What is Branded Content? A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating and Distributing It | Issuu

Branded content is a non-salesy way to communicate your brand message and values to your target audience. Since it’s highly immersive, it’s an effective way to capture people’s attention and elicit an emotional response at the end. It is entertaining and educational, allowing readers to better connect with your brand.

In this article, we’ll answer the question, “What is branded content?” by providing some examples and tips on how to create and effectively distribute it.

But first:

What is Branded Content and Why is it Important

Branded content refers to anything content marketers create—like a blog post, video, or social media graphic—intended to promote a brand’s values and evoke an emotional response in viewers. The content is developed to resonate with the target audience. Although it aims to help the target audience make a purchasing decision, it doesn’t use pushy sales tactics.

Branded content brings multiple benefits to businesses.

First, it increases brand recognition. Since branded content leverages storytelling to communicate a brand’s message, the target audience is more likely to remember your business. To further boost recognition, the content must include your brand’s logo, slogan, and colors. That’s why having a brand style guide defining all these elements is also important.

Secondly, branded content has the potential for rapid market expansion. It can be distributed on multiple platforms, including social media channels. Since it’s highly shareable, your audience can easily send it to their networks, ensuring that more people see the content.

Thirdly, branded content is a low-cost marketing option. You can share the content using your existing digital assets. Since most websites and social media channels are free, you can create and share multiple branded content campaigns without budget constraints.

Examples of Branded Content

Multiple types of branded content exist, including short videos, customer success stories, podcasts answering FAQs, and infographics. Let’s examine each one in more detail.

Short Videos and Documentaries about Important Topics

Videos have been steadily growing in popularity among audiences, with 88% of marketers saying they’re an essential part of their marketing strategy. You can use short videos and longer documentaries to highlight key industry issues related to your brand.

For example, HP uses short videos featuring how different young people are using technology to make an impact in the world. Generation Impact speaks directly to HP’s audience: students, young people, and tech professionals.

Customer Success Stories

Unsurprisingly, 92% of customers read customer reviews before purchasing a product. This shows how effective customer stories are when convincing people to purchase, even if they don’t promote your brand directly.

Most customer success stories follow the problem-solution-result system. In this approach, the customer states the problem they were facing and how they solved it. The audience can relate to the customer and see that your brand can help them, too.

Podcasts Addressing FAQs and Pitching Suitable Solutions

Podcasts are growing in popularity, with about 70 million US listeners by the end of 2023. You can leverage this popularity by creating episodes addressing customers' questions about your brand.

You can also tackle common issues close to your heart and suggest solutions.

For example, Hubspot runs a podcast named “Culture Happens,” in which guests speak about the importance of a healthy company culture and how to overcome related challenges. While they’re at it, they use it as a platform to speak about HubSpot’s reputable company culture.

Infographics and Blog Posts Focused on Industry Trends

Infographics visually represent ideas, information, or data in bite-sized portions. Blog posts, on the other hand, are typically long-form articles that explore ideas in depth to give the audience a greater understanding.

Infographics and blogs are great for showing industry trends and statistics related to your brand. They allow you to engage more readers by educating them about what’s going on in the market and showing them how your brand is relevant to what’s happening. One popular content marketing strategy is to publish a blog and then share an infographic on social media to drive interest and engagement with the blog article.

Tips to Create Engaging Branded Content

Now that you’ve learned the answer to the question, “What is branded content?” let’s examine a few tips for creating compelling content.

Identifying your brand's key message is a great place to start. Look into what problems your products can solve, what sets your brand apart from the competition, and what you want people to think of when they hear your name. This will help you decide the right content and tone of voice to elicit specific feelings and actions in people.

Aim to strike a chord with your audience by speaking directly to their needs. Use emotional appeal to resonate with your target audience. As much as you aim to capture emotional attention, remember to stand behind the values your brand promotes.

Focus on relatable storytelling to create successful branded content. Stories are great because they’re memorable and highly shareable. Introduce relatable characters your audience can identify with. We recommend using real, compelling stories from real humans to make the story more relatable. People can quickly identify inauthentic stories and won’t hesitate to call them out.

For instance, Red Bull regularly uploads YouTube videos that follow the adventures of real thrill-seekers. Check it out:

As a final tip, if you have a team creating your branded content, make sure you have a robust content creation process in place for them. You want a process that ensures the final output is high-quality and reflects your brand values. Your process should also minimize the back-and-forth among team members in charge of different aspects of content creation. For this, you can also leverage technology such as approval software. It will ensure the branded content goes through all reviewers quickly and seamlessly, ultimately leading to its timely publication.

How to Distribute Your Branded Content

Creating branded content is hard work, so ensuring your distribution strategy will maximize its full potential is equally important! There are many options for sharing your content, and having a multi-channel distribution strategy is key. Here are a few ways:

Website: Share your branded content on your website’s landing pages.
Email: Email marketing is also an effective way to remind subscribers of your brand's impact. You can send emails to retarget, educate, or inform new followers about your brand values.
Social Media: Social media marketing lets you share branded photos, videos, and graphic elements on social media platforms with leads and prospects who don’t already follow you online. Targeted social media marketing is easily shareable and can boost brand awareness by getting more eyes on your brand.
Influencers: You can also collaborate with a social media influencer who aligns with your brand’s story. With influencer marketing, you can promote your branded content to a wider audience. Just make sure the influencers you choose have a following among your target customers. Use social media to identify and reach out to these potential influencers.
Paid Ads: Other paid marketing campaigns effectively stand out and get the audience’s attention. For example, you can choose to have paid campaigns on platforms like Google Ads to distribute your branded content. They help you with precise targeting to increase brand awareness and easily measure results. If you’re using Google Ads, remember to optimize Google Ads Performance Max campaigns to access all your ad inventory with a few clicks.
PR & Events: Public relations lets you control how the public views your brand. Managing your public reputation by sharing thought leadership articles on relevant outlets or contributing to a podcast, for example, lets you remain true to your brand voice and story. That said, you can also host events relevant to your campaign and get like-minded people to talk about your brand. The best part is that you don’t have to break the bank when marketing your events.

Conclusion

To wrap up, you’ve learned the answer to “What is branded content” and why it is important. You also learned some examples of this type of content: short videos, documentaries, customer success stories, podcasts, blog posts, and infographics.

Additionally, there’s a right way to create high-quality branded content, which includes identifying your brand’s message, leveraging brand storytelling, and using real people to elicit an emotional response from your audience.

Distributing your branded content is also key. Use social media marketing, paid campaigns, email marketing, and public relations, among other channels. The channel you choose should be popular among your target audience.

Ready to create once and share everywhere? It’s time to kick off your branded content creation journey.

David Pagotto is the Founder and Managing Director of SIXGUN, a digital marketing agency based in Melbourne. He has been involved in digital marketing for over 10 years, helping organizations get more customers, more reach, and more impact.