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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We used to create a lot of video content for our audience. We would show how to do various things, provide tips and tricks, and just generally use video to provide info that our audience would find useful. The problem was, after a while, we noticed that people weren't engaging with the videos. They weren't sharing them, commenting on them, or even watching them all the way through. We thought we were doing everything right, so we researched the videos that were getting the most engagement, and tried to emulate them. This didn't work. After a while, we just gave up on creating branded video content altogether, and shifted our focus to creating shareable images. This worked much better, and we were able to build more of a following than we did with video.

Explore the monetizing potential of your content by tapping into the power of podcasting. Through this, your business can undoubtedly make a good amount of money, as many solid podcasting strategies can help diversify the revenue streams of your brand while reaching a broader audience. One popular method to earn income from podcasting is through sponsorships. When you create content about your products and services, allocate time slots to promote your sponsors. Think of a TV show where they have to insert a commercial at the start, middle, or end of every episode. That's basically the same thing with podcasting. Plus, it's pretty lucrative, considering each sponsor pays at least $50 per one thousand downloads for a single episode. Once you accumulate enough funds, you can then capitalize on your marketing efforts to expand your market share and convince more people to give your brand a shot.

Branded content techniques should consistently strive to put the audience foremost. Branded content puts the customer first and aims to unite with the audience on an in-depth level and develop a dynamic relationship with the product brand. The best-branded content is competent jointly with the realities and sentiments that your brand produces. Don’t omit to convey the bigger narrative: what creates you mortal? How do you connect individuals’ lives? How do you arrange a positive imprint in the community? The sentiment produced will be linked with your brand and will boost the possibilities of long-term consumer engagement.

The most powerful tip when branding your content is to focus on creating value for your audience. That means creating content that is helpful, informative, or otherwise useful to them. When you create value for your audience, they will likely remember your brand and return for more. Focus on creating value for your audience and watch your brand grow.

A good question to ask yourself is why constrain your marketing efforts by using internal technology that may not be up to the mark? Outsourcing enables you to take advantage of the cutting-edge technology that marketing agencies use — ones that you may not even be investing in. When you outsource your marketing to an agency, you receive a team that uses the finest technology and software possible to deliver your marketing campaigns. Some agencies will even grant you access to extra resources as you continue working together. Skilled and professional marketers have the potential to drive your company and brand to another sphere and it’s oftentimes better to invest in better marketing as opposed to an internal team.

Feedback is important. You have to observe every good and bad comment and then act on them. Assess the level of interest of your clients in your content and adjust accordingly. And then plan future initiatives to expand upon those elements that proved most successful. Please see this as a chance to grow as a result of your experiences which we have done for our company and modify your strategy accordingly.

We have found that creating a study or dataset and using it as a method of repurposing content is one of the best ways to develop a long-term content asset. For example, we have an article on 'The psychology of a Happier Home'. We looked at readily available data from existing sources, and added our own commentary which provided an expert angle that was relevant to our site. Then, we created an infographic which nicely summarised the data, and created another content component for the original data. My tip is to look at a site like Statista and national press articles in order to find data around a topic relevant to your niche, then use that data to create both a content and a visual (usually infographic) version of the article. This can then be used for outreach as well as keyword-targeting purposes. All from one article!

Your website is your special room on the internet. If you own that place, you have to make sure that everyone has a good time there. If your room is made using cheap materials, dry walls, and smells funny, every customer will move to the next one. Investing in a website designed by professionals generated a lot of business for us. If the website looks aesthetically pleasing to the eye, more people are likely to stay and render your services. A good website taps into the human psyche. Get a website that looks great, does its job, and loads at lightning speeds. It is worth the investment.