How is new media impacting branding?

The media world is changing at a rapid pace. The content marketing industry evolved from its beginning of blog post to social media posts, to SEO content to video content today. There are more social media creators than ever and everyone seems to be famous. 10k followers might not seem like a big number but let's be honest, we all know how difficult it is to even gain 500 of them. Every time you gain a follower you are taking some part of their attention span and that my friend is gold because time is money.

A quick intro about me? Hi, I am Shivam, I am the founder of?Deckster . I have worked with billion-dollar brands to startups with millions of dollars in funding to someone who opened shop in 1954 and is a family-run retail business. So yes, I have had the experience of interacting with 100s of business owners and marketing managers managing million-dollar ad budgets and they are all fighting for one thing: our attention. With content being thrown our way left, right, and center, it's hard to capture someone's attention. But we still gotta do it. Capturing a million eyeballs was difficult and expensive but thanks to social media it's been democratized. So much so that we can see an entire economy born out of it, the creator economy, which we know the government is taking seriously too with its new law around gifting to creators and celebrities. I recently came across the 2022 ROI report published by Nielsen that measures how new media is impacting a brand. Here are a few snippets from the report:

Understanding how the upper funnel impacts sales in the long run:?The 2021 Nielsen Brand ROI Report found that increasing awareness and consideration by one point drives a 1% increase in future sales. In their latest report, they found that increasing awareness and consideration by 1% can also decrease short-term cost per acquisition by 1%. Taken together, you have both near- and long-term reasons to focus on upper-funnel campaigns. Hence along with performance campaigns, branding becomes an important part of building a brand.

Is new media worth it??Nielsen conducted over 1000 studies on branded content, podcast advertising, and influencer marketing and found for each of these channels the average aided brand recall is over 70%, and the average advertiser brand sees gains in familiarity and affinity through the exposure.

I'd like to mention a personal life experience. I remember reading a post by?Ankur Warikoo ?about the purchases he made in the last year/month and he mentioned buying a?Featherlite ?chair in that post. The next time I was purchasing a new chair, Featherlite was the first brand that came to my mind. Probably because I was not aware of other brands in the segment but you can imagine the kind of impact these content pieces have on the brains of the consumer.

How can you improve the ROI of podcast ads??Many of the normal ad rules still apply to podcasts. For example, ads with more brand mentions and ads with early brand mentions drive more impact. As an advertiser, you should be looking to place your ad in the first three minutes into the podcast.

And while shorter TV spots are starting to edge out their lengthier counterparts, longer podcast ads are currently driving more impact. However, even shorter plugs can be effective because podcast listeners are especially likely to research advertised brands. For example, I recently made a switch to the Calm app when I heard about them on Jay Shetty 's podcast. I got to research one day on how they are different from other mental wellbeing's. As a podcast listener, you are really involved and hence the brand mentions can prove very effective.

Influencer and brand marketing drive big familiarity and affinity gains:?

Podcast ads appear in the content. But for influencer marketing and branded content, the ad is the content. By measuring consumers’ reception of the content, Nielsen has found that highly engaging content can drive big gains in purchase intent and deliver ROI that is comparable to more mainstream media. So what makes for good content? For starters, it needs to be compelling. That factor alone accounts for approximately half of the variation in how the content was received. And the importance of being interesting isn’t limited to “entertaining” content. It’s just as true for informational work. But being interesting doesn’t require being outrageous. Staying on-brand to produce a good “brand fit” and appear “natural” is also critical to boosting purchase intent.

The Mahindra Group nailed it with launch of the New Scorpio. There was not a single automobile vlogger in India, who did not talk about how the New Scorpio is more suited to the urban driver. Even though it might not have been a preference to a lot of new car buyers looking to buy their first SUV, they were able to achieve 100,000 bookings in under 30 minutes. Not to forget that Mahindra Scorpio N had over 2000 menitons on social media in the last 30 days with an estimated reach of 356 M+ . You could not miss it, it was everywhere, did you happen to see it? Let me know in the comment section.

We at Deckster have enjoyed success in podcast adevertising, brand marketing campaings as well as influener marketing campaigns. Few comments that we received on our recent campaign that shows how influencer marketing drives conversation around your brand. What are your thoughts on influencer marketing?

The images used in this article belong to its owner ie. The Nielsen group and have been used here for knowledge sharing purposes.