Maintaining the human connection with relevant content

The most compelling way to find new audiences and get them to buy into your brand’s ethos is to tell a human story. This is content marketing 101 and while it sounds simple enough, in reality, it is notoriously difficult to get right.

Content marketing lies in the sweet spot where brand voice and expertise overlaps with what the audience cares about. Instead of trying to push messaging onto audiences, content marketing responds to their needs in a way that is relevant to the brand.

Content marketing has earned itself the title of modern-day effective marketing by acknowledging the importance of relevant information to specific audiences. But how – as it continues to proliferate in a fragmented media landscape – can it remain relevant? By following the targeted audience, and adapting to their needs and preferences in brand discovery and content consumption.

Content remains king, and these are the trends we expect to see grow in 2023:

1. The cockTail parTy effecT: personalised conTenT maTTers mosT

The Cocktail Party Effect states that people focus on information relevant to them. With increased competition where many niches have been saturated, and an increasingly demanding audience, creating personalised content creates the opportunity to differentiate at a human scale and compels customers to take action. In a recent study, Infosys found that 31% of customers wish their experiences were ‘far more’ personalised.

True personalisation isn’t just about knowing your customers’ name; it’s about understanding their past buying behaviour and what their future needs might be so you can tailor product or service recommendations accordingly. Once you know what they need, you can serve them the right message at the right time, and drive business objectives.

2. curaTed conTenT inspires engaged consumers and converTs sales

It’s not ‘new news’ that brand discovery takes place online; the trend accelerated during the pandemic, as brands took to online platforms en masse, and a rise in ‘shoppable content’ was made available to audiences.

Since then, discovery and inspiration found through immersive shopping experiences have been reimagined online. Shoppable content allows consumers to buy products directly while they are viewing or reading content from within a page.

Immersive commerce formats engage the senses and derive an emotional response that ideally leads to customers taking action. Branded content, shoppable video series, sponsorships, and augmented reality (AR) experiences give audiences meaningful opportunities to play, engage, and shop products directly from content. Brands can create a frictionless, relevant experience as consumers interact with content they trust.

Effective, engaging shoppable content merges with a high level of conceptualisation and interactivity.

3.

Influencers have been used as a powerful tactic to connect with audiences for some time now, but the landscape and definition of ‘influencer’ is evolving rapidly with a deeper focus on the creation of quality content for brands.

Mass interest in creators is altering the balance of power from professionally produced, ‘Hollywood’ content to creator content. Production investment in broadcast/cable TV and film is decreasing while investment in creators is skyrocketing. Creator content ad spend is growing twice as fast as spend on professionally produced TV/streaming content, increasing 15x since 2017.

Integrating content creators into your media mix offers you the opportunity to:

• Establish an emotional connection with audiences – people buy into people

• Create assets that suit brand positioning and can be used as evergreen content across channels for longer periods

• Tap into new audiences and unlock new pathways to communicate with future customers

4. aI-generaTed

Automated text generation is generating huge buzz with plenty of marketers and professionals speculating as to whether AI will replace human talent. Advances in technology represent an opportunity for brands to leverage AI and drive sustainable efficiencies in the traditionally costly and time-consuming area of content creation. News pieces, blog posts and marketing copy can all now technically be produced using AI in a way that, until recently, simply wasn’t possible. AI could be an exciting disruptor to the industry; however, we encourage you to proceed thoughtfully.

An important component of content marketing is harnessing the emotional triggers – determined by your buyer personas – in your creative executions that are relevant to audiences, and simply put, AI cannot do that for you. The emotional connection a brand has with an actionable audience is built on established trust and should remain human-centric.

The power of AI lies in expediting select portions of your creative and communication strategy with time saving and cost-efficiency as your goal, supported by human insight to monitor for bias and maintain message relevance for your audience.

5. The commodITIsaTIon of conTenT

We’ve established that content is a key driver in connecting with audiences and delivering on marketing-funnel-specific KPIs. It is also true that client budgets are diminishing; their increased focus on driving cost-efficiencies is leading to the implementation of improved marketing tech stacks – CDPs as a prime example –and a greater importance placed on media return on investment.

To commoditise content marketing might insinuate turning it into a standardised, low-cost channel that is perceived as more ‘budget-friendly’ – but this would come at the cost of losing unique, high-quality content that engages and educates a specific audience.

The success of content marketing lies in storytelling, authenticity, and eliciting emotion to create a connection. This poses the question; how do we maintain content as a lead channel while maximising budgets? The answer: personalisation at scale.

The power of content is in being scalable; by ensuring your content is crafted in such a manner that it can be repurposed across several channels over a longer campaign period, or for different channels in future, clients can reduce creative production requirements and thereby deliver on cost efficiencies – whilst keeping your audience engaged.

Consider how a piece of video content intended for social channels might leverage your core story and be tailored to suit audio, streaming, online, print or OOH.

Clients are not going to stop pushing agencies to deliver on ROI, and the demand from audiences for relevant, entertaining content isn’t going anywhere.

Ask yourself: “How else can we use this content?”

Measuring attention – and returns

There is no one-size-fits all approach to content planning and delivery. Measurement of branded content is notably inconsistent; benchmarks are dependent on creative and campaign goals. Attention measurement could become a common metric applied across media platforms.

By focusing on what KPIs your content needs to deliver on, you can customise ROI based on those deliverables alongside your relevant media metric.

Create buyer personas to discover customers’ preferred channels to engage, and tailor your content or messaging around them in immersive and entertaining ways. Video still leads the pack as far as best-engaged content, but explore how else you can stretch your story to deliver funnel-specific messaging.

The future of AI is in expediting work more efficiently, not in replacing human talent; by nature of efficiency, it should create more freedom to be insightful and strategic, deepening your understanding of brands and their audiences.

The commoditisation of content is the sweet spot where personalisation and scale intersect. By creating evergreen content that can be repurposed and tailored to ignite a conversation with our audiences, we can achieve cost efficiencies while maintaining an authentic brand voice.

Getting closer to your audience and identifying innovative ways to connect is the biggest challenge business faces when searching for growth in today’s market. In an industry saturated with players, the key to growth lies in creating human connection.

Content marketing isn’t new, but it’s certainly gaining power. Here in South Africa, brands are finally beginning to realise that in order to improve their visibility and promote their products, they must place people at the centre of their marketing.

Measuring content – effectively

Most marketers focus on content’s awareness and perception effects: Marketers are more likely to use awareness and perception metrics, rather than engagement KPIs such as ‘time spent with content’ to measure a campaign’s success

Attention is a better predictor of effectiveness than viewability: Attention-based planning can act as a unifying measure of effectiveness across both on and offline channels - optimising for attention can lead to greater ad recall, ad impact and purchase intent than optimising for viewability

In future, key measures of success will continue to move towards optimisation of the audience’s attention with;

• Fatigue analysis: identifies and assigns message fatigue for improved engagement –what is the wear down factor and how do you maximise before moving on

• Subject line optimisation: improves open rates by highlighting over- or under-performing keywords

• Audience intelligence analysis: of the breadth and depth of engagement and their topics of interest

• Time optimisation: determines best time to send, based on when a customer is most likely to open a piece of content

Greer Hogarth is head of strategy at Planit Media. A trend and category insights analyst with expertise in financial services, retail, FMCG, automotive and telecommunications, Hogarth is also a social listening tool analyst with experience in deriving content opportunities, customer insights and pain point discovery. She has worked with Apps such as Crimson Hexagon, Brandwatch, AmaSocial, Meltwater and BrandsEye.