What is one branded content strategy that worked (or didn't work) for your business? Please share the learning lessons/tips?

When we started planning our branded content strategy, we relied mainly on our marketing team. Focusing on keyword selection, my team and I created a strategy to roll out content over a six-month period. The strategy really hit the mark for keywords and saw us ranking for mid to low end difficulties. What we failed to look at was our audience and what they needed. We generated excellent social and longform content but neither resonated with our audience. We learned that we needed to take an inclusive approach. Our customer service and sales team understood the questions our clients needed answers to and their input helped us create a successful branded content strategy.

We had great success with comissioning a case study-based guest post from a freelancer. We found that this type of content was very engaging for our audience, and it also helped to boost our SEO rankings. However, we did learn a few lessons along the way. First of all, it's important to make sure that the case study is relevant to your brand and audience. Secondly, be sure to edit the piece carefully before publishing, as any errors will reflect poorly on your company. Finally, promoting the article through social media and other channels can help to ensure that it reaches the widest possible audience. These steps helped us create branded content that was both effective and popular with our target audience.

For SEOJet, my SaaS company that got acquired last year, our main customer acquisition channel was always SEO. I decided to go all in on Facebook ads to get more predictable growth. I am also a filmmaker and truly understand the power of storytelling so I wrote and directed two commercials that outline the pain points SEOJet solved but did it in a humorous way. The commercials were a huge success and they helped the business double in size in just a few months. It was also great branding for us because nothing had been done like that in the SEO world so they were very sharable. Here are links to the two commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR8ilA69egs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGnUw3uOw3U

In the beginning phase of our content creation strategy we started to experiment with short form blogposts. Although there was a lot of hype around it, I didn't see any positive returns. We were spending a lot of time creating the content short and bite sized but it wasn't getting the attention of search engines. On top of that the people landing on the pages had a high bounce-rate. Most likely it was due to the small amount of information we were able to put into those sub 500 word contents. But they were great as sharable social contents. Granted they had a slightly higher share-rate than other formats but still wasn't worth our efforts.

I tried using branded content on my e-commerce business's blog, and it was a complete flop. I wrote articles that were ostensibly about my products, but really just trying to hard sell my readers. Unsurprisingly, my readers didn't respond well to this approach. Not only did they not convert into customers, but they also stopped coming to my blog altogether. I quickly realized that my branded content strategy was not only ineffective, but it was also driving away my potential customers. Since then, I've abandoned branded content in favor of a more customer-centric approach.

Making a content strategy is a sensitive task that needs supervision and support from an expert. That is why it's important to make someone responsible for their actions. Put someone in control of your branded content and make them accountable, even if you don't have a "chief content officer." Thus, we do have a chief content officer in our company who looks after everything content related for us and it really helps. Whenever something is put to the test, it inevitably gets better. What isn't measured usually gets left behind. So, having someone to look after your content is a blessing in disguise.

One branded content strategy that worked for our business was the creation of a branded podcast. We published a podcast series on our website titled 'The Art of Coaching with Joe Sansevere'. This series was very well-received and has been downloaded over 30,000 times. We were able to create a valuable piece of content and promote it using various channels within our business. This was a great way to connect with our audience and to stay top-of-mind with potential and existing clients.

Influencer marketing has become trendy and more popular in this media world, it is also become a part of digital marketing to promote your content. So tie up your hands with a best-paid influencer who as a related niche to your content, it makes to attract more customers to your brand and gets trust from the influencer's followers. They feel they are comfortable and connected to your brand, and automatically the sales rate hikes. Collaborate with the influencer and choose the best media platform and produce magnetic content. Influencer marketing is beneficial for both partners.

Conducting an online survey is a unique technique for developing branded content. The main objective of a PR survey is to collect opinions from the general population or a specific target audience regarding a topic related to a brand. The results create blog posts, infographics, press releases, and more. Better yet, because exclusive research is so appealing to media outlets, they often source the data and link it to a company's website. Earning these backlinks helps increase a site's domain rating and authority. Here is a success story of our brand using a PR survey. Drive Research surveyed 2,000 shoppers across the U.S. regarding Black Friday shopping habits. We created blog posts and infographics, plus shared our results with news agencies across the country. The story was picked up by 30+ media publications including CNBC, Yahoo Finance, and The Boston Globe. As a result, our research firm earned 50 backlinks. Additionally, the news coverage gave us a 520% boost in site traffic.

A few years ago, we had a competitor who was directly going after us with their marketing since we are the leader in the market of selling dental retainers online. We decided that we needed to do a branded marketing campaign showing why we have been in business for over 15 years and are the front-runner in our market space. We ran a large campaign on social media and made sure if a potential customer saw our competitor’s ads they will also see our ads with the truth and what makes our brand better. The competitor evenly ended this marketing tactic. We learned an important lesson that we needed more branding marketing so that not only do our customers know why they should work with us, but so our competitors don’t want to compete with us on some of our products. We now always run some sort of branding campaign at all times. This should be part of all business marketing strategies to show your strengths as a brand.

One branded content strategy that has worked for my business is using influencers to promote our products. We've found that working with influencers who have a genuine interest in our brand and who are passionate about our products results in more authentic and effective promotion. Additionally, we've found that providing influencers with creative freedom to produce their own unique content leads to more engaging and shareable content. However, we've also found that it's important to set clear expectations with influencers upfront in terms of what type of content we're looking for and how we want them to promote our products. As a business lawyer, I make sure to use an Influencer agreement that sets these expectations in writing to avoid any misunderstandings down the road. Otherwise, we've found that the quality of the content can suffer and that influencers may not be as effective in promoting our products.

Some time back, we hosted a podcast series called "Recruitment Entrepreneurs" wherein leaders from the field of staffing and recruitment industry. They were invited to talk about their life and entrepreneurial journey on the podcast. This not only helped serve the right dose of inspiration to the audience but helped us with content and brand marketing. The learning lessons we had were: 1. Strike a chord by doing something different 2. Provide valuable content 3. Target the right audience

When it comes to branded content, the main goal is to really establish a connection with your audience. A branded content strategy that has worked well for Layla Sleep is telling a story. Because our main keyword is sleep, we make sure to paint the picture of what great sleep will look like for our customer with our products. This also gives us the opportunity to touch on some of their pain points, like maybe they are too hot at night or their current mattress isn't comfortable for their back. We then can take these pain points and tell a story which shows how our products will alleviate their concerns and give them better sleep. From here, the selling takes care of itself because our ideal customer is interested and feels connected to the pain points and desires the resolution our brand offers. Overall, branded content is an effective way to increase traction and emotion which results in more clicks and sales.

Using audience polls worked very well for my business. I believe a business is only successful if its customers are satisfied. It is essential to know what your customers want; for that audience polls work the best for me. I can understand my customers’ aspirations, choices and recommendations by conducting these polls.

Your branded content should show off your brand’s personality, but don’t use the content to try to create a brand-new image for your business. Our most successful branded content elevated the image we already built rather than trying to be someone we’re not. Your branded content shouldn’t be a direct sales pitch, but the content should still fit in a way that makes sense with your products and services. For example, releasing a cookbook makes sense for Jell-O, but the same strategy wouldn’t make sense for Ford or Victoria’s Secret. Your branded content needs to fit in the realm of your business naturally for the best results!

In my last company, we produced a video that showed a comparison of our product to the competition. We thought it would be a good idea to show in great detail the pros and cons of our product compared to the competition, and eventually generate the interest of customers. The video was shared on social media, but our campaign wasn't very successful. We realized that showing the positive points of our product wasn't enough. We needed to add a human element to our content. We started by inviting real customers to share their experiences and show how our product has benefited them. The response was overwhelming. In fact, in less than a month, our video received more than 20x the views as the original. We could not have achieved such a feat without the human element. Showing a product on its own is not enough anymore. Humanizing your content will make a world of a difference.

When I promoted my brand on Instagram, I used custom story stickers and hashtags. The Any Sticker app is free and lets you create creative, unique story hashtags. I used PicsArt to create cutouts of me and I used them as stickers on my stories. I didn't find my brand benefited in any way from using these creative, unique methods. If anything, trying these methods cost me time. However, the tools were free, so I didn't have financial losses from trying these experiments with unique, engaging social media marketing methods.

Branded content strategy should be audience-oriented. Instead of pushing our content in the market, it is better to study consumer patterns and deliver as per demand. Know what sells- once you get a hang of consumer needs, the rest of the process gets easy. If you try to manipulate customers into buying your product once, you promote pseudo-sales. You are killing brand loyalty and limiting your product range to one-time customers, which collapses in the longer run.

Our primary social media content approach is to share brand partners’ and customers’ UGC. Social media users put more stock in UGC in general, but we also get to source a diverse host of design examples to advertise to users through brand affiliates’ beautiful home designs. The goal of advertising is more or less to make consumers envision your product in their homes. Using this logic, we want to showcase our users as many examples of our rugs in their homes as possible both to drive engagement and pique their interest. Some users are dog-owners who find us because our dog-loving brand partners share photos of their fur babies on our spill-proof rugs, while others might be parents or designers looking for specific colors or products to match a style.

We've run several influencer campaigns over the last couple years and the split in success has largely been based on the size of the influencers’ following. For the couple of campaigns we've run with macro-influencers, the results have been abysmal. Despite spending a good amount of time aligning the content with their audience, the content fell flat. Clicks and conversion rates were atrocious. However, the campaigns we’ve run with micro-influencers have been largely successful. The metrics we’ve seen out of those campaigns have been rock solid, and we've redirected most of our influencer budget into working with smaller influencers with more niche audiences.