According to research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute in 2018, branded content campaigns produce a brand recall that is 59% more than that of a standard display ad campaign. However, most companies' marketing teams provide low priority to developing a branded content strategy due to a lack of understanding and resources.

Companies should have a defined system with strict guidelines for generating branded content using a five-to-one promotion-to-creation expenditure ratio and a generative engine-optimized workflow to develop branded content effectively.

This article provides resource modeling, matrixes for determining the correct format for branded media assets, and formulas for measuring the success of branded media assets in delivering measurable, enterprise value.

Branded Media Assets: How a Branded Content Strategy Works

Branded media assets have the potential to fail because many brands are trying to "interrupt" their target audience or "earn" their attention. Companies should move from focusing on communicating sales messages to creating high-value narratives without sales messaging.

You cannot have a successful branded media asset without knowing how to measure the effectiveness of the branded media asset. There are many examples in the market of businesses with branded media assets that are generating a tremendous amount of revenue and not getting a return on their investment.

The industry continues to grow on an annual basis; 55% of all brand studios have recently achieved their revenue objectives. The average increase in the branding industry from year to year is 18%, and 88% of brand studios expect to see more growth next year than last year. This is all due to the success of the branded content strategy if executed correctly.

To achieve success requires a shift in thinking regarding how your team(s) measure success.

Move away from simply measuring views and move toward measurable business metrics. The standard metrics for measuring success are an 81% aided recall and a 10% lift in overall brand awareness.

Emotional-based branded campaigns produce brand effects almost twice the effects of rationally-based, feature-focused branding campaigns. Research by Binet and Field demonstrates the importance of emotional storytelling principles for both a B2B software company and a consumer brand.

Generative AI now plays a critical role in these marketing strategies.

Currently, over 40% of brands are heavily investing in AI systems for content creation and atomisation. Companies investing in AI are saving 1+ hour per creative task on average; approximately 68% of these companies are also reporting increased ROI as a result of their use of AI.

However, to utilise the technology to grow your brand through deploying 'junk' will only damage your position in the market.

Human, authentic storytelling will always be the primary driver of trust. 83% of consumers trust user-generated content (UGC) over traditional advertising. Micro-influencers convert 22x higher than celebrity accounts. Therefore, brands' focus should be on combining the power of AI with the raw and unrefined truth that human storytelling delivers.

Aligning Your Production Capacity With the Current Environment

Before selecting content formats that you plan to develop, you must audit your internal resources. Many brands are planning to develop weekly documentary series without the internal budget, crew, and time required to do so, which results in a significant amount of operational drag.

Auditing Your Internal Capabilities

Take a look at your specific team. Do you have dedicated editors, writers, and camera operators on staff? If the answer is 'No', you will be reliant on external agencies and/or independent creators to develop your content; this will limit the frequency of your output.

If you are a founder of a brand and do not have access to a large production budget, you will need to implement a low-fidelity, reactive content production system. You can accomplish this by using mobile phones and quick editing tools, but if you want to produce high-gloss videos, you will need to incorporate lighting, sound mixing, colour correction, and comprehensive post-production.

To produce a weekly podcast you will need to hire a producer, sound engineer, and dedicated host. When operating with a small team, it’s crucial to refine your focus on just one type of content, ideally the one you’re most successful at producing.

Your Distribution Budget is King

Remember that the creation process accounts for 20% of the overall project, while 80% is dedicated to promoting it once created.

You should hold yourself accountable to a strict 5-to-1 ratio for your distribution budget. For every $10,000 spent on creating a series of videos, a minimum of $50,000 should be allocated to driving the series into the marketplace. Without a distribution budget, your excellent creative work will never see the light of day.

Major insurance companies like Hartford understand this and thus do not simply write articles; they also invest a significant amount of resources into paid promotion to ensure their articles rank highly in search engines and end up in targeted social feeds. Typical line items include paid boosts, creator engagement and targeted newsletter sponsorships.

Don’t ever sign off on a creative brief that lacks a comprehensive distribution plan with all required funds allocated for distribution. If funds are limited, cut the production costs. Reduce the camera quality, reduce the number of locations, and place the savings back into paid promotion.

Selecting a Format for Your Branded Content Strategy

When choosing formats, you cannot base your decision on what you enjoy watching; you must pick formats based on your goals for the business, where your audience is at, and what available resources you have. This provides an opportunity for you to interview your target customer, develop your relationship, and capture hours of recorded content.

You should not depend on audio recordings alone; you must create video recordings of the podcast. The video component will enable you to create small, punchy video clips for social media. Establish a multi-camera recording studio and use dramatic yet professional lighting, and focus on achieving high-quality audio. Shot angles may be forgiven if they are poorly taken, but if the audio quality is bad, your listeners will drop off.

The design of your production shoots must support a dominant short-form video strategy. Short-form video content is the fastest-growing type of video across all industries today.

You need to make your production shoots vertical-first in terms of format. Although horizontal video serves a protective role for long-form video platforms such as YouTube, vertical video on mobile screens is by far the most significant source of brand discovery for the modern world. You can’t shoot horizontally and crop it later, as the final product will not be framed correctly. For every shoot, you must frame your subject in vertical aspects for the very first shot taken.

Brands that focus solely on short-form video content on platforms such as TikTok can expect to experience massive increases in view counts. Numerous studies and case studies have been published that show increased video views increasing from 1,000 views to over 20,000 views due in large part to the adoption of platform-related editing styles.

Engagement rates for videos on these platforms can also increase from less than 1% to more than 4%. There is a requirement for storytelling that is actually imperfect. Overly polished corporate videos fail on short-form video platforms. The delivery must be raw and authentic.

Interactive Utilities for Data Collection

Written content has not lost its value; however, the traditional blog post continues to lose momentum to the rise of interactive content.

Quizzes, calculators, and assessment tools provide instant value to users while simultaneously capturing valuable first-party data for brands. As you develop content to target buyers in the mid-funnel, consider designing a tool (calculator) to demonstrate potential revenue loss for potential clients as a result of not purchasing your product or service.

Design a compelling branded content strategy that can create an immense number of shares, will generate an exceptional amount of time spent on the page, and will be an important fundamental link for your brand's sales funnel.

Executing B2B Content Workflows

When executing workflows or processes for B2B content products, you have to put in place strict governance models and adherence to the appropriate workflows, which are often not included in generic workflow resources.

Conducting Audience Research

Conduct audience research through the use of search intent data, social listening feeds, and interviews with your potential customers for three to five days. When conducting audience research, the findings should reflect emotional triggers and not only demographic data.

For example, a 25-year-old manager in London has a different set of emotional triggers and pain points than a 50-year-old B2B executive in New York, regardless of the fact that the 25-year-old manager and the 50-year-old B2B executive are purchasing the same product.

The 71% of younger buyers that feel overwhelmed by marketing are 2x more likely to stay loyal to a brand that connects with their individual humour and daily challenges. Create a map of these emotional triggers prior to writing any content, so that you can accurately reflect your brand in your messaging.

Conceptualising and Scripting

Spend two to three days creating your core concept and writing your script. The narrative you create needs to be grounded in your brand’s story. A narrative is much more powerful than a catchy slogan. Brands like Don't Panic London have built complete creative frameworks based on the extraction of their brand’s essence and subsequently creating compelling narratives.

When creating a documentary, create a detailed shot list. When creating a podcast, create a concise, compact briefing file for the on-air talent/host.

Do not proceed into production until you have developed a strict production plan. It will also inform your concept and how you will develop the concept across all the different platforms you will create content. You need to know what your TikTok clips will look like before creating your main YouTube video.

Active Production Phase

Allot one to two weeks for active production.

During this time, the selection matrix will determine the workflow, or the entire production process. If you are planning to create a vertical-first video series, you will need to hire editors that are familiar with social pacing, movement within the first three seconds of the video, bold text that overlays the video, and fast cuts.

If your area of focus is writing an industry-sized report, your data processing, copywriting, graphic design, etc. will take place during this time as well. It’s a good idea to keep your team as small and focused as possible. If you have too many opinions, you will be diluting the final product and losing the original concept.

Quality Control and Legal Review

B2B brands have long sales cycles, which translate into a lot of rules and regulations to comply with.

In your timeline, build in two to three days specifically for the legal review and to ensure the content meets the safety standards of your brand. You should not be in a hurry to get this done. If your content includes any financial data, health-related claim data, or secure software, the legal team must give their stamp of approval.

Additionally, you should build a timeline that limits the review process and the number of revisions. It is reasonable to give your stakeholders one chance to review the rough cut. If they miss that opportunity, your content moves forward in the process without their input. Production stops dead when the marketing and compliance teams have no service agreement.

Create and Amplify Content

The time it takes to distribute stage five is between two and four weeks.

Take your largest asset and break down all the pieces of it. For example, a video podcast can be broken down into three short videos, an email newsletter, two pieces of text-based content for social media, and an audio podcast. This is called the atomisation process.

Once you've created your atomisation pieces, you can use your five-to-one amplification budget. This means that you will run paid ads for the short video clips with the most engagement. You can send the email newsletter to your audience that you own. You can send long-form video to your industry micro-influencers. The Content Marketing Institute and StoryChief often state that atomisation is the best way to execute your branded content strategy across multiple broken-up spaces.

Zero-Click Search

The manner in which search is being done has changed, and this will not be reverted to how it was being done before. You can no longer expect to have someone click on a hyperlink and navigate to your website.

Structuring Content for Zero-Click Searches

Generative engine optimisation is now the standard.

The internet is now being scraped by AI chatbots and social search engines for information and providing direct responses to those searching. If a buyer searches an AI resource regarding which software is best for their team, they will not have a link to your blog with information on the best software; instead, they will receive an answer generated from your blog through the AI interface.

Your article will have to be structured and written in this manner. You will have to use questions and answers in your articles, and your entity clarity must be perfect.

Using Actual Products, Real People, and True Metrics

IO Digital emphasizes how badly the performance of strategies which fail to acknowledge the importance of social search will lag in both discoverability and retention. Your content should provide so much unique information that AIs will have no choice but to cite you as the source.

Using GenAI to Automate and Scale Operations

Utilize GenAI to perform the heavy lifting associated with atomisation.

Upload your podcast transcripts into an AI service and request five different newsletter subject lines. Leverage AI technology to remove long delays in your audio. Use AI to translate your hero article into three additional languages.

According to Gauley, 75% of buyers would be more inclined to engage with personalized material or contacts. Furthermore, 48% of businesses who excel in the area of personalisation exceed their revenue objectives. Generative AI has enabled marketers to deliver content at scale using personalisation; marketers can provide different introductions for the same article based solely on the reader's industry.

However, it is important to note that while Generative AI can assist in scaling, it cannot substitute for human creativity. Therefore, a marketer must keep human-driven storytelling at the heart of their asset.

Quantifying Performance and Baseline Benchmarks

“Measuring what matters” is a horrible philosophy if you do not know what is actually important. Vague measurements lead to burned budgets. You need a specific set of performance metrics, including Google Analytics, social insights, SEO rankings, and independent measurement tools.

Identifying the Metrics to Set as Targets

As a general rule, start-up companies should measure their success based on how many people recall seeing their product/service, sentiment for the brand, and share of search.

You should set a baseline for measuring the success of your campaign. A successful campaign should have a 50% average view-rate on platforms like YouTube and aim for a 37% video completion rate. Pay close attention to your comments. Aim to achieve a positive lift of around 7% in sentiment.

The Greenpeace/LEGO partnership generated approximately 8 million organic views in a 48-hour period and was responsible for generating over 1 million signatures on a petition, resulting in termination of the corporate partner agreement within a matter of months. That is an example of powerful, targeted engagement. While viewership may be high, the low 10% percentage of completion proves the hook is effective, yet the core content must still resonate.

Evaluating the Strategic Impact of Your Pipeline

The impact of mature brands on their pipeline of procurement and retention.

Did the people who watched the podcast end up signing a software contract? Creating tracking links and utilising multi-touch attribution models for comparison, and sending brand uplift surveys through your email subscribers, will test the aided recall of your brand. Leading platforms like Contently argue that tracking by the stage of the customer lifecycle is critical.

To prove that the branded content strategy is resulting in lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) is to use revenue generated from the branded content to reduce the costs of producing costly advertisement buys. If a business is able to stabilise community-driven storytelling versus highly expensive performance marketing, the data collected should indicate that the stabilised organic fan base generates lower cost and better qualified leads into the sales team.

The Final Return on Your Branded Content Strategy

The result of your branded content strategy is influenced by the distribution budget allocated to push the content into the marketplace. Would you be willing to reduce your overall production volume by 80% to ensure your best content is effectively delivered to your target audience?