Content marketing should put audience first, brand second – or else you’re doing it wrong
Too many content marketers put the brand rather than the audience first argues Suz Tucker.
Advertising’s most handsome fictional sage Don Draper once said of his tradespeople: “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.”
Traditional advertising can be beautiful or clever or really expensive, but it’s also always about something the brand wants us to want or need.
On the flipside, content marketing is about creating something that responds to – or intuits – what the audience wants or needs. Maybe that something is practical grooming & life advice for the hirsute gentleman or an unprecedented vantage point of the world’s coolest fish.
That’s probably the key understanding required by brand managers and content marketers in order to score in the content game – and to no one’s surprise it’s still the hardest thing for brands to wrap their heads around and embrace: considering the needs of the audience first – not the brand.
The brand comes a close second.
Agencies are pulling folks like me from the publishing world with increasing regularity to help them move from just “doing social” to being more editorial in their approach to wrangling content. The reason publishing deserters are generally good at it, is simply because we’ve been programmed to provide the readership (or audience or consumer or whatever you want to call them) with stories they need to know or want to know. (Notwithstanding the myriad instances of media brand agenda-pushing, of course.)
In my years working as an editor and writer, every editorial decision, big and small, always comes back to the value each potential piece could offer the audience.
Three questions basically acted as a litmus test as to whether or not a news story or feature piece would get the go-ahead:
Are enough people interested in this topic to make it worthy of investing our time into the story?
In content marketing terms this basically translates to: what’s the ROI on this piece? This is where the value of SEO and data really come to the fore.
Has the story already been covered by someone else? If so, what unique angle or approach can we provide here?
There has to be a point of difference in either the content (the ‘what’) or the delivery (the ‘how’ – is it an animated short, a comic strip, a GIF, live-blog, journal entry, photo essay, etc?) to cut through. This is where brilliant creatives really bring value.
Does it deliver new information or bring a new perspective to light?
How can we leverage influencers, experts or even the community to create something that’s original and exclusive?
Then there’s an essential fourth question that needs to be layered into content strategy, which is: does the content support or reinforce the brand’s purpose and core beliefs?
It can’t be a sales message (or you’re talking about an ad, not content), but it should still contribute – in a cohesive relevant way – toward building the brand.
That’s the trick: bringing the brand and audience together.
In our global offices we work with clients to develop an Editorial Vision – just like any publisher or media property would work toward. It frames content with an audience-first perspective and acts as a sounding board to keep both our clients (and ourselves) honest.
The ultimate goal is to have the audience (and, by extension, the customer) seek your content out or find their way to it – and not the other way around.
The best way to do it is have five million dollars, a crack team of geniuses and all the time in the world.
The second best way is to know what your audience wants and deliver it at the right time, in the right way.
Personally? I’m more than happy to work with both.
- Suz Tucker is Editor-in-Chief at AnalogFolk Sydney
Start with the beginning: strong brands with a point of view on the world rather than just their own little category = interesting content that also drives the brand
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Sell the category first, if you’re in the category and are focusing on the other channels as well you’ll win
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A picture tells a thousand words. Unless it is an intrusive, irrelevant Instagram advertisement. #getoffmyfeed
There is a lot of dross being peddled by so called, ‘content marketeers’. This is a buzz word from 2012 for crying out loud, I cannot believe people are still peddling it along in 2015?
As a human being I want to be entertained (check out cat fails on YouTube, people can’t get enough of them). Think about intent. INTENT GUYS!!! Think about where you should air certain ‘content’ (think channels). So, so, so, so many ‘marketeers?’ are getting it ever so wrong. If I am in buying mode, then hit me with relevance. If I am browsing, tempt me. McDonald’s ad, in an Instagram feed that is full of sports, fitness and outdoors energetic healthy lifestyle: Macca’s NOOOOO!!!! You are way off the mark!?
Am I looking to buy stuff when scrolling through my Instagram feed? Well before you place an advertisement in front of me; YOU SHOULD KNOW IF I AM! Do your research and fine tune your weaponry. There is so much collateral damage being caused to brands, because their ‘marketing’ teams are getting this ‘native’ / ‘content’ ‘dross’ marketing very, very wrong.
Dare I say it, but bumbling traditional ‘marketeers’ are spraying and praying on digital networks, which can be highly targeted channels.
‘Content marketing’ scores 50 points in a 2015 game of bullshit bingo.
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Thanks for the article. Completely agree with the audience-first approach. Actually the best ‘traditional’ ads tend to use this approach too – the tough bit is getting marketers to have a light touch with their product integration.
But the fact remains – and it’s always ignored in these kind of articles – that ‘content marketing’ works extremely well for products that have an inherently passionate audience (music, sports, etc) or products that are complex (like a car) and require instruction and education. But MANY, MANY products – take just about anything in your fridge or pantry – don’t have this kind of ‘interested’ audience.
Take the mo-wax video above and apply that to say toilet paper – I don’t need you to show me how to use that. A brand of Jam? Okay now you can show me recipes but there’s an over-saturation of that content already.
SO that forces us to find more inventive content, which inevitably moves further away ‘what the product actually does’. A toilet paper brand could, for example, show me how to fix my car, go behind the scenes of a music festival or create a sitcom style series of films.
But this is the TIPPING POINT. Now i’m interested, but the brand CANNOT force itself in a heavy handed way into the communication (or I will reject the content) but there’s NO NATURAL FIT either. Instead it becomes in a sense a ‘sponsor’ of the content. And this is where the problem starts because since it’s no longer integral to the ‘story’ the brand just isn’t remembered, and we lose the whole point of making the content.
With these kind of low interest products you either ruin the content while getting your product remembered or you make great content and the product is forgotten. I know you’ll say it’s ‘just a matter of being more creative’ and occasionally there are examples that go against my argument but by and large you are fighting this INHERENT problem.
Traditional advertising used to fix this problem by making, for example, a toilet paper ad highly entertaining (on the rare occasion that would actually happen).The entertainment bit was the thing that kept you watching despite the product being front and centre. But god forbid we’d want to do anything traditional.
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@Greg,
I am sure that there are potentially millions of views to be had, from letting loose 6 Golden Retriever puppies on a large lawn and giving them 6 soft toilet rolls to play with.
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I have just witnessed Microsoft post onto Linkedin (a platform for serial ‘content marketing’ wannabees), the following:
‘Have you heard of social selling? It can help you boost your sales. Get informed and know the 6 ways social selling can help your top line today.’
Microsoft, ffs, it is 2015!?
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@Creative.
Agree. But that sounds suspiciously like an ‘ad’. I’ve seen that basic idea quite a few times in the last twenty years. On my television set.
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@Greg. Good points. Especially the question of: where does branded content end and – what I’d refer to in my previous life as “sponsored editorial” begin?
I think there’s no clear-cut line between the two. For example: Marriott’s Medium channel ‘Gone’ is a half and half split (but it should be said that wherever Marriott properties are mentioned, they’re subtly wrapped into a bigger story – not the core of it). This goes back to your point, though, about the product or brand being inherently interesting i.e. hotels and travel are “sexy”.
If you are dealing with a “boring” product or brand, you’ve just got to think sideways. Post-It does pretty nice stuff with a non-sexy product.
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