Quality content is one of the most effective ways to build a relationship with your customers and create a connection with them. When you publish valuable original content that speaks to their needs, they’ll see you as an authority in your field and are more likely to purchase from you.
But, as a brand, you should do more than publish awesome content. It should be connected to your brand. This means creating branded content that reflects your brand’s values, mission, and identity.
This post will discuss how to create branded content that keeps your company top of mind.
What Is Meant by Branded Content?
You could say branded content is anything a business creates that includes a logo or brand name and is distributed across your marketing channels. In marketing, though, a more accurate definition is this: branded content focuses on creating value and conveying the brand’s personality rather than selling the brand’s products.
Branded content takes many forms, but the end goal remains the same: keeping your brand in the minds of your target market by providing engaging, shareable content pieces. You can do this through short-form videos, blogging, infographics, whitepapers, social media posts, and more.
Whether you sell custom hats or SaaS products, branded content can spark conversation and engage audiences on a deeper level – an emotional level. It leverages compelling stories to provide a memorable marketing experience.
5 Tips to Create Winning Branded Content for Your Brand
Branded content can be an excellent tool for boosting visibility and engagement on social media platforms and attracting more potential buyers to your brand. Sadly, some marketers are still struggling with figuring out how to create compelling branded content without looking like they’re blatantly trying to sell people something.
Your branded content doesn’t need to be complicated or cost-prohibitive. You can get started by trying one or all of these five ideas for engaging branded content that will boost your brand’s visibility.
1. Focus on Brand Value-Based Content
Brand value-based content showcases the unique value of your brand or product. How and why is your brand different from everyone else? What makes it unique?
Brand value-based content might be a video showcasing your product’s benefits or a blog post explaining why your company is the best choice for customers.
To create this type of content, you need to clearly understand your target audience and what type of problems they are trying to solve. Then, ensure your content is relevant to your audience, engaging and interesting, and provides value.
For instance, Salesforce creates various branded materials for company CEOs to use in their roles. The brand consistently highlights how Salesforce improves the CEOs’ efforts and saves time, as shown in the image below.
When people understand the value of your brand, they’re more likely to trust you and become loyal customers. As a result, you’ll also see a massive difference in the results you get from your content efforts.
2. Use The Right Tone That Connects with Emotions
The tone of voice is vital for any content creator. When you find the right tone of voice for your online content, you’ll be able to speak directly to your readers’ hearts and minds.
Your tone of voice also gives your brand its personality. It’s how you speak to your customers and what sets you apart from your competitors.
There are three steps to creating an emotionally powerful tone for your branded content: finding your voice, speaking from the heart, and giving your words emotional strength.
To find your voice, it is crucial to consider your target audience. What do they want? What are they looking for? Which do they care about?
You must also consider the emotion you want to evoke to speak from the heart. For example, do you want your readers to feel excited, inspired, curious, or engaged? This will make it easier to find the right words and phrases that will help connect with your readers emotionally.
Dove, for example, developed a series of videos aimed at those who experience appearance hate. It leverages customer stories (user-generated content) to elicit the feelings they want to convey.
Finally, add emotional strength to your words. Think about the words you want to use and how you can use them to create a connection with your readers.
Your tone should be genuine and authentic—it should reflect who you are as a company. Also, it should be consistent across all the content shared on your marketing channels, from your website to your social media to your email marketing campaigns.
3. Create Versatile Content That Works for Any Format And Platform
Branded content marketing does not have to be boring or stale, and you can certainly make it work for you. The trick is to make your content versatile to work across multiple formats and platforms, allowing you to maximize its potential value.
But how do you create content that works in different formats and platforms?
It’s possible to divide branded content into three categories based on its format—video, text, and image. In addition, you can divide branded content based on its intended platform, for example, social media platforms, email, mobile apps, or a company website.
However, you must publish it in various formats without duplicating your work. For example, you can repurpose medium-length content into carousels and share them as Instagram posts. You can also convert long-form content like guides into PDFs and create a PDF QR Code that will make them easy to share. Generative AI tools can be so helpful here. Plus, you can use AI templates to help you repurpose your content for the different platforms.
Experimenting with new formats can help you engage a wider audience of readers or listeners. You may even find an unexpected passion or interest in a particular format. If that happens, don’t be afraid to explore it. Varying your content types and formats will help keep things interesting while increasing traffic.
4. Take An Immersive Multisensory Approach
Using an immersive multisensory approach helps you create content that users engage with and share on social media, allowing your brand to establish itself as an expert in the field.
And here is the other thing. One study found that users remember the sound from a commercial better than the visuals. This goes to show the importance of employing an immersive multisensory approach.
A multisensory approach is a marketing strategy tactic that employs multiple senses or sensory channels. A sensory channel conveys information about something or someone — taste, touch, sight, sound, or smell.
The idea is simple; create multimedia content that immerses your audience in a cohesive narrative and engages more than one sense at a time. Such an approach is designed to elicit rational and emotional responses from your target audience.
This multi-sensory content can take many interactive formats—videos, infographics, audio, animations so long as it engages all of an audience’s senses.
For example, you may interact with the following video by clicking on the side icons that activate the touch sensation. Also, the music and the view engage the auditory and visual senses and may evoke emotional reactions.
The process begins with determining why you are creating content and who you’ll share it with. Then, find ways to incorporate audio content, visuals, and experiences to tailor them toward your audience.
That way, you will give your audience an immersive sense of what they might expect if they engage with your brand or product.
This type of content also performs exceptionally well on social platforms, especially visually heavy social networks like Instagram and TikTok. It can help you gain more TikTok likes and Instagram followers, and ultimately build an engaged audience.
5. Reach Out And Co-Create Content
Co-creation can effectively bring visibility to your brand, especially if you’re new to the scene or don’t have much of a budget for marketing and advertising. By partnering with another person or company to create content posts, you get exposure via the content’s shares and comments.
Researching relevant topics your potential influencers are talking about is critical in finding their sweet spot and developing tailored branded content for them. If you can find a way to tackle an issue they care about, you’re well on your way to having them share your content posts with their audience.
Create a list of people and potential business partners relevant to your niche. Then, use an email lookup tool to search for their contact details. In your email, tell them what you’re doing; ask if they’d be interested in content collaboration.
It is crucial to find a complementary brand. Nike and Sharpie are good examples of complementary brands that collaborated to reach a larger audience and create content.
Here’s an example of the Nike-Sharpie video content.
You can also find potential influencers and partners to help co-create your branded content by searching for top blogs in your space, niche hashtags on social media, or even asking friends with connections.
Instead of just promoting your product or service to influencers’ followers, focus on developing connections with them. For example, please give them a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to be successful in your field.
Conclusion
It’s no secret that quality content is key to a successful online presence. A brand’s success depends on a few core elements, including a recognizable brand, a relatable story, and the ability to create value beyond the product.
If you’re working on a branded content campaign, use the above tips to create branded content for more brand awareness. Also, ensure that what you create will reach as many new people as possible and engage them in a way that will help generate interest.