strategies aim to promote their brand (and/or products) on external communication channels. For example, films, series, on TV, on YouTube, on Instagram, via newsletters.

And if Brand Content aims to present a brand, product placement is much more explicit. For example, in every American movie, you can certainly see an Apple computer with its logo clearly visible. There are other recognizable brands often highlighted.

If we talk about an effective strategy, then the marketing strategy of product placement is different because there is less control over how the product will be presented. However, Brand Content aims to highlight the brand and its values rather than its products separately.

How to develop an effective brand content strategy?

Like any strategy, Brand Content should not be taken lightly. It all starts with setting goals and using your imagination to explore all the topics that could be addressed. It also involves standing out and offering new and interesting content that would help to lay down the preliminary guidelines for your content strategy.

What needs to be done for a Brand Content strategy to be successful? Here are some elements to help you think about your editorial strategy.

Define clear and precise objectives

Start with a simple question: ‘What do you want to achieve?’:

• Traffic?
• Awareness?
• Conversions?
• Retain your existing customers?

All these questions must be asked to properly define the direction your brand content strategy will take.

Define your target audience

Here, the goal is to determine the profile of your target consumer. This profile is often called a ‘persona.’ A persona helps to understand the values of your target consumer and to build a detailed profile (age, activities, hobbies, habits). When creating a persona, it is important to ask questions, for example: Is your target sensitive to sports or art? What do they face daily? What are their fundamental needs? What language do they use? What topics should be addressed/avoided?

Define the most suitable type of content

What type of content would your target audience read? Articles? Photos? Videos? Podcasts? Newsletters? The right content format for your audience is a priority because the form is as important as the content!

When developing a Brand Content strategy, it is crucial not to confuse a Brand Content strategy with a content marketing strategy. Brand Content is primarily focused on promoting the brand, while content marketing has an informative/interactive goal. Of course, these two strategies can coexist and complement each other.

What to do to succeed in your brand content strategy?

Any Brand Content strategy is based on four main pillars:

• Analyze your existing editorial strategy. Yes, it’s a crucial step that would allow you to understand what type of content works best and what your readers currently read. It’s a way to explore the topics that interest your readers and which pages of your website are the most viewed;
• Creating a persona. By defining the profile of your target customer, it will be possible to understand what type of content and which communication channel will be suitable to communicate most naturally with your target. Thus, the content and form of any message should be adapted to your audience’s needs;
• Prioritize communication channels. Brand Content cannot rely solely on one communication channel; it is important to have a global vision and take advantage of each channel to communicate with more internet users. Each channel can play an important role in user experience and in the brand’s editorial impact;
• Brand Content = a specific editorial line. Having a specific editorial line allows for harmonious content that would well link your content marketing strategy with that of Brand Content. This approach would allow for more credibility in the eyes of your potential customers.

Define your editorial calendar

An editorial calendar allows you to maximize an established communication strategy and create a habit for readers to discover your content at a certain time of the week/day. Such planning allows you to clearly predict topics to be addressed, future special projects, and upcoming steps. And of course, an editorial calendar enables content to be designed in advance, enhancing its editorial quality.

How to create a quality editorial calendar?

Start by listing events (new product launches, conferences, specific professional events) that would be interesting for you and your audience. Then, you should make a list of significant events and anticipate thematic content to talk about the brand and its products. Next, you get to the categorization of articles by theme and consider how to naturally integrate them into the editorial sequence you have on your site.

What are the principles of brand content?

Brand Content is primarily about building a strong brand. If we mention the traditional approach, it all rests on three elements of the traditional approach:

• Brand vision: Definition of long-term objectives;
• Main mission of the brand: Its raison d’être, its real added value;
• Real values of the brand: Defining the brand’s common beliefs.

Although this is a traditional approach that is and will always be relevant, new branding methods focus on the community aspect. Moreover, everything is happening today on social media, where the ‘brand-consumer’ relationship keeps transforming. Communication is evolving and is no longer top-down as it was before, going from the brand to the target audience without feedback.

Evoking emotion

This is key to conveying your message and ideas. Brand Content is not merely a technique to present a brand’s products; it is a long-term strategy to build a universe where a brand would reign.

So, how do you create content that shares emotions? Emotion is often at the heart of decisions people make when deciding on such or such a purchase.

Here are some tips on how to create different emotions in your content:

• Use the right vocabulary. First, you need to study your persona and understand what language they use and what words will resonate with them;
• Create a particular brand atmosphere. It’s through this magnetism that users will subscribe to your pages and be proud to be part of your community;
• Always stay aligned with your values and your main mission. Do not ‘play hide and seek’ and always tell the truth, communicating values that you embody.

Use good storytelling

It is evident that without storytelling, no story could exist for more than a day. So, without well-placed storytelling, there is no effective Brand Content. Everyone is captivated by stories and their ‘lively side.’ This is how people identify with a story and want to follow to see how everything will unfold. It is often about curiosity but also about inspiration in daily life.

Mastering the narrative arc is extremely important. Let’s take the example of a Redbull campaign, the king of impactful and successful content strategy.

Initial conditions: Felix Baumgartner is a skydiver and extreme jumper ready to break new records.

Essential element: Jumping from 40,000 meters of altitude. Felix Baumgartner is ready to achieve his new record.

• Problem 1: His first attempt is postponed due to bad weather.
• Problem 2: His second attempt succeeds, but his jump looks dangerous, with worrying rotations. Felix Baumgartner risks losing consciousness.

Outcome: Until the last moment, the skydiver does not manage to deploy his parachute.

The finale: It all ends well, Felix Baumgartner becomes the first man to successfully jump from the stratosphere in free fall. Redbull gives wings to everyone, doesn’t it?

Thus, through this campaign, Redbull communicates the brand’s values: courage, sportiness, fun, risk, boldness. And even though everyone followed the jump from the stratosphere, in the end, we retain the good image of Redbull that organized it.

A strong relationship with your audience

It may be evident, but one can often forget the priority of creating conversations when designing content. In addition to social media algorithms that require users to react to your content, it is important to think about how to make your followers proactive. Since every story is supposed to evoke emotions, the audience inevitably creates links and brand notoriety increases. This also attracts curious individuals and new potential customers.

Entertainment comes first

When thinking of Brand Content, one might confuse this type of content with advertising. In reality, Brand Content is not promotional content, but content that should value the brand or… entertain users. Yes, because by entertaining your audience, you have a better chance of capturing their attention. A good campaign uses personas, includes psychological aspects of your potential buyers to create content that will be both interesting and entertaining.

Reflect brand values

Brand Content focuses on the real values of the promoted brand. This is the main difference between Brand Content and advertising. In doing Brand Content, you don’t delve into product characteristics, but rather stay on essential qualities of the brand. The goal is to talk about the brand and make future customers dream of products the brand could offer them.

By evoking values, Brand Content aims to create an environment, an atmosphere that clients would need.

Try different formats/media

Finally, the last important principle for successful Brand Content is to experiment with different formats and media. You can never be sure that a particular medium will capture the attention of your target users. So, flexibility is welcome! Here are some of the most commonly used media examples:

• create podcasts;
• develop video games;
• produce videos;
• create interactive websites;
• organize events, such as sporting events or thematic scavenger hunts.

Afterwards, to come up with something truly original, you can mix formats. This will help increase visibility and attract more people to interact with your content (share on social media, participate in events, talk about it, etc.).

How to create brand content?

As with anything, there are specific techniques you can choose from. These include:

• create content that is both entertaining and professional;
• tell a story instead of directly selling products. Your story should be impactful and convey a message that is neither too short nor too long;
• develop an article with relevant and interesting content for your target audience;
• accompany the text with relevant images or videos to highlight the visual idea and the general idea of your article;
• don’t forget to include the main keywords that would be helpful for your article to aid its positioning.

The most interesting Brand Content strategies are those of large brands that try different formats and media. Speaking of which…

Brand content example

To illustrate what Brand Content looks like in real life, here are some examples of well-known brands.

La Vache Qui Rit. The brand created a website full of content for the whole family: outings, exhibitions, walks. It’s useful information for everyone but still sprinkled with Brand Content. In addition to that, on the La Vache Qui Rit website, you can find recipes to cook a dish at home but with La Vache Qui Rit cheese. Real marketing and brand promotion!

• Leroy Merlin. This is also a very good example of Brand Content. The brand makes a lot of effort to present its values as well as its products to effectively convey its identity to a broad audience. The brand content here offers consumers a better experience and allows them to embrace the universe in a privileged context.
• Apple. If we take the example of Apple, everything is very clear here. Their motto is “Think Different,” two words that already set the well-defined framework. This short message immediately signals to users that owning Apple products makes you different, standing out from the crowd. Apple’s strategy is to do Brand Content by mixing it with product placement. Yes, the two methods have different goals, but by placing products in films, Apple also conveys its values and creates an ambiance that everyone wants to experience at home.
• Netflix. Netflix produces the British series Sex Education, which explores teenagers’ relationship with sex while reflecting on the role of sex in our society. To promote the release of the second season of the series, Netflix offered a free manual on sex education. This marketing operation was very successful, widely shared on social media, especially on Instagram. The paper manual is currently out of stock, but it’s still available in PDF format.

Brand content and the digital world

Although Brand Content is close to advertising, it relies on different techniques and builds a relationship between users and a brand. The main challenge of Brand Content is to produce quality content to stimulate, excite, and captivate potential customers. Brand Content is also a valuable asset for implementing an effective editorial strategy that would relay the message and therefore increase visibility.

It is worth remembering that consumers are becoming increasingly demanding and pay attention to unique and original content regardless of the communication medium.

Creating Brand Content is possible for all types of brands. The goal is to “sell” a brand and its universe. A web writer’s mission would be to:

• understand the needs and demands of the target audience;
• develop unique stories that would be useful for the target audience;
• incorporate the brand’s DNA: its philosophy, its way of communicating, its key messages, its sales objectives.

Then, when writing content within a Brand Content strategy, it is important to consider three axes:

• Editorial. It is essential to write for the targets defined by the brand, use appropriate vocabulary;
• Formal. It is important to create content readable on screen without tiring users, paying attention to spelling and grammar;
• Functional. Don’t forget the technical constraints of the interfaces for which the content is produced (CMS, metadata, etc.).

Thanks to the agency PrFlare, you can gain visibility and make your brand, products, or services truly recognizable on the Internet. Our team helps you:

• publish promotional content on different websites (thematic blogs, news sites);
• enhance your brand’s awareness;
• manage your business’s online reputation;
• promote your website and perform effective link building;
• make your website popular and referenced through developed techniques such as brand content or outreach marketing.

Discover the unique database of websites created by PrFlare and order the publication of your advertising content that our web writers will create for you!

Brand content and top-notch e-reputation

Brand Content is not only a tool that allows creating a connection with users but also turns them into brand ambassadors. As everything is shared on different media, leaving a visible trace in search engines, brand content could then help control its image on the web.

But how?

First, monitor online opinions and perform regular audits of its online image to see a general trend (more positive reviews, more negative reviews, etc.).

Then, better integrate into social media, be present on different communication platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter), and create communities around a brand. This is where Brand Content would be very useful. Internet users then learn more about the brand, interact with the brand’s content, and… become ambassadors!

Reputation engages user participation through platforms, and Brand Content helps target sensitive points, anticipate rumors, and cement a brand’s positioning thanks to ambassadors.

The most vibrant example is Nike with its “Nike Run Club” community. Nike created an application that allows people to get together for a run, to train, and simply to meet in a community of runners who share the same interests. People are brought together around a concept created by a brand that provides free access to a quality activity, values they share, and an atmosphere they need. All of this makes “Nike Run Club” members Nike ambassadors, forming a positive image of the brand in their circles.