5 Tips on How to Make Branded Content

Table of Contents

• How To Make Branded Content: 5 Ways To Craft Effective Branded Content
• Measuring and Improving Content Engagement 
• Key Takeaways
• Conclusion
• FAQs

Markets are becoming increasingly saturated, making it difficult for brands to carve a niche for themselves. While content creation is a great way to reach out to the right audience, how does a brand set itself apart where every other business creates and shares content?

It’s all about storytelling. The best marketers understand this and use branded content to tell their stories. 

But what is branded content, and how to make branded content speak for itself?

Well, a piece of branded content doesn’t promote products or services; it promotes the brand’s values. It communicates the brand’s values through an embedded story and elicits an emotional response from the audience. It can be a blog post, a YouTube video, an image/infographic, or a news article. Regardless of the format, a well-crafted piece of branded content can build brand awareness, boost brand loyalty, and create a lasting impression on your audience.

How To Create Branded Content: 5 Ways To Craft Effective Branded Content

1. Ask questions

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What is your most important goal when you create branded content? Customer engagement!

Your posts receive better exposure with improved engagement. And with increased exposure, the chances of your followers visiting your site and turning into your loyal customers increase exponentially. Apparently, it’s a simple formula at work—you create branded content that’s engaging and share-worthy, and conversions follow.

But then it’s easier said than done. Creating engaging content that will spark conversations around your brand is not easy. Why? Because your audience is constantly exposed to promotional content and also probably has “ad fatigue.” So, it’s not easy to engage them, let alone impress them. Also, search engine and social media algorithms have evolved so much over time that no one can take a shortcut to success. All this has made it necessary to do something different with your branded content. One highly effective way to pique the audience’s interest is by asking engaging questions through your content. 

Questions make people think critically and take action (answer). This explains why contests and quizzes are often interesting.

Asking people relevant questions through your content is a great way to foster a dialogue between your audience and your brand. It doesn’t matter if your post is a blog or a video; you can include relevant questions to encourage the readers to pause and reflect. This will undoubtedly increase your content’s appeal and boost customer engagement.

2. Tell stories

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According to content experts, branded content creation should involve storytelling.

Content that tells a story can grab attention, engage the audience, and make them feel emotionally connected to the narrative.

Storytelling, the art of crafting an engaging narrative, takes the audience on a journey. It does so by sharing interesting facts and describing actions and characters. Traditional storytelling is something we all know from books and movies. But as mentioned above, storytelling is not just for fiction. Brands can also make use of storytelling for specific purposes.

When branded content tells stories, it humanizes the brand, builds connections with new audiences, and strengthens existing relationships.

Stories are as old as the human race, and people simply love stories. With a great narrative woven into your branded content, you can both influence and inspire. When strategies like storytelling are incorporated into branded content creation, it results in share-worthy content.

3. Know what your audience wants

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Empathy for consumers is one of the most valuable skills you can have as a content creator/marketer. Effective branded content creation is all about understanding your audience and their needs. Audience research is also vital because it’s impossible to cater to your audience’s needs without first understanding them.

Draw audience personas to visualize and understand your audience better. Finding out about relevant industry problems through niche keyword research will help you build better products and create more impactful branded content. Try to answer your audience’s questions. But before that, study the purpose behind the questions.

Create branded content as if you are having a conversation with your audience, and use a consistent brand voice across all the content pieces. To boost the value of every piece of content in your library, link it to other relevant content. Don’t forget to support them with stats, visuals, and expert quotes when making arguments.

If you are creating written branded content, make sure it is SEO-friendly. And no, SEO writing doesn’t mean stuffing your content with keywords. It’s about creating user-friendly, insightful content that your audience can immensely benefit from. No matter what you do to make your branded content stand out, make sure you do it keeping your target audience in mind.

4. Surround yourself with inspiration

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Too many people wonder how to create branded content that will cause a stir around their brand. Well, it needs patience, creativity, research, and powerful visualization. But then creating such effective branded content is not a one-off job; creators need to keep producing fresh content to keep the audience’s interest piqued. 

And for that, they need inspiration—even the best content creators and marketers can not conjure stellar content out of thin air. Give yourself the right environment to feel inspired and create great branded content. Here is what you can do:

• Stay up to date with industry news and developments.
• Make a list of top-performing content assets like blogs and videos channels.
• Follow the most influential thought-leaders in your niche.
• Keep an eye on what viral videos are being shared and why.
• Listen to podcasts when you are on the go.
• Bookmark all your favorite branded content using bookmarking tools.
• Make notes of what you enjoy reading or watching and how you can enhance your content.
• Do some research before you create branded content. Content research should be an integral part of your writing. With daily research, you will never run out of content ideas.

5. Make your content soulful.

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Even though you know how to create branded content, you might not be able to capitalize on it as a content marketing tool if you don’t focus on quality. There is simply no end to arguments surrounding “quantity vs quality.” However, it is impossible to replace quality with quantity with so much online content available. Creating impactful branded content is all about eliciting emotions.

• What would I like my audience to feel after they consume my content?
• Does my content have the potential to inspire people?
• What aspect of my content will make people want to share it?
• Will my content appeal to people who have never heard of my brand before?

You should ask yourself questions like these to create soulful content. Your aim should be to create content that resonates with your audience and makes them return for more.

Measuring and Improving Content Engagement

You have done your research thoroughly, chosen the right tone and style for your content, and put your heart into it. Now, the next step would be to see how it performs after being put out in front of your audience. But then you won’t be able to evaluate your content’s performance if you don’t know the metrics that measure success for branded content. Don’t worry, here’s some help. We have listed below some of the most important parameters to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of your branded content. Check them out.

• Comments: Check all the comments on your blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media updates. The higher the number of comments, the better. But then don’t forget to check the quality of the comments and the underlying sentiments.

• Likes and shares: Tracking the likes and shares your content has received is a great way to measure your content’s engagement level.

• Unique page visitors: This metric is most relevant to websites. Log in to Google Analytics to see the reach of your blog posts or infographics.

• Average time on page: Google Analytics shows you how much time users spend on your content pieces. More time spent implies better engagement.

• Conversion rate: Most content contains a call to action (CTA), such as signing up for a newsletter or a free trial. Having a higher conversion rate signifies that your content is serving its purpose right.

With these metrics, you will be able to review all your published content. You can then create a list of your most engaging pieces to analyze what factors led to their success.

Key Takeaways

• Branded content doesn’t promote products or services; it promotes the brand’s values.
• Marketers use branded content to tell their stories.
• A well-crafted piece of branded content can build brand awareness, boost brand loyalty, and create a lasting impression on your audience.
• The best tips on creating branded content include asking questions, leveraging storytelling, proper audience research, making the content soulful, and the like.
• Some parameters to measure branded content’s success are conversion rate, average time on page, unique page visitors, shares, likes, and comments.

Conclusion

The article offers an insight into how to make branded content stand out. And you now know that effective branded content writing involves great storytelling. While a compelling story can be enough to draw interest towards your brand, it is not enough to make it more discoverable. You need insightful content that fearlessly talks about real problems in society. With the right branded content, you can highlight your company’s message, values, and story for all to see. 

FAQs