4 Tips to Ensure Your Branded Content Gets Discovered

Branded content. To some, it’s a dirty word. To many, it’s the future of advertising. In an era of ad-blockers and hyper-competitive social media, marketing that takes the form of useful and entertaining content as a way of promoting a brand has become de rigueur. In fact, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Mashable, and even The Onion employ branded content. Passively asking for an audience’s attention is the past; demanding an audience’s attention via integrated content is the future.

You may already incorporate branded content into your marketing strategy. But how do you ensure that this content gets discovered by your intended audience? The following are a few ideas that may help your branded content get discovered.

Provide Value

No single tool or strategy is as necessary as creating branded content that provides value. While your content may technically be an advertisement for your brand, it’s important to recognize that your audience won’t view it that way. What exactly are you providing to your audience that they wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else? Is your content useful?  Are you providing suggestions, life hacks, tips, help, or even recipes? Is your content informational?  Are you providing something that’s of a newsworthy or historical nature? Or is your content entertaining, and presented in the form of humor, music, or videos? Whichever way you decide to present your content, make sure that it provides value to your audience or they won’t bother paying attention to it at all.

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Know Your Audience

All branded content is not created equal. Content which may be appropriate for one audience may confuse – or even offend – a different audience. Once you determine your targeted audience, you can then create content for which your audience will resonate. Is your brand geared towards millennials? Humorous, playful, and open-minded content will likely perform best. Is your brand geared towards a wealthy or older audience? In that case, perhaps your content should take on a more sincere and refined voice. Knowing your audience when creating branded content is essential.

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Create Dynamic Content

A decade ago, simply writing some copy about your brand and posting a few pictures would suffice. In 2016, with so many dynamic media options available, this is no longer the case. Would your brand best be presented as a video? If so, will you present your branded content in the form of a short 6-second Vine video, a longer form YouTube video, or even an animated GIF? With Facebook Live and Periscope becoming more and more popular, perhaps your content can take the form of a live streaming video. With live video, anything is possible: you can answer questions, provide a product review, or even offer a tutorial. From videos to embedded media and animation to quizzes, today’s branded dynamic content comes in countless shapes and sizes.

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Know Your SEO

Although SEO may not necessarily play the same role that it did in the early Wild West days of Google, knowing how to utilize SEO and target keywords is essential when it comes to creating branded content. While a lot of your traffic may come from social and paid media, search still provides a considerable percentage of web traffic. Jason DeMers, CEO of VUDU Marketing and a widely published expert in the SEO field, admits that, “SEO is far from dead . . . but it’s changed so drastically that people really need to learn to think of it as less of a marketing tactic, and more of a branding play.” SEO isn’t as sexy as social media, but it’s cost-effective, it still works, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Effective SEO should always provide the foundation for your branded content.

These are just a few ideas on how to get your branded content discovered. Have any ideas of your own? We’d love to hear them in the comments!