Brand content in 2020: A Brief guide
The Challenge: getting your brand seen amongst the noise.
Creating social media content for your brand can be challenging. We’re in an incredible time where social media content is king and creating compelling content that engages with your target audience is essential to marketing your business. It’s also a time where it’s easy for brands to get lost in the noise and is difficult for them to know how to reach out to it’s audience.
That’s why finding the right content creator, that suits the requirements of the business and it’s audience is crucial to creating effective online content. Brands know they need to be visible on their social channels, but producing content that tells the right story, engages with it’s audience and avoids damage to it’s reputation is the next biggest step.
It is normal to see brands bringing their social media management in house as part of their marketing teams, however creating the content isn’t often where their speciality’s lie and it’s the hurdle many brands are falling on.
Consistent, compelling, high quality content.
Producing high quality content that resonates with the brands target audience, represents the product or service and encourages consumer engagement, is essential to the survival of brands online. Consumers expect consistent high quality photography and video content, anything less could damage the reputation of the brand. If the brand isn’t posting regularly they risk getting lost amongst the noise of always-on content.
The reality of social media content in 2020.
The reality is, brands need to prove their worth. They need to provide a compelling reason for consumers to engage with their content. If they fail to do that, there are plenty of other brands for their audience to turn to.
With consumers watching more online video and engaging with more online content than ever before, it has never been more important to be talking about your product or service online. There is huge value in creating a channel where consumers have a desire to view your content and learn about product or service.
Need more reasons to up your social game?
Over 500 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube every minute, with 2 billion logged in users a month (source: hootsuite). 83% of users on Instagram say they discover new products or services on Instagram and 80% percent of them said they use the platform to decide whether to buy a product or service (source: Oberlo & Facebook). Lets not forget the size of that audience, with 1 billion active monthly users on Instagram alone, it’s impossible to ignore the importance of being part of the conversation.
Enough fear mongering. What’s the solution?
The recipe for brand success on social is (relatively) simple. However, there are no shortcuts.
Understand what your audience is likely to engage with and create a strategy and content production plan.
Create content that is relevant to your audience, is interesting, compelling, high quality and will encourage your audience to engage with your brand online.
Post regularly, with a consistent level of quality.
Within each of these are a number of steps which can all be broken down. But, in essence this is how brands succeed online.
Consumers expect interesting high quality content from brands, posted on regular intervals. Otherwise, there is no reason for them to engage with it. But, there are no shortcuts - it can take time to build a following and a drop in quality or consistency can result in a loss of followers and engagement.
There are ways to accelerate this process, they typically require further investment such as advertising spend on promoted posts.
Over ten years experience delivering social content for brands
What’s great is there is no shortage of content creators for brands in 2020. However, finding creators that are versatile and experienced enough to articulate the message of your brand, product or service is the challenge brands are being faced with.
For over ten years I have been producing photography and video content for brands such as Vans, Dr Martens, Roberts Radio, Badger Beers, Williams Jet Tenders, Westfield, BT and Marshall Amps. Working independently for 5 years and 5 years establishing a content production team within a large advertising agency, where I worked alongside teams of strategists and art directors to create content that delivered results.
It is with this experience that I am able to offer a bespoke solution for brands looking to create cost effective content, enabling them to engage with their audience and remain relevant online.
How?
Meet with your marketing team and key decision makers to understand your target audience.
Identify your niche.
Work with your marketing team to develop content ideas and concepts to engage with your audience.
Help build a content calendar to identify the amount of content required.
Produce photography and video content.
Offer ways of engaging with your target audience with your new content.
These steps are entirely flexible, your business may already have many of these processes completed. Or you may wish to complete them internally with some advice or without any guidance at all. You may already have a social media strategy, a content calendar and are only looking for production. Wherever you are in your process, I am happy to chat about how I can help with your brands social content production requirements.