5 Characteristics of Successful Brand Content

Today, dig­i­tal is def­i­nite­ly at the heart of our lives, but also at the heart of brand’s lives. From sim­ple eco­nom­ic actors, they have become real actors of our soci­ety, try­ing more and more to estab­lish a direct rela­tion­ship with their tar­gets, espe­cial­ly through social net­works, and more and more often choos­ing to no longer focus sole­ly on tra­di­tion­al media such as tele­vi­sion or radio.

At the heart of a true dig­i­tal mael­strom, brands are try­ing, in order to become vis­i­ble, to cre­ate inter­est and attract atten­tion. Thus, if the ROI (Return on Invest­ment) remains a major KPI, ROA (Return on Atten­tion) is becom­ing increas­ing­ly important.

What is brand content?

Brand con­tent is a con­se­quence of these devel­op­ments: it is a cre­ative new genre, com­bin­ing a brand com­mu­ni­ca­tion log­ic with the pre­sen­ta­tion of a tra­di­tion­al media offer, in order to answer these issues of engage­ment creation.

More specif­i­cal­ly, the brand con­tent is a con­tent direct­ly cre­at­ed by and for a brand, which is both the edi­tor and the pro­duc­er. This con­tent has a “nat­ur­al” link with the DNA of the brand and its role is to expand its ter­ri­to­ry by shar­ing its val­ues ​​and pas­sions, but also to cre­ate a rela­tion­ship, and lead to sup­port and engagement.

On a more glob­al scale, con­tent mar­ket­ing is def­i­nite­ly there to stay, and its devel­op­ment isn’t stop­ping any­time soon: in 2015, 70% of mar­keters pro­duce more con­tent than the pre­vi­ous year (Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute), and 80% of CEOS are con­vinced that the con­tent is the future of mar­ket­ing (Info­graph­ics Demand Met­ric).

5 char­ac­ter­is­tics of suc­cess­ful brand content

With this in mind, I stud­ied numer­ous suc­cess­ful brand con­tent cam­paigns and was able to iden­ti­fy 5 essen­tial con­tent features:

1 / Be inter­est­ing, before being interested

The aim is to ensure that the audi­ence comes and remains pri­mar­i­ly for the qual­i­ty of con­tent, and not pri­mar­i­ly for the brand. The con­tent should be based on the DNA of the brand, but above all, in rela­tion to a tar­get, and not in rela­tion to a product.

2 / Be enter­tain­ing, but not advertising

The sec­ond essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic of a suc­cess­ful brand con­tent is its abil­i­ty to be enter­tain­ing and engag­ing, while remain­ing with­in the uni­verse of the brand, with­out falling into the pit­fall of adver­tis­ing. Brands are not media and there­fore aren’t des­tined to be neu­tral: we must cre­ate char­ac­ters, tell sto­ries, while remain­ing con­sis­tent with the brand values.

3 / Cre­ate engage­ment and adherence

The goal of Brand Con­tent is to build a strong rela­tion­ship between a brand and its audi­ence. For this, it is nec­es­sary to cre­ate con­tent that makes you want to share it, that will fit into a social sys­tem, and that will ensure Inter­net users trans­mit the brand’s mes­sage and content.

4 / Be Free

A brand con­tent must be free: there shouldn’t be any access fee to that con­tent because the goal is to gen­er­ate atten­tion, and paid con­tent auto­mat­i­cal­ly has a reduced scope.

5 / Be able to spread in the dig­i­tal ecosystem

Final­ly, Brand Con­tent should enable the brand to reach its audi­ence direct­ly where it is locat­ed: on video plat­forms, on media por­tals, on social plat­forms, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly on a brand site.

The pres­ence of these 5 char­ac­ter­is­tics does not guar­an­tee suc­cess, but the absence of one of them seems to guar­an­tee fail­ure: it’s about stack­ing all the odds in your favor!

More­over, mea­sur­ing the per­for­mance of a Brand Con­tent cam­paign is essen­tial, but it requires to clear­ly iden­ti­fy objec­tives in advance, which is still far from sim­ple: I will speak about it in more details in my next arti­cle. But know that, as usu­al, if one does not know pre­cise­ly define what suc­cess is, it is dif­fi­cult to eval­u­ate and mea­sure it…

What about, what are the qual­i­ties that you con­sid­er crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of a brand con­tent cam­paign? Feel free to con­tin­ue the dis­cus­sion and share your views in the com­ments section!