Brands should focus on creating content that is entertaining and relevant to their audience rather than pushing their own agenda too much, according to Kaper founder Chris McCafferty, who has revealed five lessons that marketers can learn from the recent PRWeek UK Awards.
McCafferty claims that brands often produce content skewed towards their own wants and needs, but this can have a detrimental impact on real audience interest. He adds that a “put people first, brand second” strategy should be the goal for marketers and believes that entertaining content allows brands to stand out from the crowd in an increasingly competitive and saturated digital space.
The second lesson is that brands are not investing enough money into creative quality and that limited production budgets are not delivering the return on investment required to get ahead. Marketers could benefit from outsourcing some of their content efforts to an agency, but McCafferty also believes that a smarter and influencer-focused distribution strategy can help.
Finally, music and diversity are two areas that brands should double down on to drive awareness, reach and engagement. McCafferty claims that music remains an underinvested creative element in branded content, as it can be a key lever for creating emotion, prompting recall and moving people to take positive brand actions. Diversity in the form of new and exciting content formats and types can also enable brands to stand out.
A separate report published by marketing website Conductor Spotlight has found that publishing educational content during the early stages of a customer’s journey can have a substantial impact on brand trust and purchase decisions thereafter. Consumers are 131 per cent more likely to purchase a service or product from a brand in the immediate aftermath of consuming an engaging, educational piece.
The long-term impact is also notable, as there was a nine per cent uptick in the number of consumers that deemed a brand “trustworthy” seven days after reading educational content, while eight per cent more said that they viewed the brand in a “positive” light a week later. This suggests that brand affinity actually grows rather than diminishes as time passes due to a phenomenon known as “rosy retrospection.”
