Comprehensive Branded Media – Part 2: Vision & Value Add

Branded media, or content created by your company specifically for the benefit of your customers, is an excellent way to create profound and lasting customer relationships. This comprehensive approach addresses all four phases: vision, production, distribution, and feedback (see the Overview here). The consistent publishing of customer-centric content builds loyalty and genuine dialog even in the increasingly crowded online world.

This second article in the series addresses your broad vision for content and how to identify the value to your customers. The goal here is to create a canon of small works that collectively meet the differing needs of your community better than any single piece ever could.

The entire cycle is guided by the value-add to your customers.

Your Business Value, Shared
Your business makes at least one aspect of your customers’ lives better (if it doesn’t, you probably won’t be in business for long). Branded media, done well, supports and augments these benefits.

You are the world’s expert in your products and services—my guess is that the majority of your customers are not. Your articles and videos can give your customers the opportunity to take full advantage of your brand by featuring tips and tricks, insights, use cases, success stories and access to key personalities.

Helping your customers get more out of your products is an excellent sales strategies, but only if it’s customer-centric. Your content will fail if your customers perceive it as a veiled sales pitch. It takes a lot of courage to invest in an indirect marketing strategy, but the impact can be magnificent.

Human Nature
Storytelling is about connecting with people. We humans, though, are full of ironies and paradoxes. For example, we’re communal and highly social, but also unique and highly individualistic. We thrive in freedom and choice, though we often make poor choices. We find the greatest purpose in achievements that were the hardest to reach. There are fine lines between seeking efficiency and being lazy, between ambition and greed, and between self-improvement and self-absorption. The best content recognizes and even plays to all of it.

Everyone likes to be entertained and inspired. They appreciate being educated as long as they don’t have to work too hard, though some do actively seek it. One of the best approaches for the masses is to produce content that is entertaining and/or inspiring, with some hidden education sprinkled in.

Human life is diurnal. Finding some way to become a part of your customers’ daily life is ideal. This may be too much to bite off, especially in the beginning, but it is dramatically more effective than less frequent publishing. As Zig Ziglar said, “People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing—that's why we recommend it daily.”

How People Connect
Most of content marketing is based on the social aspects of your customer base. You want them to identify with your brand and to feel included in your community. There are three main categories for enhancing inclusion: people, participation, and ideas. For the broadest mass engagement, your content should include all three categories in ratios and frequencies appropriate to your market.

People connect to people. There are lots of ways to take advantage of this, particularly in video. Giving access to your key people (behind the scenes, key elements to their success or personal lives to the degree relevant) offers huge appeal to fans and potential clients. Highlighting both prominent and everyday users can also be effective. Connecting to the audience via a dynamic, charismatic host is a potent addition, but it must be done right as it adds both risk and cost to the production.

People connect through participation. Giving your customers a means to participate virtually or literally is a massive way to create loyalty. What they participate in will vary of course, depending on your business. The activity needs to fit something they’re already doing or seeking, ideally with or around your product. You want to leverage the momentum of their existing activities as much as possible.

Some portion of the population is driven by ideas. This can be anything from politics, diet, lifestyle, philosophy, or agenda. It can also be sport or competition-based where fans identify with a person, team, group or outcome. If your content strikes a passion in your community, it will become contagious. Be cautious, though, as ideas are often polarizing. They are like a hot fire than can cook and transform, but also burn and destroy.

Branded Media vs Art
Art exists for its own sake, whereas branded media is a means to an end. There is nothing wrong with art in branded media, but it should always be used to support the broader business goals.

That said, art can be an effective tool to increase engagement. People enjoy creative exhibition as a rule. Clever and unique expressions add entertainment value, which keeps both your customers and content producers happier. From a business standpoint, though, this needs to be managed as art can both become a distraction and get expensive.

Designing Content
You have to plan your content. Good content takes time. Creativity isn’t linear and can’t be forced. Therefore, it is often beneficial to plan and implement multiple projects on overlapping timeframes. Some will be quick and efficient, while others will hit obstacles of one kind or another. Multiple projects in the pipeline also provide flexibility to adapt to unexpected conditions.

There are four primary phases to content: idea generation, scope and assignment, project management, and approval and publishing (each of these will be detailed in upcoming articles on the Production Cycle). It is recommended that you keep at least a half dozen projects at each phase. Otherwise, you’re at risk for missing future deadlines.

Plan your variety, and hold yourself accountable. People have a strong tendency to get into grooves. From the very outset, you need to push for as much variety as possible while staying focused on your goals. Create categories of content and make sure you have active projects for each one. This is especially important after you’ve been publishing for a while. You’re likely to find that some types are easier to produce, even though they may or may not be the most effective.

Views are Not the Goal
The goal of a comprehensive branded media strategy is to dramatically increase consumer engagement and identification with your brand. Your content should compel viewers toward your brand because they increasingly perceive the value-add your product or service brings to their lives.

Viewership alone is not the goal. While it is an important factor, especially if you’re targeting the top of the funnel, not all views are equal. You’re really seeking engagement and influence, which are different and difficult to measure. You have to become adept at reading the sounds and behaviors of your market (which will be discussed in the future article on The Feedback Loop).

Conclusion
Branded media is content you create for the benefit of your market. The canon of works you publish has much more value than any one piece ever could. You teach your customers how to be experts in your products and they learn to get a little more out of life while aligning interests and deepening brand loyalty.

This article is the second in a series. See the previous article Overview. The next installments cover Timely Decisions & Idea Generation and Scope & Assignment, the first stages of The Production Cycle, in detail.

Further Reading
There are so many great works on storytelling, branding, and the human condition. Three good articles are:
10 Ways to Create a Content Engine by Robin Neifield
6 Reasons Your Company's Content Engine is Stalling Out by Tom Treanor
Big Idea 2013: Put a Content Engine Inside Your Company by Steve Rubel
Four of the best books are:
Winning the Story Wars by Jonah Sachs
Contagious by Jonah Berger
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Three Uses of the Knife by David Mamet