Did your brand really encash the popularity of the content piece?

Have you ever wondered why even an excellent viral content piece is often not able to fetch the desired ROI? There could be several reasons. Was the content initiative a part of the brand’s consistent content marketing effort in the long run or just one of the tiny pieces of initiative in the overall marketing plan?

Content marketing should follow the ‘Hero, Hub, Hygiene’ model. Everybody is doing a hero, and there is no hub or hygiene. One has to have follow-up content in any format to make the overall content marketing efforts bear results for the brand.

The 'Hero, Hub, Hygiene' model is Google's content marketing strategy devised for YouTube publishers, although the principles can be applied to all forms of content marketing. It helps publishers and marketers plan their future content strategy by filling gaps in the overall content plan.

Dheeraj Kummar

Giving an example, Dheeraj Kummar, Motivator, National Creative Director, Brand and Consumer Experience, Motivator (GroupM), said, “Suppose there is a season 2 of Mirzapur and it has only one episode. How will you feel? In content, you cannot look at it from the lens of one video done brilliantly, collect accolades and then disappear. Whatever you want to drive is gone unless you have follow-up content.”

Anecdotally, Kummar explained, “If advertising is ‘Ek lohar ki’, the content is ‘sau sunar ki’.

He went on saying, “Even if the content pieces are average and done consistently, the recall will be higher than doing one piece of content. Even if you do five pieces, spread it in a manner that makes it look large-scale. For example, The Man Company launched one video with Ayushmann Khurrana on International Men’s Day. During that time, if it was followed by social media posts then it would have been kept alive in the mind of consumers.”

Khushboo Benani

Khushboo Benani, Content, Influencer Marketing and Brand Advocacy Head at Diageo India, seconded that one can’t do away with a single piece or shorter duration campaigns if the plan is to build a full-fledged content play or a separate intellectual property altogether.

In the race to be on top of recall, brands end up latching on to creating different content pieces on various topicals and issues prevailing in the market instead of sticking to a theme and genre of content that matches the brand philosophy. This confuses the consumers, and they can’t mainly figure out the brand voice.

Kumar Deb Sinha

Kumar Deb Sinha, Country Head, Dentsu StoryLab, suggested that the fundamental issue is not the volume of content but the role of content. He said, “Before we embark on the content journey, we should be crystal clear about the role content is going to play in the consumer purchase journey. And depending on the role, we can decide on the pieces of content required to achieve the objective.

If the role of the content is to build brand love, it cannot be achieved in one day. Similarly, one video, even if we have the biggest viral hit of the year, will fail to achieve the objective of driving brand love. It will need reinforcement of the message time and again over a period of time.”

Smita Murarka

Smita Murarka, Vice-President, Marketing, Duroflex, said, “It is also very absurd because if you are going to talk about anything and everything, you are not going to have a personality of your own. People won’t immediately relate you to something logical to your existence. So, you cannot latch on everything topical. You also have to choose topics which are relevant to your existence.”

She further said that just for the sake of saying something and being visible, one should not keep talking because then people stop listening to what you have to say. One needs to sound authentic and sensible. If you need to stay relevant and in the minds of the consumer, your content needs to be a lot more consistent. You cannot just do one thing and disappear as people are not going to remember your brand even after one month.”

There is no set rule for content marketing to be a long-run play. Sometimes it is also a part of the amplification strategy of the more extensive marketing campaign. In such cases, it is okay to create smaller content campaigns supporting the larger brand marketing campaign.

“Sometimes, content is created in service of the larger 360 campaign and is just a leg of that campaign. In this case, the content is going to be single or the number of the pieces which are required to service the duration of the campaign are limited as the objective here is very different,” added Benani.

Shamik Ghosh

According to Shamik Ghosh, Head, Content and Communications, Paisa Bazaar, doing one piece of viral content is a very short-term gain, and a viral content piece lasts for maximum one week. If it is very good, people remember it, but it takes no time for some other good content to take over the consumers’ mind space.

Karthik Nagarajan

Having a slightly different perspective to give, Karthik Nagarajan, Chief Content Officer at Wavemaker, believes that it doesn’t matter if the content initiative is a consistent long-run activity or just a single piece of work. It should align with the overall marketing objective of the brand. He also said the quantity of content never matters.

He said, “I believe a single video or even a single post can be content marketing. The question is not just the quantum of it, but the direction. What did the brand do before and after that video? Was it part of a consistent and focused effort, chasing a certain purpose? How did it help move the needle on the business challenge?”

One needs to understand that unlike the advertising which is more driven towards awareness of the brand, content inherently is more about engagement with the consumer, and like in real life engagement deepens through sustained conversation, according to Sinha.

To conclude, Murarka said, “It is a mix of both long-term content plan and short-term content initiatives. One needs to find who his/her audience. What is that one stands for? Today a brand is not only for selling something, but it is also about standing up for certain things. It is a lot more than selling today. One will have a lot of avenues which relate to your business to talk about. One needs to draw both long-term strategies and then marry it with her/his monthly objective, including topical relevance which one can immediately latch on to.”