Why You Must Rethink Content Production as Brand Storytelling

Many businesses who commission our social media marketing services give us a folder of images and if we are lucky, a handful of videos to post on their platforms. A few clients (less than 10%) also have blog posts that we can share on their website. Our best clients understand that producing new content of their experiences on-the-fly massively helps our work. Sadly all too often, clients give us much less material than that with which to work. The harsh reality is that a business cannot just create content for social media as a one-off activity and expect that it will be sufficient forever. When you consider that we publish two a day, three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) for most clients, we require every client to provide content on an ongoing basis. Even though we source half of the content ourselves in the form of industry news articles, tips, quotes and video, our clients appear astonished by how much content a business requires for a consistent and engaging social media presence. New material provides essential benefits for your business, and when you stop producing it, it says something awful about your business to your community, potential clients and existing clients.

 

The biggest issue we find is that when you tell clients you require them to produce content, many look at us like we just asked them to find an extra 10 hours a week to give us things to post. Indeed, continually producing content is one of the significant challenges a business faces today because you always need to feed the beast.

 

I certainly understand the burden that content creation puts on clients. I am on a mission to reframe people’s concept of content-creation as brand storytelling because that is the primary reason we produce content in the first place. Moreover, telling the story of your business does not mean doing anything in addition to what you already do. You simply have to make an effort to capture moments from your business activities in the form of pictures and videos and advice that you can share.

 

In the first section of this post, you will see that not sharing content is rarely an option for serious businesses that want to engage their community.

 

Damage of stopping creating new content

Without new content, your company looks dated and looks as if you no longer exist. At best, your followers and potential clients will rightly believe that you have lost the plot, gone out of business, or have not evolved.

The last thing you want is for potential clients to believe that your business has stagnated, that there is nothing new going on in your business and effectively, your brand’s story stalls or ends with your tired old content.

 

A common strategy to not creating new content is to re-post things that you have previously shared. As a marketing agency, there is nothing more simple than re-posting old content. After all, we don’t have to expend any time at all in creating new images and working up new narratives. However, re-posting tired material bores us and takes the fun out of social media marketing altogether. If we are bored by putting content on your social platforms, you can be sure that your followers and fans will be equally sick of seeing the posts, and you will stop engaging your followers.

It should come as no surprise that people will be less likely to get excited about something they have seen previously, even if they got excited the first time around. It follows that the more you post stale old content, the less engagement you are going to get.

A dull social media presence is one thing. Having a website on which people and search engines have seen everything means there is nothing new to make you more visible on search results. After all your resources do not answer any further questions or queries.

 

Why producing content matters

I am always shocked by the fact that businesses do not appreciate the importance of producing a wide range of content for their marketing. One likely reason for this oversight is the fact that few realise the benefits that you can get from generating content. Let me make a case for ongoing content production.

• Content Marketing will build your brand more than any other forms of marketing. And yes, creating content demands some effort and resources.
• Content comes in many forms, many of which are great to share on your social media profiles and pages – think of quotes, blogs, videos, images, tips, audio, visuals and many more. Producing content is simply a matter of deciding which type of material you want to focus on to enhance your online presence.
• Producing great content enhances your personal and professional credibility in ways that affect your revenue. Simply put, if you educate, entertain or inspire your followers, they are going to see you as having more credibility, and they will be inclined to engage with you.
• Content is the best way to engage your followers and build new followers because you are giving them interesting information.
• People love to receive value from businesses. Value can be in the form of information, resources, offers, humour, insights and inspiration that help them to solve a problem or improves their lives. When you help people to feel something (feeling better, happier, more understood or more informed), they become more interested in your business. More engaged followers are likely to share your content to their network, become clients and promote your brand.
• Content is the ideal platform for long-term engagement. Content, whether in the form of social media posts or blog posts on your website, facilitates regular communication with your customer base. You can gradually build up a bond with the reader, increasing their trust in your brand and making your product or service their first choice.
• Creating new content on social networks or website helps your SEO because Google and other search engines give you visibility in more places. Consequently, your business is more likely to show up in relevant search results. New blog posts, for example, provide Google with a reason to come back and crawl your website. With more indexing search engines pick up more things for which to show your business for relevant searches. Taking your content and turning it into new forms for consumption will allow you to increase the reach of each piece you create. For example, can you turn that blog post into a podcast, YouTube video, a dozen Tweets and an Instagram Story? In 2020, there will be less content production and more distribution.

When marketers appreciate the varied benefits that producing content brings, including to the all-important revenue, it is virtually impossible to ignore the need to create exciting content. Recognising the benefits of content marketing does not free businesses from seeing the process of creating it as yet another task that companies must somehow add to their already busy schedule.

I firmly believe that reframing how you think about producing will lessen the burden. I have seen from experience that clients who manage to see the task as telling the story of their business invariable give us more new materials to post on their blog and social media platforms. Let’s examine viewing content creation as telling the story of your business.

So what is brand storytelling?

Telling the story of your business invariably involves an ongoing obligation to create images, videos and more that speak to your followers, potential clients and the likes of Uncle Google. It is much easier to focus on capturing and sharing the day-to-day experiences of your company than thinking about creating content. Ultimately, your followers and visitors want to see the reality (warts n all) of doing business with you. Furthermore, taking a brand storytelling approach gives every company the tools to ensure you will never run dry when it comes to having engaging material to tell your brand’s story. Here is the vision and trend in brand storytelling towards ‘real’ stories.

Your brand story is the thread that ties you to your target clients and followers. Like any captivating tale, it strikes a chord with readers when they hear echoes of themselves in the adventure. It’s the era of brand authenticity. As Val Razo tells us, modern customers look for a genuine brand with real people behind it. Thus, brand storytelling helps to create an emotional bond with your network, humanise your brand, build brand authenticity, hold customers’ attention, and influence consumer behaviour.

Deep Patel makes the point about the growing need to be authentic when he wrote about Tik Tok’s increasing popularity. He says that it is based on the fact that “TikTok is the antithesis of your mother’s Instagram account because it shuns the overly curated and filtered view of life Instagram has become known for”. In other words, telling your story should showcase your business’s personality, people and experiences instead of hiding behind glossy, staged content.

In the final section of this post, discover simple strategies that any business can use to tell your brand’s story and keep your business fresh and relevant online.

Strategies to tell your brand’s story

1. Questions are the answers

To use this new perspective to your advantage, resist the urge that many businesses seem to have when they produce blog posts. Instead, make a record of questions that your clients bring to you. After all, you will have taken the time to consider the issues, and then given a considered response to each enquiry. Writing down the question (s), your answer and the evidence supporting your point of view makes the most engaging blogs that you can be sure other people will want to read because they have similar questions/issues. Of course, you will benefit from checking the content for typos and grammatical errors as you will want to make a great impression with everything that you publish online.

 2. Let the people speak

Content is about telling the story of your brand. It is your chance to show your values, personality, people and evolution. Ultimately, people do business with people they know like and trust, and content is a great way to fast-track the processes of getting to know like and trust your brand. Keeping your content fresh shows hat you are still active and the exciting things in which you are participating.

You as a key figure in your organisation can create photos and videos of people you meet, interactions with customers, events that you attend such as networking get-together and initiatives your business is doing or planning to do.

Employee-generated content can include videos, images or blog posts, which could show the company’s ethos and the benefits of the product or services.

User-generated content (think customer reviews, customers talking about your products and working what it is like with your business) provide genuine evidence that it may be worth trying your brand.

 

3. Showcase your network

Content is a way to acknowledge your valued stakeholders. You can showcase partners, suppliers and clients. When you bring others up, you show that you are connected and also promote their business to a broader audience. Encouraging user-generated content as I recommend, perhaps using an incentive to get the process started and build momentum is a sure winner for every business.

Creating content gives you personal and organisational credibility. Helping people by offering your expertise to solve problems raises your status as an expert and the go-to-people for various issues.

 

4. Show your learning

Businesses rarely write about the importance of showing and sharing your knowledge and things that influence your thinking and business practices. Many enterprises wrongly assume that they can only share organic content that they have produced about their work. The truth is that you, your team and your network will continuously be reading interesting articles and engaging posts that other company’s share on their social media pages and their blogs. You want to share the fantastic articles, videos and quotes from which you benefit or that you enjoy. Often your network (partners, clients, suppliers and associates) have great content. Otherwise, there are content platforms like Medium and Linkedin from which you can easily find great content

 

Bringing it all together

Creating content should not be a chore for any business. Brand storytelling is much less taxing and will quickly become part of your day when you view the process as telling the real story of your business by sharing authentic moments through your days and weeks. Deep Patel, whom I referenced earlier in this post, makes the point beautifully when he says: “users are more sceptical than ever. They want to hear insights from real people before they pull out a credit card and close the sale. The need to show the human side is where user-generated content and employee-generated content are critical, with the key being that these must be genuine. So grab your smartphone or encourage your team and clients to use their smartphone to make videos and take photos of your business products and services. Taking this action will give you more than enough content to come across as the genuine people your business that exists to work with to address their needs. Even if you struggle to create a treasure-trove of amazing organic content, take the first steps and share moments from your days at work. You will be surprised to find out how many people just need to hear what you have to say to them.

 

*********************************************************************************************************************

Contact Us