Is your content ‘helpful' enough for consumers?

Content marketing professionals discuss the importance of creating helpful content, challenges associated with it and finding the balance between human-interest storytelling and practical solutions-based content for consumers

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Akansha Srivastava
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Havas Group’s latest Meaningful Brands report 2021 states that compared to pre-Covid times, ‘helpful’ content is on the rise as consumers figure out how to navigate their personal new normal. Unfortunately, almost half (48%) of all content provided by brands is not meaningful to consumers. It’s an irony that while no marketing conversation is complete without using the term ‘content’, the Havas report data is a wake-up call for content marketers. Every now and then, a content marketer should introspect if they are offering the right content that the consumers actually need.

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Shirish Agarwal

Shirish Agarwal, Head of Brand and Marketing Communications, Panasonic India, said authenticity and relevance define ‘helpful content’. “In these tough times, brands must be genuine in their efforts and must deliver the right information and the means to cope with the situation. At Panasonic, rather than focusing on the conventional features, advantages and benefits of our products, our content on social media is highlighting GOI Initiatives, DIY videos on servicing appliances and creating topical content that is relevant,” said Agarwal.

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Sanchita Roy

Sanchita Roy, Head, Strategy, Havas Media Group India, said the environment in which we live and in which brands operate is very different from what it used to be, what we call the pre-Covid times. The overall situation today is unnerving, stressful and requires brands to act as companions and not just service providers. It’s even more important for brands to create ‘helpful content’.

Brands have the resources and potential to make a difference in the lives of consumers. If brands offer meaningful content, then it can help them strengthen their connections with consumers.

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Jana Colaco

Jana Colaco, Associate Creative Director at Blink Digital, said brands must use their reach now more than ever to encourage informed decision-making and also create that much-needed sense of being in this together. Not as a brand to consumers, but as human to human.

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Payal Shah Karwa

Payal Shah Karwa, Content Director, The Word Jockey, gave the example of Sirona Hygiene products and how it creates content around tips and facts about women’s menstrual health. Sirona creates content pieces like a period calendar or myth busters about PCOD in an engaging style. Giving another example of Colgate, she said the brand has created an informative website that helps people know more about dental hygiene, how smoking ruins one’s teeth and other useful facts.

She added, “If this content is coming from a global dental brand, they also come across as an authority in this domain. The world is moving towards people, not profits. And helpful content is the bridge that will connect brands with people.”

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Neena Dasgupta

Neena Dasgupta, CEO and Director at Zirca Digital Solutions, explained that helpful content is any content where the degree of relatability to the viewer takes precedent over the traditional branding-first approach. Giving examples of helpful content, Dasgupta said, “A home chef trying to learn a new cuisine will find food recipe videos helpful. A new parent living in a nuclear family would find parenting videos a godsend. That itself is the answer to ‘why should brands create helpful content’. Our minds better recall content if we can make associations with it.”

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Natasha Puri

Creating content that addresses your target audience's pain points is a great way for brands to get discovered and drive inbound traffic, added Natasha Puri, Content Marketing Lead, at Pepper Content. “The benefit is that instead of shoving a product in their face, the brand then wins the consumers’ trust, which eventually makes it more likely to convert them into customers.”

The challenges that await content marketers en route to ‘helpful content’ creation

Content marketers have to overcome several challenges to make a brand stand out as meaningful and helpful, and not as a brand doing small talks and making false promises.  

There is a Hindi saying, ‘Havan karne gaye aur hath jalaa diya’. Similarly, at a time when just about anything can be ‘misconstrued’ or ‘regulated’, any wrong step by brands can attract flak. Colaco of Blink Digital thinks one must find the right balance between what consumers need and what a brand can do for them. Giving an example, she said in the case of brands that are amplifying emergency needs on their stories, proper verification and filtering of sources need to be done.

With so much content already out there, the biggest challenge is creating original, high-quality content that can stand out. Puri of Pepper Content said, “This means creators have to dig deeper, extract information from their internal teams and real-life experiences to make the content truly helpful.”

Another challenge that Puri pointed out is defining the funnel and taking prospects through from this content stage over to the next — closer to conversion. “Helpful content is great for the top-of-the-funnel leads, but it is essential to have clear CTAs, follow-ups and communication to ensure your audience is simply just not downloading that e-book and exiting your funnel. A content follow-through must ensure they keep coming back till they eventually choose to convert into customers.”

According to Karwa of The Word Jockey, creating helpful content is only tough for the marketers who want overnight sales through content marketing. “To be helpful, one must think with the heart and not the head. Have the heart to put the consumers’ needs before the brand’s features. The brand already understands its consumers and their needs. All they have to do is think from the point of view of the consumer and not the brand.”

In order to create helpful content, brands must understand the consumers well. And not just their spending habits but also their social behaviour, personality, their family and social value systems and many more attributes, said Dasgupta of Zirca.

“Brands will have to do more in-depth studies and research to fully understand their consumers. In that vein, Zirca classifies consumers based on their personality types, life goals, and online behaviour, among other factors. That way, we can create customised content that caters to each subcategory, striking a deeper chord. Different consumers buy the same product for different reasons. The challenge is finding those reasons and addressing them through your content.” she said.

We already live in the age of uncertainty and cynicism and brand trust is at an all-time low worldwide. The crisis, political and social unrest has significantly impacted consumer behaviour and shifted their priorities.

Therefore, making promises that brands don’t tangibly deliver leads to a trust deficit and, even worse, accusations of a new form of ‘CSR washing’ — affecting a brand’s reputation to a level it can be hard to come back from, Havas’ Roy told BuzzInContent.

She said, “Gaining trust through transparency and communication is key and cannot be built overnight as consumers have become more sceptical and are more aware of the brand’s past and current actions. A brand's content strategy must ensure it connects more authentically with consumers, ensures that the communication goals align with the brand’s heritage and enable consumers to organically get more involved. Balancing purpose and profit is no mean feat for any organisation. However, it is more important than ever for brands to ‘Act now’ for the greater good of the society and planet by leveraging the power of content.” 

Does human-interest storytelling through content fall under the helpful content category?

Creating an emotional connection with the consumers is what every brand desires. Therefore, launching emotional and human-interest content is a sure-shot winning formula to strike the right chords of the consumers’ hearts. We see several brands creating human-interest and cause-driven content, which might give hope to the consumers but it isn’t practically helping them in their daily lifestyle during the Covid period. So, would we not call such content helpful? Does that mean human-interest content is not helpful?

Karwa said, “I dislike the trend of tear-jerking or preachy ‘viral’ videos where brands tend to be like Miss Goody Two-Shoes, or are trying hard to appeal to the human sob taps. There are only emotions and no emotional intelligence in this content. It’s a waste of good money as these videos have a limited shelf-life (barring Ogilvy’s Google video a few years back). However, content that actually guides, show, tell, educate, inform consumers to save their money, health, life are way more valuable.”

Having a different point of view, Dasgupta said it's not right to classify human-interest and cause-driven content as not helpful. “Even if the content is giving them hope and not practically helping them in their lifestyle, it is still helpful in another way. Especially during Covid times when hope, happiness, and our mental health have taken precedence over social media viral challenges, brands need to create content that relates to the consumers. Otherwise, what is the difference between ‘helpful content’ and an advertisement or a YouTube brand video? Human-interest content and helpful content aren’t mutually exclusive. Brands can also benefit by focusing on a consumer’s emotional needs instead of just material.”

According to Puri, there are different times in the customer lifecycle that human-interest storytelling helps to convert prospects. She doesn’t believe that it is an either/or situation. Helpful content plays a role in answering questions, whereas human-interest stories are powerful to form a connection. “They help each other and eventually have a collective impact on the prospect. As far as content creation in the time of Covid goes, these are exceptional times. Brands are coming together to help out the general populace and I believe that this will stay in the public memory forever as a goodwill gesture,” she said.

Roy believes building a better world starts at home. So brands should first focus on what is most authentic to them and create meaningful or helpful content accordingly.

According to Havas’ Meaningful Brands study, there is a higher expectation in the East for ‘personal’ and ‘collective’ benefits compared to the West, while the consumers in APAC seek to connect more on emotional, organisational and social benefits over individual gains compared to its western counterparts.

Karwa said that the best way is to have a mix of both — human interest stories along with helpful content woven into a great cocktail. She said, “For instance, a new version of ‘Share The Load’ campaign by Ariel would be apt here, keeping in mind the additional pressure women have during the Covid lockdown. They could have shared real stories of how husbands and other family members can contribute to household chores, and in the same video shared hacks on how to wash clothes easily even if you don’t have machines or a maid.”

Agarwal of Panasonic concluded, “Need of the hour is to think of innovative ways to engage with our stakeholders while staying relevant and adding value.”

Is your content ‘helpful' enough for consumers