Branded Content – Is it content that builds your brand’s relevance? Is it content that brings to life a brand’s personality? Or is the new way of communicating your brand’s essence to the consumer while he or she is consuming content relevant for his or her need? Or is it about building effective brand association and driving awareness by leveraging the power of empowering content and the dynamism of digital media. If all of this is correct, what then is the best way of creating branded content?
The biggest advantage that any marketer can gain by owning content is that it enables engagement with consumers on the brand’s home turf, within the brand’s own environment. Self owned branded content gives marketer full control of the message. But, as anyone in media will tell you, consumers’ top want is trusted empowering content. If you want to engage users, you must give them something useful – not just marketing messages. Great-looking websites and marketer-created content does not always positively amplify their brand via customer experience. That requires a depth of not only engaging information, but high-quality content designed to attract prospects that seed their websites, feed their marketing programs and fuel their marketing automation systems. When brands team up with established publishers to build and generate sponsored content programs, they inherit audience trust and leverage the credibility of powerful media brands. What then is the best way of delivering content that provides context for marketing? The answer probably lies in ‘collaboration’ and in creating ‘win-win’ models. Brand journalism or content marketing (we may call it whatever we may want to) is here to stay and fast evolving as a new approach to marketing. The future will be interesting.
