By Urooj Husain, Client Services Director at Team Red Dot

Content marketing allows brands to drive strong cultural connections with their audience. It is a major step up from earlier times when a brand’s canvas was a 30 second spot. 5G has reframed our media consumption with personalized entertainment as information choices grow exponentially with on-demand access, solo viewing, and media on the go.

But as the love for content grows among consumers and marketers, so does the clutter. This clutter is so overwhelming that it is a challenge not only to get content noticed by consumers but also to ensure that there is brand recall with the noticed content. It is not an easy task in a world where everyone with a smartphone can qualify to be a content creator and every platform keeps changing algorithms to keep organic engagement of branded content to a bare minimum.

Creating impactful content has some thumb rules:

Be culturally relevant
Content if done right can add significantly to meaningful and distinctiveness scores for a brand. It delivers an emotional connect and not just vanilla reach or recall. That also means that for content to be engaging, it needs to be rooted in strong cultural insights or moments that make it extremely relevant and relatable.

Make it share-worthy
Media monies can buy reach and views, but garnering shares is one metric that only good content can deliver. People will only share content that they really connect with and hence marketers should use it as a true yardstick of success. Shared content is the digital equivalent of what qualified as word of mouth and there is enough data which indicates that it is the gold standard for driving brand influence.

Change is the only constant
First came videos and gifs and then came Filters, Stories, Vertical Formats, AR, VR, Tik Tok and much more. As content marketers, we need to really be able to adapt and experiment with new formats and platforms at the same speed as consumers. This need for early adoption is only going to get more critical as brands start focusing on Gen Z along with millennials.

At the end of the day, to win hearts as brands we need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and become what people are interested in.