How to win with content development

Too often corporate content development is produced because someone has decided that it’s a tactic that they would like to try with little thought as to how it will work strategically and how it will enhance the brand. Then after they’re done, they’ve spent a lot more money then they would have for email campaign but aren’t sure how much more beneficial the process was.

Here are some tips on how not to let that happen to your next video content development project.

1) Know your customer’s relationship to your brand. Are you a high-involvement brand, that requires a lot of thought behind a purchase or are your customers impulse buyers? Impulse buyers aren’t going to want to learn a lot about your product but high-involvement buyers will. Entertaining content will work for both audiences but educational content won’t.

2) Make sure your customers find the content useful. Entertainment is useful to everyone. A short video about how to use a product is very useful to a niche. A diatribe about a company’s core values is mostly useless if not done very, very well.

3) Make sure any entertainment content reflects positively on your brand. A pharmaceutical company will not want to sponsor a web version of Breaking Bad. But take a look at what Chipotle is doing with Hulu. They’ve created a show that fits perfectly within their brand.

4) For product education make sure you follow best practices for writing, length and production quality. A 10 minute, meandering, iPhone video with poor sound quality doesn’t reflect well on your brand even if YouTube is full of that stuff.

5) Remember distribution is part of the strategy. How are big brands making huge impressions with “viral” content? Well, it’s not viral content at all but part of an expertly executed campaign. Don’t forget Google and Google’s YouTube are advertising companies. How will your video content work within your current marketing efforts and your current online presence? These are questions that need to be addressed before the camera rolls because they should influence the production.

Hope these tips help you make more out of your next branded content project.