Videos that create buzz, practical guides, consumer magazines, blog posts, ebooks, graphics, etc. . . . For some time now, brands have been producing and developing instructive content–sometimes useful, other times entertaining–that’s looking a lot like “real” media.
Although hardly breaking news, this Brand Content (or Content Marketing) trend has steeply increased in recent years, becoming an integral part of a brand’s strategy. Brand Content has become a key part of Marketing Resource Management and we thought it would be interesting to review not only why it is so important today but also observe its effects on the organization of Marketing and Communications Departments.
Brand Content is now essential for major brands
Brand Content was born in the 60s in the United States with “soap opera” telenovelas sponsored by detergent brands and in France with Michelin, but its meteoric rise in recent years is a result of several factors:
- The increasing number of channels has caused a dispersion of content and a fragmentation of the audience making it difficult to capture the consumer’s attention and convey a message.
- It has also become very difficult to impose a message on increasingly savvy consumers: we must shift from a directorial top down approach to organic content that incites desire.
- The explosion of digital applications and social networks has created new relationships and new avenues of expression between brands and consumers.
To continue to capture the attention of their consumers and respond to their needs, brands must broadcast multichannel editorial content by focusing on their interests and promoting interaction.
How does Brand Content impact the organization of marketing and communications departments?
The most evident shift in the organization of marketing and communications teams has to do with timing. All the experts agree that Brand Content does not lend itself to one-off operations, but rather must be conceived over the long term.
David Lacombled, President of La villa numeris, explains in his article published in Le Cercle – Les Echos: there are three notions of time required for a successful Brand Content strategy : responsiveness (the ability of the brand to react in real time), relational (the capacity of the brand to interact with the public) and emotional (the ability to create desire and convey the brand’s story.)
In this context, establishing a strategy for Brand Content requires marketing and communications teams to move from a “one shot “logic organized around campaigns to one of continuous planning, similar to a writing and editing process—indeed, some of our customers resemble news agencies internally.
- Implementing this plan raises the critical question of process and deployment and their effectiveness:
- How to produce content at a steady pace for all channels?
- How to work effectively with the agencies responsible for the production of such content, and with the internal teams that must approve, translate, etc. it?
- How to ensure consistent messaging across all media and channels?
- How to plan this work together?
- How to monitor production and ensure that all items are ready in time?
- Etc.
Technology proves indispensable when optimizing these processes and creating synchronized and combined multichannel experiences. Our next blog will detail the advantages of a marketing resource management solution when dealing with Brand Content.
