A Comprehensive Approach to Branded Media – Part 1: Overview

Branded media, also known as owned media or custom media, is content created by your company specifically for the benefit of your customers. By adopting a comprehensive publishing strategy, you can create profound and lasting customer engagement.

The word comprehensive is vital. This engagement strategy requires you to be effective at all four phases: vision, production, distribution, and feedback. With adequate planning, a reasonable budget, and attentive execution, your company can create a relatively large volume of content that deeply connects you to a growing customer base.

Step 1: Vision and Value-Add

Content is king, and sits at the heart of this strategy. You have to create compelling content that in some way adds value to your customers. Given that you’re an expert in your business, sharing that expertise is compelling to people interested in your products and services. Everybody wants improvement of some kind, whether it’s more value, better efficiency, developing skills, or finding inspiration to be better.

The key is to create videos and articles showing how customers can get better results directly or indirectly from using your products or services. This can be a series of tips and tricks, different techniques and/or uses, or success stories. Concise, varied presentations are most effective. Smaller, more frequent pieces have many benefits: they are easier to produce, easier to digest, give you multiple opportunities to engage, and allow for you to adapt to the feedback you get.

With branded media, the cycle never ends.

The bottom line is that you have to create value. Your content helps your customers get more of what they want out of your products and/or services, thus deepening your connection and increasing brand loyalty.

Step 2: The Production Cycle

Creating a quality video or article is always a challenge. There is no way around this, but the good news is that producing a series requires only a little extra work with substantially greater payoff. For articles, break the content into nuggets of insight that have value by themselves, but then build on each other to weave a richer tapestry than any one article alone.

For video, it’s all about economies of scale. Every shoot should be designed to capture not just the primary content, but as much secondary content as possible. Much of the cost of a shoot is in the set-up and day rates for the crew. A little creativity can result in a multiple of end products with almost no additional cost.

In post production, one graphics package can be carried through dozens of videos. This investment saves both money and time. Plus, editors get into a groove working with a series, and can produce sequential episodes much more efficiently.

The best video series balance the familiar with the novel. Your videos can use a simple, consistent structure to highlight fresh ideas and content. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time.

Frequency! How often you should publish new content depends on many factors: audience, market, competition, budget, and resources. There are, however, a few rules to follow. Publish new content at least once a week for relationship building. Be consistent so your market learns to count on you. And, the more varied your content is, the more frequently you can publish.

Finally, keep the content concise. Shorter is always better as long as the point can be made effectively.

Step 3: Distribution

Great content is useless if no one sees it. You need to put as much thought and creativity into figuring out how your customers want to access your content as you do creating it. You have to consider where the content lives, how people want to share it, the way your customers use social media, the different ways of accessing content (links, searches, browsing), and make sure it all works across different platforms and screen sizes. This may sound like a lot, but it’s the reality in today’s complex online environment.

First, you need to establish a permanent home for your content that is well suited for browsing. Your most loyal customers will find you there. Make sure they can consume piece after piece, sharing as they please. Let them browse by category, by theme, by personality (as appropriate). If at all possible, set up A/B testing to evaluate different structures and arrangements.

Then, recognize that good content is platform agnostic. You can ride the waves of popular applications freely. Go wherever your customers are and make it as easy as possible for them to discover, enjoy, and share your content.

Step 4: Feedback Loop

The great benefit of our connected world is the opportunity for a real-time dialog with your customer base. This dialog is not at all like a person-to-person conversation, but it is very possible to learn the sounds and behaviors of your customers. The internet gives equal voice to everyone, so a small group of malcontents can be much louder than a quiet, happy majority. Reading these behaviors accurately can inform how you evolve your production cycle to optimize engagement.

In the beginning, you should have a specific publishing plan that covers several weeks, along with a general plan for a few months more. Be cautious about major deviations from the plan based on initial reactions (of any kind), as they may be as much about the novelty as the substance. Be responsive to customers specific questions and issues, but less is generally more here.

Instead, your branded content is your biggest statement. Over time, you demonstrate your attention to your customers by incorporating their best ideas and suggestions into your content and your products. Too much back and forth dialog online just feeds the trolls.

Conclusion

The ongoing publishing of branded content can deeply improve the connection to your customer base. You will need active management of the entire cycle to keep it both efficient and relevant. This consistent and persistent effort pays off in the long run, just as it does with most important relationships in life.

This overview is the first article in a series. The next installments cover Vision and Value-Add, Timely Decisions and Idea Generation, Scope & Assignment, Project Management, Approval & Publishing, and Distribution.