Content Marketing & History: Tell an old story using new tools

Have you wondered how younger generations approach the history of the nation? Different from the common misconception that history class is boring and monotonous, I have seen a number of innovative ways that content marketing is educating and promoting historical events/sites to the youth on popular social media channels. Let's figure it out to see how similar approaches can be used for your business or social organization!

1. Find your niche market before finalizing niche contents

Previously, content about history is often created for mass audience with some common formats such as documentaries, books, biographies, and guided tours at the historical sites. However, these formats are no longer effective for younger generations who:

• Value creativity and interactivity
• Have a short attention span
• Have a strong appetite for social media, spending 4-8 hours to hop on latest trends, connect with friends and learn from each other.

Recently, this generation also show a strong interest in history when they are actively opposed to the use of an old song for TikTok background music as it misrepresents the history of Vietnam. Based on these findings, Gen Z is an underserved market for the history-focused content marketing efforts.

2. Content adaptation for each social media platform

History is already rich in content with different events, milestones and analyses. However, editing and adapting contents for each social media channel is a challenging task as it needs to meet the requirements as well as the prominent feature of the channels. To reach out to a larger fan base in different social media platforms, history contents are adapted into different formats:

• TikTok: short videos (cut scenes from documentary videos) with high engagement rates

• Facebook group: short sharings and memes to interact with the audience. Especially, the posts created via meme jacking are highly popular among young audiences (similar to historical memes on Reddit).

• Spotify: short story-telling podcasts (3-8 minutes) with touching stories about the prison life
• Facebook Page: a combination of memes and well-developed historical analysis with the assistance of professional historians and historical consultants.
• Music videos: Vietnamese singers feature one side of historical stories in their music videos which perfectly match the lyrics. Hoa Minzy with a music video about the story of Empress Nam Phuong and Emperor Bao Dai has created a trend to learn about historical events mentioned in the video.

Thanks to these diverse contents, younger generations have a stronger motivation and emotional connections to study history, instead of just remembering figures and events by heart.

3. Relatable work choice to younger generations

Lastly, historical stories are also brought back to life with a series of relatable word choices to attract, entertain and educate the audience. Gen Z in Vietnam also have a resourceful package of slang words (if you can relate: ch?m zn, lem?n, fishu, sin l?i). This interesting language use also helps content marketers to twist the format of content delivery to drive audiences' interactions. One of the examples I enjoy is the status posted by Hoa Lo Prison Relic:

A B C D E F G [things I love] P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

• The lacking letters here are from H to O, aslo written as H2O (water) meaning "n??c" (nation) in Vietnamese, a simple play-on-words to convey "patriotism" of Vietnamese and drive the engagement from the audience.

REFLECTION

There are more areas that content marketing creators about History of Vietnam derseve a compliment, such as the debate competition about studying history, the effective use of visuals and sound to create emotional connections, etc. Quickly checking the comment sections, we can easily find positive feedback from young generations:

"I somehow passively obtained more historical knowledge"

"Studying history for 12 years is not as effective as one hour of surfing TikTok"

• What do you think about the approach of telling an old story using new tools?
• Should a similar approach be widely adopted in the academic history teaching?