Start with your audience in mind

To borrow from Meabh Quoirin, managing director of the global consumer trends agency Future Foundation, people want brands “to tell them what they need to know that they don’t know yet” and quality owned content fulfils this purpose. But only if it starts with your audience in mind.

While consumer brands are arguably leading the way with owned content, business brands can also benefit from developing and sharing great content. This month Barclaycard launched a new content hub ‘News and insights’, which has been designed to help give small business owners “the knowledge and understanding to keep their business moving forward”. In a recent interview, Barclaycard’s Business Solutions vice president of digital strategy, Andrew McNamee, explains that the company has changed its approach to content marketing and now focuses on the individual rather than business.

When drafting owned content, whether it’s for a blog, website, email or client publication, it’s easy for business brands to fall into the trap of extolling the benefits of their products or services. However, they should instead be focusing on what it is their target client wants to read. What is it that they are struggling with and what insight or advice would really help them? McKinsey’s recent ‘What CEOs can learn from activist investors’ video post is a great example of this. The conversation remains focused on what will benefit the audience and provides pointers that they can implement.

As important as the substance of your content is the format in which you expect your client to read or view it. Think about your own habits, when do you catch up on industry news, check work-related blogs or social media for new insights? It’s probably on your mobile on the way to and from work. And this is likely to be similar for your target audience. Given this, it’s important all content you produce is mobile-responsive and you’ve considered the usability on a smaller screen. Posting to mobile-friendly sites such as LinkedIn can help.   

Related to this, it’s important to remember that your clients are often time poor and, as such, visuals can work well. Images typically garner 313% more engagement on social channels than posts without and, according to SlideShare, visuals are processed 60,000x faster than words and can increase a viewer’s comprehension by 89%. With more than 52,000 followers on Instagram, IBM is bringing the brand to life visually and they are using Vine to good effect, making data fun in only six seconds.

Lastly, while your target clients may be professionals in serious roles, they are also human. Be brave and don’t be afraid to test boundaries and publish higher risk ideas that stretch what people usually see from your company. For example, GE produced a science fiction podcast series to engage a younger tech-savvy audience and was also responsible for this very cool but somewhat unrelated Vine, which generated more than 230k Likes and 180k ‘Revines’. It’s this type of content that could help gain extra awareness, generate greater interest or build advocacy for you and your firm.

There’s no silver bullet when producing quality owned content, no procrustean solution. However we know great content when we see it and it’s probably because it’s been created with us in mind.