Making and keeping the brand promise

Why does so much of the general buzz around content marketing seem to rely on it being the hero, with so-called ‘traditional’ advertising painted as the antiquated villain?

Our experience is that content marketing actually complements advertising very well, so we decided to explore this relationship between paid and owned media to provide our clients with some useful guidance.

Working  with YouGov, we surveyed members of the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), as well as a representative sample of 2,000 consumers. We now have a set of general principles around the role of paid media versus that of owned media, how and when consumers prefer to use different types of media, and how those preferences vary throughout the customer journey and across different sectors.

Establishing some context
Our consumer sample said they were generally pretty positive about advertising. They were warmer still about content  and conversations with brands – with 57 per cent definitely agreeing or tending  to agree that they felt more positive towards ‘brands that generate content  for people like me’.

And given this resonance of content marketing with people, our advertiser sample also demonstrated similar sentiments, with a whopping 60 per cent definitely agreeing with HSBC group head of marketing, Chris Clark’s assertion that: 'In the future, brands will be built by aligning themselves with engaging content, as well as the more traditional  advertising-led approach.'

Spend trends
Another contextual consideration for our research was how marketers are spending their ever-more  stretched  budgets. First, rumours of the demise of advertising have been widely exaggerated, with 40 per cent of our sample still spending 60 per cent or more of their budgets on traditional  paid
media and digital paid media now attracting an average 29 per cent of spend.
 
However, owned media now accounts for an average of 21 per cent of marketing spend – a figure equating to over £4 billion – covering magazines, email and blogs, content on websites, tablets and mobile, and editorial content in social media.

Not surprisingly, our sample also reported significant increases in those describing owned media as ‘extremely important’ and ‘very effective’, with spend across a diverse range of owned media channels also increasing.

So it’s fair to say that both paid and owned media have their place. The question, of course, is how one relates to the other.

The role of content
So what is content? More to the point, does it really matter? Rather than arguing about, for example, whether an ad is content, let’s focus on what they both achieve. As our client at Sainsbury’s, marketing director Sarah Warby, said at the launch event for our research: 'Our ads make a promise – to help you Live Well For Less. The role of content is to evidence that. And content is just stuff that people choose to spend time with. It’s got to be useful, entertaining or teach them something – preferably all three.'

Our consumer sample echoed this. For example, people watching branded video content (made for the web, not just uploaded TV ads) are looking for entertainment and information – around 30 per cent are looking for both, but they’re twice as likely to be seeking entertainment as they are information.
So it’s clear that delivering on a brand promise every day isn’t just about utility – the ‘how to’ and ‘where can I?’ content. Brands must remember  that attention is scarce, so they must entertain as well.

Build it and they may not come
Another feature of effective owned media is ensuring that the quality of the content is matched by intelligent distribution. Again using video as an example, advertisers rate quality of content and distribution as of almost equal importance, placing these two criteria well ahead of factors such as interactivity, duration and measurability.

Similarly, people told us they are just as likely to navigate to video content from paid, owned or earned media sources. So it’s clear that traditional advertising can be the gateway to a richer, longer-form narrative in owned media.

Paid and owned media throughout the customer journey
To further  define the relationship  between paid and owned media, we also explored their respective roles in different channels at various stages of the customer journey. To do this, we defined a basic four-stage journey and asked consumers which channels they preferred  along the way. We then split the responses by sector.

1. Awareness
As expected, a majority of people cite TV as their preferred means of being made aware of products and services. This ranges between 54 per cent for retail brands and a low of 25 per cent for travel, with the variation probably reflecting the frequency, demand and subject matter in each case. Owned media does score relatively highly for awareness in travel and finance. In the latter case, the importance of content-rich websites probably reflects the frequency with which we all access internet banking, so the opportunity for brands to engage people here is clear.

2. Find out more
TV still plays a huge role as consumers seek to learn more about products and services. This is particularly true in retail, with the weekly frequency of purchase, and also in finance and automotive, where conversely it may be the long decision-making process that requires TV’s reach to keep people engaged. But we also see the brand’s website becoming more popular, particularly in travel and telecoms, where it usurps TV at number one.

3. Compare, choose and purchase
Looking at the comparison and purchase stages side by side, we see consumer preference shift further towards owned media, with the brand’s own website relegating TV to second or third place across all sectors. The message here is very clear – when your customers are genuinely ready to buy, your website experience is critical to building brand preference.

4. Staying in touch
Post-purchase, the picture changes again, with email and direct mail coming to the fore in all sectors. Perhaps this is a useful reminder  that while unwanted sales messages are very easy for consumers to filter out, helpful or enter- taining content that provides genuine value is well received. Interestingly, social media does
not appear as a top-three answer here. Perhaps people engage with brands in social media in a more active sense – asking specific customer service questions or ‘entertainment snacking’, rather than being positively distracted by more promotional messages.

Practical considerations
From the perspective of marketing effectiveness, it’s clear that paid and owned media have a symbiotic relationship  and that their roles, balance and respective importance vary – not just from sector to sector but also at different stages within the customer journey.

But how can brands bring these two very different disciplines together to achieve the benefits of a joined-up approach? With advertising well established, the first question is about how to do great content too – as Warby has been widely quoted as saying:
'If brands don’t behave like publishers, they are going to be left behind.'

Sadly it’s not unusual to see similar sentiments expressed by other people (particularly in content agencies) as a rather vague rallying cry to ‘do some content’ without describing what’s required. So the following four steps are a practical guide to creating a publishing process that complements the promise made by
advertising. These aren’t intended to provide all the answers and the steps will certainly vary from brand to brand, but they have certainly worked for us.
 
Advertising is the headline, content  is the story. Sometimes the dial is turned one way or the other, but they’re certainly stronger together

1. Tell the brand’s story
Behaving like a publisher hinges on using editorial expertise to explain and support the brand promise, often telling a rich and nuanced story across a wide range of channels. This can be a challenge, as Sainsbury’s found: 'You know what you want to say, just say it everywhere. That’s easy to say, but it’s organisationally difficult.' For this reason, a content strategy (ideally owned by a single person) that achieves what we’d call a ‘single view of content’ should clearly address far-reaching  topics, such as organisational  design, process and governance, and bring stakeholders together  – often from beyond the marketing department. This framework enables the efficient creation of the range of content  required to deliver a consistent customer experience. As Warby warns: “An asset that can only be used in one medium isn’t an asset; everything has to be multi-purpose. Otherwise the customer is limited in how they access it, they’re cross and we’ve lost them.”

2. Be always-on
Being a publisher also requires a rigorous editorial approach to creating content that provides people with daily relevance and responsiveness, delivering on the promise made in advertising. 'We have to evidence our promise every day, so we have a massive amount of content because it’s not up to us what customers want to interact with. We give them a library and say ‘take out of it what you want’,' Warby says.

3. Optimise your content
Great content is useless if no-one sees it, so the optimal distribution of content is crucial. This requires a balance of technical and editorial know-how. Warby advises: 'Telling the story in different ways takes different talents, skills and effort – including technical optimisation, not just for tablet and mobile but also for little cards and big magazines, or things that are free and things people are willing to pay for.'
 
4. Find specialist agencies who can work in partnership
As long as the ability to do fantastic advertising and the skills required to create world-class editorial content exist under different roofs, adopting a complementary approach is about partnership. 'Content and advertising do different jobs: the difference between concise advertising lines and the expansive conversation you have in content has massive implications for how you run your business, as does the campaign versus ongoing approach,' says Warby. Advertising is the headline, content is the story. Sometimes the dial is turned one way or the other, but they’re certainly stronger together. Clear roles, shared briefings and more flexibility on the ‘lead’ discipline for any given task enable agencies to roll up their sleeves and collaborate.

The case for a converged approach
What have we learned from our research and these real-world perspectives from a brand reaping the rewards of a converged approach to paid and owned media? That far from the widely touted – and clearly biased – view that content marketing represents the ‘death of advertising’, in fact they play a highly complementary role.

Just as content can be more effective when further demand is created through paid media, it’s also true that the value of advertising can increase when it entices people to a deeper story told in owned media. When working to a single agenda, investment in one fuels return on investment in the other.

Budgets are stretched as never before and consumers’ ability to filter the messages they receive increases every day, so the value of genuine brand loyalty continues to grow. In that context, the value of content picking up the baton from advertising and delivering on the brand promise every day cannot be overstated.
The final word goes to Warby: 'Advertising and content are the most comfortable of bedfellows. They beautifully augment one another – drive some awareness, get some depth. Clearly, advertising has a huge part to play, but it’s content that drives advocacy – and that’s more valuable than straight transactional acquisition.'

Robin Bonn is business development director at Seven [email protected]. For more information on Seven’s research, visit http://sevensha.re/convergedmedia

Taken from the January 2014 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.