Vibrant News

Content.  It’s a term that we are all familiar with and yet it has wildly different meanings for everyone.  If you’re anything like me, you start your day off sifting through the morning’s “need-to-know” news stories and thumbing through mindless social media posts before even getting out of bed.

We all generate and share content as a reflection of ourselves.  Because of that, we spend a significant amount of time finding that perfect mix of quirky yet intelligent posts for our blogs, captions, or memes.  Brands should be no different.  Scratch that, smart brands should be no different.  All too often, brands are consumed with the need for aligning with the latest trends, when in reality, that means they are only relating to a portion of their intended audience.  There is no perfect algorithm for creating content that sticks, but there are a few key do’s and don’ts that can help weed out the unnecessary and get your brand noticed…by those who actually want to see it.

 

The Do’s

Do: Differentiate yourself

78% of CMOs say that custom content is the future of marketing and over 52% of marketers say the ability to target and personalize content is fundamental to their online strategy. So, it is no surprise that advertisers are gravitating towards the story-telling approach, and fast.  It’s not only smart but it is necessary and what’s absolutely crucial is differentiating yourself within the endless sea of branded content.

Always asks yourself, ‘will they actually care?’ or ‘would they share it with friends?’ With over 27 million pieces of content being shared each day, there is no question that the competition is stiff.  Everyone can create content but truly reaching, engaging, and connecting with a user on a personal level is the secret to creating content that will resonate.  Pinpoint your biggest differentiator and find your brand personality in the process.  Don’t try to be among the popular crowd, rather create your own recognizable voice and let those who it resonates with come to you.

Do: Speak their language

People turn to the internet to be informed and entertained.  While creating your own voice is the priority, you don’t want to lose sight of who you’re speaking to.  Get on their level and give them content they would likely find themselves when browsing the internet.  Reach them in the environments they are seeking out and hit them with a contextually relevant message that speaks to them and their interests.

Do: Create content that resonates

Let’s face it, as a brand, your competition is pretty much everyone.  Any brand with a message to share is out there sharing it. You can’t take your current strategy, mold it a different way, and then expect it to go viral. You need to find what it is about your brand that is valuable to the consumerand let the creativity run wild. Simply, find its best feature and emphasize it.  Sometimes that requires stepping out of the comfort zone, but a little something out of the ordinary or going for that shock value will pique the audience’s attention and keep them coming back – now that’s something you can’t put a price on.

 

The Don’ts

Don’t: Go for quantity over quality

It’s better to share a few GREAT nuggets and insights than scrape the bottom of the barrel for a long list of mediocre anecdotes.  All too often, brands try to keep up with the hottest stories and latest trends.  Don’t align with trending content for the sake of aligning with trending content.  Trying to fit in with the cool kids rarely gets you a seat at the lunch table. On the contrary, it discredits you as a brand that can think on its own.  Feeding too much to a user loses their attention so keep it brief and straight-forward and never lose sight of that end goal. Find your niche and stick to it so that you identify with those who matter most to your brand.

Don’t: Get greedy

Let me set the scene.  You’re sitting on a conference call with multiple parties trying to align to a campaign strategy.  Before you know it the call ends where everyone agrees they are on the same page. And yet you walk away with the key objective(s) being awareness, engagement, purchase intent, and everyone’s favorite…conversions.  Wanting every KPI under the sun is something we all deny, and yet they are the foundation of so many of our campaigns.  While of course that is the ideal, it isn’t realistic.  When it comes to content, focus first on one main strategy and do it well. Then, when you see how your audience reacts, you’ll know what else you can add to your strategy.

 Don’t: Sell. Period. 

Good content often involves a brand removing itself from the conversation altogether.  This may be hard to imagine and you’re probably asking yourself, ‘why create all this great content and not get all the credit for it?!’ Two very important reasons.  First, you position yourself as a thought leader, a brand who just ‘gets it’ and can be a trusted source of knowledge.  Second, you bring value to the consumer and, in turn, they will invest their time with you.  You have an opportunity to bring something to the table that other brands cannot.  By removing a blatant ‘sell’, you end up building rapport with your consumer which will leave them coming back for more.

Now for the Holy Grail.   While there isn’t one right formula, there are some ingredients that simply must go together. Provide users with content they want, in spaces they expect to see it.  Offer knowledge or stimulating entertainment at a time when they are most open to your brand message.  Giving your audience content that is relevant to what they are already seeking out on their own will only enhance their experience and make you a more relatable brand.  Once you marry content with contextual relevancy, you’ve mastered the craft.

Welcome to our weekly ‘Tech Talk Thursday’ compiled by Vibrant’s Tech team!

Each week we bring you the stories and videos that have filled our conversations at the coffee machine, printer, sandwich shop, train station… you see, we really do love chatting tech.

This week we’re sharing some great reads on subscriptions you may no longer need in your lives; why emerging tech trends can be soo wrong; and how radio astronomy is being ‘played’ again.

Have a great friday, and an even better weekend!

The Vibrant Tech Team

Top Tech Stories This Week

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Will Elon Musk’s 120-hour a Week Stop Us Worshipping Workaholism?

To keep production of the Tesla Model 3 on track Musk recently confessed he had been working 120-hour weeks. “All night – no friends, nothing,” Musk emotionally told the New York Times. However, the reaction from fellow multimillionaires and entrepreneurs like Arianna Huffington, called out workaholism for what it really is. “This is not about working hard,” Huffington wrote. “It’s about working in a way that allows you to make your best decisions. Working 120-hour weeks doesn’t leverage your unique qualities, it wastes them.”

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This Start-Up Incubator Wants to Build the Next Internet on Ethereum

The technologists and entrepreneurs working at the Consensys warehouse collaborate on ways to expand Ethereum’s infrastructure—a practice they call ‘mesh’—as they compete to finish their own apps. “The kinds of things that we’re building here are going to be the foundational elements or the building blocks of economic, social, and political systems over the next few decades,'” says Joseph Lubin, cofounder of Consensys.

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The Rebirth of Radio Astronomy

“Radio astronomy is really, really unique in the kinds of astrophysics that we can study,” says Brian Kent, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. This article looks at a more sustainable approach to Astronomy to bringing it back to measuring radio waves heard from remote space.

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Gartner’s Great Vanishing: Some of 2017 Emerging Tech Just Disappeared

Every year Gartner publishes its annual “Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle”. For two decades it perpetuates the idea that emerging technology trends follow a repeatable path. Nine emerging technologies identified last year by Gartner in the corresponding Hype Cycle report have vanished. see which ones…

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The Services we Cancelled this Year.. From MoviePass to Netflix

The Verge polled their team to see what services they’ve ditched this year. A novel approach to asking which ones they’ve signed up to. Read on to see which subscriptions and services were cancelled (even in trial stage).

New ad formats are constantly in demand for brands and agencies alike. Agencies need to show their clients that they have their finger on the pulse of the latest ad technologies and placements. Advertisers must consistently deliver innovative solutions to capture consumer attention. Yet over the last few years there has been an increasing propensity to create technologies that focus solely on consumer engagement rather than those that drive traffic to brand websites. It’s a trend that’s clear to see in Vibrant Media’s revenue figures. Once almost exclusively supplying traffic-driving campaigns to brands across the world, Vibrant’s content marketing and engagement formats have grown to account for a significant amount of revenue in both Europe and the U.S. These CPE ad formats collate and curate brand content, and give consumers a choice of rich media from branded interactive units, which include videos, games, articles, images and social media profiles.

 

But the rapid adoption of these formats is not just new tech for new tech’s sake. The brands that require engagement formats often have complicated messages to communicate or perhaps don’t have an online destination that’s particularly entertaining. That is likely one of the reasons Vibrant has seen more business-to-business campaigns buying into engagement ad formats recently. Engagement formats capture attention, and encourage consumers to spend time delving into the brand, so that they can discover more about the advertiser. These formats establish the brand’s desired relationship with their consumers. Such relationships build trust and loyalty, and they also offer the best prospect of creating brand advocates, which is something of high importance on social media.

 

Consequently, the creatives behind engagement campaigns have developed compelling and entertaining content to be distributed at scale around the web through native ads. As more advertisers have recognised that consumers react well to branded content, they have invested more in it. What’s more, is once the engagement campaign is over, brands can extend the use of that high-quality video, editorial, and image content across other channels like their corporate websites and social media profiles.

 

Consumers’ positive response to branded content has seen more advertisers turning their own websites into hubs of articles, videos and images to inform and entertain consumers, rather than just performing as ecommerce or brochure sites. This is one of the reasons that cost-per-click (CPC) traffic driving campaigns are seeing a resurgence. CPC has always been Vibrant Media’s cornerstone business but what we’ve seen recently is that brands have been investing a lot more into their websites, and have created valuable destinations for their consumers.

 

Some brands have even developed news rooms for content professionals. Brand journalists create editorial news and feature articles, image content, and videos. Some of the content is directly about their own brand and products however, much of the content is each brand’s response to the cultural and world events that their consumers connect with – fashion, music, sports, celebrity culture, relationships, health, comedy, personal finance and more. By monitoring what attracts and retains their consumers’ interests – and responding in kind by producing even more engaging content –  these brands develop a deeper relationship with their target market.

 

Historically, the challenge for many brands that wanted to drive traffic to their sites, was a lack of qualitative innovations in traffic-driving formats. Brands and agencies often feel obligated to rely on standard IAB banners even though research shows the majority of these ads are never It’s time for a new range of CPC formats. These formats must be inspired by the success of the best engagement formats; must be consumer-centric, user-controlled and responsive; and must be placed appropriately at native and highly viewable points of the consumer’s content experience. Ensuring contextual relevance will also continue to connect consumers directly to the high quality content destinations brands have been building. Great digital marketing engages consumers, encourages interaction, and attracts consumers into visiting brands’ own environments. Both engagement and traffic are needed to build the optimal relationship between consumers and brands.