Wonder why your brilliant content ideas do not reach the conversion stage?

Imagine a situation in a content creation company ‘A’. One morning, the company’s branded content head gets a call from a brand ‘B’ to come up with 2-3 branded content solutions in a week. A’s 10-people team brainstorms and prepares a full-fledged presentation of at least five ideas for B. The branded content teams of A and B meet. The brand likes all five ideas and tells they would get back in a few days. The company A waits for a few days and does not hear back from B ever. Their ideation efforts go futile, fetching no business, and they feel demotivated.

Many may relate to this situation because it is a common phenomenon not just among agencies, platforms, creators and publishers but also brands. It’s not that only clients reject ideas of service providers. A lot of times, marketing teams of brands too come up with wonderful and unique ideas but only a few reach the conversion stage and come to a logical end.

One big reason for such a situation is that content creators reach out to brands with a plethora of ideas. This confuses the client and reduces the value of the ideas. It is important for a creator not to take forward only a few ideas that match the requirements of a brand.

Dheeraj Kummar

Dheeraj Kummar, Motivator, National Creative Director, Brand and Consumer Experience, Motivator (GroupM), explained, “We have the habit of providing multiple ideas. The buck stops there. Why are you going with multiple ideas? You can go with a couple of ideas. And the idea that is selected has to be driven away before a brief has come.”

No marketer would reject a brilliant content idea if it’s unique and driving the brand objective. But most of the times, brands tend to ignore random content ideas that do not exactly match their requirements. No brand will send a brief if it’s not required.

Khushboo Benani

Khushboo Benani, Content, Influencer Marketing and Brand Advocacy Head at Diageo India, said, “I would be amazed if people reject brilliant ideas. Sometimes what happens is that the ideas are not servicing the brief and that is why they are rejected. The brief comes only when a brand is really interested in creating a brilliant piece of content. It is the combination of the brief and the idea given in response to that brief.”

Another way to curb this problem is that brands should keep aside a specific budget for content marketing in their annual plans. As and when required, one can create a content campaign to drive the marketing objectives at that point in time. Without a proper framework for the content marketing plan, it is taken lightly.

Kummar said, “I tell clients that you put aside a content budget in your annual plans. In that budget, you give me a content-specific brief. You know when you have to do that content piece in a year. For example, if a client has parked money for four special occasions when they want to drive a certain point of view through content marketing. Like this, once the context is set right in the beginning, then there are chances that your ideas will be used.”

The content idea must align with the brand’s requirements. No matter how amazing the content idea is and relates to the brand, if the objective of the brand at that point in time differs from what that particular content piece will fetch, then it makes no sense.

Shamik Ghosh

Shamik Ghosh, Head, Content and Communications, Paisa Bazaar, said, “If the brand’s objective is to generate leads through a content piece, and the agency comes up with a long-format video that has the potential to go viral but not generate sales leads, then even that potential viral content idea is not useful for the brand.”

Giving an example of Paisa Bazaar’s viral content piece ‘The Wedding Speech’, Ghosh explained that the video was a brand-building exercise. Assume what would have happened if my objective was to get leads and still I went with the ‘wedding speech’ video. In such a scenario, the idea goes nowhere. Sometimes, brand teams are not clear. They get swayed away by the virality factor. It does not work like that.”

Rajasekar KS, GM at Matrimony.com, added, “From a brand’s point of view, ideas are plenty, ideas that integrate a brand’s proposition well into the story are not many. So clearly, there’s no dearth of ideas. It’s the fitment that challenges agencies and brands. Whether it’s an ad, film or digital video series, brands look to solve a challenge for the key characters in the story. If that happens, then there’s a perfect fit. We listen to a lot of stories from video makers all the time, some of them are good and, if made, the audience will like it but if the story doesn’t fit the brand or we can’t perfectly weave our brand into the story, we don’t invest. We don’t want to just plug our Ad into the story, that’s an interruption for the audience."

Everyone has understood the importance of content marketing but it still does not get due importance in the marketing plans of brands. Traditional advertising still holds the strongest position in India, because of which content marketing at times becomes secondary. Even among agencies, which help brands strategise marketing plans, content is mostly kept in the amplification plan for the larger mainline ad campaign and not as a priority in the communication.

Smita Murarka

Smita Murarka, Chief Marketing Officer, Duroflex India, said, “It has lot to do with aligning the chemistry between agency, brand and platform. It is easy to come up with creative concepts. But when you start executing it, you start realising that it probably does not fall into your area of priorities as a brand.”

Therefore, it is essential for all the parties involved in the making of a brand—the agency, brand and platform —to think in alignment about content marketing for content ideas to fructify.