One of the toughest jobs for any marketer is the constant need to create engaging and effective content for their brand. It can feel like an overwhelming and daunting task for some. With all advice saying to post as regularly as you can, how can you keep content high-quality and engaging? Well, what makes it easier, is to break the term ‘content’ into sub categories, looking at the different types of content, and working from there. By thinking about content in categories, rather than one large vague group, you can start to create a content strategy to begin building.
So, in this blog, we’ll be going through the 5 main types of popular content that you can create for your brand. Let’s take a look…
‘Make Me Smarter’ Content
With so much content being made and shared every single day, audiences now ask themselves: “what’s in this for me?”. With an almost-infinite sea of content to consume, people want to engage with content that will actually benefit them and give them something to take away. And so, ‘Make Me Smarter’ content is designed to inform or teach something new to your audience. It could be a piece of knowledge they didn’t already know, or it could be an interesting story that they could pass on. Either way, always be thinking: what are my audience getting out of this?
‘Brand Theme Anchoring’ Content
Sometimes also referred to as ‘Brand Reinforcement’, this type of content is designed to support and strengthen your brand’s image. The idea with this one is to, over time, create a feeling of familiarity with your audience. The end goal should be that you’ve anchored your brand so much in people’s minds that, when they see your company branding, it creates a feeling of familiarity, closeness, and sentiment. Think John Lewis’ Christmas adverts, or McDonald’s signature whistle. Both of these are great examples of how, over time, marketing can create a sense of familiarity. Now, everytime you hear that whistle (or even anything similar) you think of those gold arches. That’s brand anchoring at its best.
‘Community’ Content
This next one’s been around for a while, but really seems to be taking centre stage in the past few years. ‘Community’ content is content designed to encourage discussion around causes, purposes, and current affairs. It’s important for modern audiences, especially in younger demographics, that the companies that they do business with are morally and ethically aligned. People want to know that the products that they buy aren’t contributing to climate change, or sweat-shop exploitation. They want to see that the brands they like are vocal and active around current causes and affairs. So the aim with this kind of content is to give your brand some heart and humanity – show that there are real people behind the business that care, and aren’t just machines for profit. However, with this one, always be sure to stay authentic. Creating artificial empathy will have the opposite effect, as audiences will see straight through it.
‘Lifestyle’ Content
This type of content is all about storytelling. We mentioned earlier that audiences these days will ask: what’s in it for me? And they’ll think this way when looking at products/services to buy. How will that car improve my life? What will this new phone add to my day-to-day? What will my experience be at that restaurant? ‘Archetype’ content is all about answering that question before they’ve even asked. Show them just how much your product/service will benefit them and fit perfectly into their lifestyle. Create heroes (your customers) and villains (their pain points) and show them how your product/service is the answer they’re looking for.
‘Social Proofing’ Content (UGC)
When it comes to buying a product or service – people are a lot more likely to pull the trigger if they can see others do it first. There’s 2 aspects to this thinking. The first being that if they can see others enjoying something, then it will most likely eliminate any concerns they might already have. The second is on more of a subconscious level. People consume in trends, and so if someone sees tons of images and videos of people wearing a particular pair of shoes, for example, then they’ll start to think that they are missing out. This term has been popularised as FOMO (fear of missing out). The idea that everyone else is a part of something that you’re not. Build content that will create this same feeling in your audience.
How To Strategise This…
So, we’ve identified a few different types of popular branding content – but what now? Well, to give your marketing a varied and wide range of content that covers the most important areas, you should aim to be always putting out one type of each of these. If you are covering all 6 of these areas with engaging and authentic content, then your brand will feel diverse and plentiful to your audience.
Conclusion
Hopefully now, after reading this blog article, you feel as though you have a good understanding of the different types of popular branding content. As well as having these to use as general temples for you to go and create your own amazing content for your brand.
If it’s marketing, branding, and business tips-and-tricks that you’re looking for, then we’ve got the perfect Instagram profile for you to follow… Ours!
We want to help the businesses we work with to be the best they can possibly be. In order to do this, we share all the knowledge and insight we know and learn with the world. However, we also understand that people are busier than ever, and so we try to condense all our advice into bit-sized, easy to understand content that doesn’t take huge amounts of time and prior knowledge to understand. Invaluable advice, just minus all the head-scratching. Follow today, thank us later!
