Branded Content – Engaging Narratives, Stronger Brands

Did you know that branded content can increase your brand’s recall by an impressive 86% on average?

So, if you want to come out on top in a market that’s highly saturated with ads, consider generating value for users with this genius marketing technique.

Branded content is any relevant, engaging message that resonates with your target audience. It seeks to “hit a nerve” and provoke an emotional response, helping people engage with your offerings on a much deeper level. But it doesn’t work like magic. You have to be strategic with your content, focus on educating and informing your audience instead of selling services to them, use keywords to maximize visibility, and ensure shareability while staying true to your brand voice and values. This can help you earn greater ROI and brand awareness.

Excited to see how it can help your reputation skyrocket in a competitive industry?

Stay tuned as this article from Mediaboom shares what branded content is, how it can help your business, and how you can use it to your advantage.

What Is Branded Content?

Branded content is a marketing technique that grabs consumers’ attention with immersive stories that represent your company’s values and vision.

It seeks to show, not tell what you stand for and what your values are with rich, interactive multimedia formats like videos and podcasts as well as blogs to evoke an emotional response. Because people remember how you make them feel, it adds value to a customer’s perception of your business while increasing their loyalty.

What Are the Benefits of Branded Content?

Brand content is a specific type of strategy in content marketing that gets your name out there. Instead of singing praises about your offerings, it leverages user-centric content that surely but subtly promotes your brand without being intrusive.

Take a look at how it can positively influence your business:

Better Engagement and Loyalty

Branded content marketing builds stronger relationships with high-quality content and an engaging experience. Unlike ads, it does not focus on “selling.” Instead, the focus is on establishing trust and credibility to improve brand loyalty.

Since it educates and empowers with moving stories, brand content can make your target audience choose your company over your competitors, setting the stage for customer loyalty and repeat business.

Greater Reach

Your content can be tweaked, personalized, and presented on multiple networks and websites. It can be delivered via multiple digital content marketing formats such as audio, video, images, and text. Since they’re high-quality, relevant, engaging, and easy to share, they can create a snowball effect that attracts and retains visitors beyond your current customer base.

Highlights Shared Values

Branded content builds connections by highlighting the brand’s qualities that people want to be associated with. There are many desirable traits to choose from like sustainability and body positivity.

It uses a combination of information and entertainment to tell a story worthy of your audience’s attention. It creates a positive association in their minds, so when they need what you’re offering, you can be sure they’ll come to you.

Increase Visibility and Sales

When a customer stays on your website for a long time, it signals to search engines that your page delivers valuable knowledge to users. This establishes you as a thought leader—someone with expertise and industry perspective, which can improve your search engine visibility and make it easier for prospects to find you.

Generate Branded Content in 11 Steps

How do you create brand content that moves your audience? Here are 11 tips:

1. Define Your Brand Identity

Your brand identity differentiates you from the competition. Make it count by defining what your goals are—whether it’s engaging with new customers or retaining existing ones. Consider how you want people to feel when they interact with your brand and align every aspect with your brand voice and vision to create a consistent impression.

Make it easy for your prospects to remember you by creating or elevating visual elements like your logo, typography, web design, etc. Give them a similar look and feel for a cohesive effect.

2. Understand Your Audience

A deep dive with market research will give you an accurate understanding of the type of content that will resonate with your buyer persona, including what they love and hate. This will help you eliminate a lot of trial and error, allowing you to focus on choosing the marketing channels they frequent.

3. Choose Content Formats

Branded content marketing is one of the most flexible types of marketing there is—mainly because it can be shared through multiple formats for maximum visibility.

These include, but aren’t limited to:

• Blogs: From listicles to pros and cons, you can cover a wealth of topics with this one. Pair them with compelling, high-quality images and strategically placed keywords to supercharge their appeal and ranking.
• Infographics: These give an easy-to-understand overview of information that is likely to be shared. It typically appears on Pinterest and social media ads.
• Podcasts: They provide a relatively easy way to absorb information. It allows you to potentially capture 22% of all internet users.
• Videos: Short, engaging clips generate 1,200% more shares than text and image content combined. Remember that people are visual beings who remember 80% of what they see. Make video storytelling fun and relatable to grab your audience’s attention and optimize conversions.

You can also consider case studies, e-books, whitepapers, and e-newsletters!

Choosing the right format is no walk in the park, but if you consider your target audience’s language preferences and behaviors, you may be able to get it right on the first try.

4. Craft a Content Strategy

Devising a content strategy for your brand is essential, especially if you want to wow customers in the “attract and delight” stage of the buyer journey.

Here’s how you can create content that generates steady traffic to your site:

• Define your goals. This enables you to push the right type of content on the right channel at the right time.
• Conduct persona research. Understand your audience, their behaviors, demographics, needs, etc.
• Find gaps in the information currently available online and produce authentic content around it. This will help establish your brand as an authority in your niche.
• Choose a content management system (CMS) to create, modify, and publish content. Also, refine and rank your ideas for the best results.
• Use persuasive CTAs or calls to action.

It’s also important to amplify your content strategy. If you don’t know how, Mediaboom can help you devise a spectacular content strategy—just as we did for Millenium Tower, San Francisco.

5. Create Compelling Content

With branded content, you need a brand story that sells. Ideally, you want to create content that shows people what you do and stand for with real-life experiences and stories, behind-the-scenes tours, user-generated content, and the like. At the end of the day, they should elicit specific responses and inspire your audience to get involved with your brand.

The focus should be on humanizing your brand so your users feel seen and valued. So, create engaging, relatable, and personable touchpoints that make people feel good about doing business with you.

6. Collaborate With Influencers or Partners

Brand content is often co-created for a reason. Fifty-nine percent of Americans claim that celebrity endorsements influence their purchasing behavior (Pipslay Research, 2021) while 50% of millennials trust product recommendations from influencers. Based on this information, it’s important to explore strategic collaborations that allow you to tap into new marketing opportunities and audiences.

Just make sure to connect with professionals whose values are aligned with your brand.

7. Practice Search Engine Optimization

Knowing how to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) into your branded content can improve your online presence by increasing your market size, website traffic, and conversion rates.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Add visual elements like images and videos with alt-text for enhanced accessibility.
• Consistently adhere to your brand voice and tone.
• Naturally incorporate relevant keywords and phrases. This enables you to be part of the ongoing online conversation and interact with potential customers.
• Optimize on-page elements like headlines, headers, and subheaders (use H1, H2, H3 tags), meta descriptions, etc., to improve search engine indexing and readability.
• Use appropriate internal and external links.

And yes, make your content mobile optimized for increased visibility. Ensure it doesn’t take longer than 4 seconds to load.

8. Leverage Social Media

Over four billion people used social media in 2022. That number is only expected to grow as the internet becomes more accessible. Capitalize on the trend by creating a presence on relevant social media channels.

YouTube has 2.527 billion users, Instagram has 1.628 billion users, Facebook has roughly 3 billion users, and Twitter has 540 million users. So, it’s good to consider one or several of these popular platforms.

Be sure to use the right type of content for your chosen channel, and be consistent with the quality and frequency of your posts. Nailing local social media marketing will keep engagement high, foster connections, build brand awareness, and improve the brand’s perception, driving leads and sales.

9. Engage With Your Audience

Reply to comments, direct messages, mentions, etc., to make your audience feel heard and valued. You can even use branded content to host giveaways and contests while increasing engagement.

𝕏 monthly users reach new high in 2023 pic.twitter.com/trqLGBEvvA

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2023

After all, people are hard-wired to respond to emotional branding. By publishing posts that resonate with them and invite them to participate, they’ll be eager to share their thoughts and feelings with you.

10. Measure and Analyze

Tracking your key performance indicators—such as page views, content shares, scroll depth, bounce rate, time on page, rankings, revenue and conversion rates, churn rates, etc.— lets you see and quantify the impact of your efforts.

This gives you intel on what needs to be changed or improved as you work on your marketing strategy and goals.

11. Monitor Trends and Evolve 

Strategic branded content marketing is far from a one-off job. You can’t simply cross it off your list after a certain number of hours, campaigns, or posts. You must know the trends and topics in your industry to remain relevant—a task that requires ongoing effort and research.

So, aside from knowing your audience and brand identity, you also have to make frequent adjustments according to what’s trending and what works.

Mediaboom can help you produce results-oriented branded content that lets you take advantage of the latest trends. Contact our digital experts today and let’s elevate your brand.

5 Best Examples of Branded Content Campaigns

Gain inspiration from our favorite examples of brand content done right:

1. Coca-Cola on YouTube and Facebook

In 2013, Ridley Scott Associates produced a 7-minute film for Coca-Cola to help generate awareness about the environmental dangers that polar bears are facing. Though it didn’t directly sell cans of soda, it created a favorable perception for the brand by allowing it to be associated with sustainability, protecting the environment, and the lovable family of bears that was part of the story. Published on YouTube and shared on Facebook, it was responsible for 27% of incremental sales while only costing 2% of the company’s media budget.

2. Red Bull on Instagram

As an energy drink, Red Bull has created an image that is often linked to high energy, extreme sports, and great athletes. A large part of its marketing is done through Instagram. Many of its posts on the image-sharing app feature daring feats like extreme BMX stunts, wingsuit gliding, and rock climbing. These are usually accompanied by cheeky captions like, “Tag your wingman”  and “Light up your weekend.”

Today, the brand has over 18 million followers on Instagram and has the highest market share among its competitors.

3. Lego on YouTube

Lego has been described as “the savviest brand on YouTube.” With over 32,000 videos and growing, it has several types of branded content that include:

• Business milestones (like the release of a new product)
• An “Explained With” series that answers questions children are likely to ask about the world (example: Why do we have seasons?)
• REBRICKULOUS, a show where people address different challenges with structures made with Lego

An abundance of cohesive content that keeps in mind its audiences has propelled it to YouTube greatness with more than 16 million subscribers.

4. Gymshark on TikTok

If you’re a Gymshark fan, you may have noticed how their marketing is different on TikTok than the rest of the channels where they’ve established a strong presence.

The #standupchallenge, for example, was created by Demi Bagby, a fitness influencer with athletic talents. This allowed them to tap into a larger audience on the platform while users create content for them.

5. Zelle Website

The digital payment network provider Zelle worked with Vox Media to produce informative branded content that warned consumers against elaborate and sophisticated financial schemes. Published on the Vox x Zelle website, The Science Behind Scams has a wealth of information about the psychology of scams and popular modus operandi. They have remained consistent by including a Safety Education section on their website that teaches users how to safely use their services without falling victim to scams. This didn’t just make the brand more credible but it also made them appear more trustworthy while increasing consumer safety.

Hire a Branded Content Digital Marketing Agency Now

Brand content is a game-changing marketing strategy that can help you remain competitive. Digital experts at Mediaboom can help elevate your brand and make it unforgettable to your audiences.

Schedule a free consultation today. Together, we can make your brand stand out in the hearts and minds of your consumers.