Small to mid-sized brand marketers, your new content formula is E+E=E

This post is for the underdog brands of the world. 

Before I reveal the secret formula, let’s be honest for a minute. The kind of honest that can’t even be delivered by your best friend. Nobody cares about your brand. Pause for dramatic effect. That’s right, nobody cares about your brand (that is, unless you are lucky enough to be a marketer for a multi-national brand that changes lives; however, most of us aren’t that lucky). 

Most marketers don’t have a sexy brand or product to truly generate and support a content strategy that brings a return to the bottom line. However, most of us inherently know it’s our responsibility as a marketer to invest (time and money) in a content strategy that differentiates our brands from not only competitors, but also those aforementioned multinational brands with umpteen more millions of dollars than you. 

Alright, let’s get to the story, what you’ll soon refer to as your game changer. For our mid-sized regional bank, we face two hurdles. One, our industry is super regulated which forces our legal and compliance department to play “bad cop” on a daily basis. Secondly, and arguably more importantly, our industry is growing increasingly noisy – even Amazon wants a slice of the traditional banking pie. For some of us, that’s the end of the story. However, I am here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be the end of our story, friends. 

This simple equation will allow us underdogs the ability to differentiate among our peers and the behemoth companies with millions of dollars at their disposal: E+E=E.

So what the hell does that even mean? For us, we will ONLY produce content with the three Es in mind. Educational and Entertaining pieces ultimately resulting in Engagement – the content marketing utopia (bonus points for Educational and Entertaining content).  

Either E can be exclusive to the channel in which you use to distribute content. For example, our professional website purpose is more Educational. In our industry, consumers want to learn about being an adult and managing their money, especially when they are younger and don’t know what to do with their paycheck, and in most cases, would rather watch a video to learn, in lieu of reading longer form content. 

For our blog (learning center) and social media content, we are focused on Entertaining the audience. Both E’s are designed to Engage the audience and build a loyal following, and ultimately drive revenue to the bottom line. An Engaged customer, especially in banking, is the ultimate dream. 

Educate your customers when you have a particularly complex product or service and would like to provide value to their lives. Entertain your customers when they want to be entertained (seriously, nobody goes on Facebook to learn the basics of a Home Equity Loan). And don’t be afraid to loosen up your corporate voice a little bit, consumers enjoy brands with not-so-serious voices. They’ll also find you more relatable.   

While I’ll admit, this topic, in some form or fashion isn’t new in the content marketing world, my hope with this post is to simplify priorities for you, as an underdog brands fighting to be different. Remember E+E=E, or in other words, Educational and Entertaining will equal Engagement – which for us, is content marketing success. 

If you want to learn more about our philosophy, feel free to drop me an InMail message.