Table of contents
If your brand or products cater to women, it might be time to dive into content marketing. A recent survey by Influenster found that 87 percent of women (across Generations X, Y, and Z) have a positive view of branded content.
Of course, not just any content will do. In a survey of 13,000 women in the U.S., they all agreed that they enjoyed branded content when it was authentic, entertaining, and told a story.
The place they most like to find this content: social media. Of course, the social networks these women gravitated toward differed by age group.
Facebook ranked highest for Gen Xers at 79 percent, followed closely by Instagram at 76 percent and YouTube at 47 percent. Gen Y (millennials) was partial to Instagram at 88 percent, followed by Facebook (69 percent) and YouTube (57 percent). Instagram was also favored by Gen Z at 87 percent, along with YouTube at 71 percent and Snapchat at 62 percent.
(Snapchat ranked highly only among the youngest generation, an indication that the social media outlet has some potential growth opportunities.)
After social, these women liked to find branded content on brand websites and blogs, print publications, TV, and email.
How to get started with brand content
Before you start producing content, you need to figure out a few things:
Who is the target?
Defining your target helps you determine how to best disseminate the information. For example, if you want to reach out to Gen X customers, your top three outlets for this information should be first Facebook, and then your brand’s website/blog, followed by email.
What kind of content do they like?
Social media is also a great tool to get to know your audience. What other brands do they follow? What kinds of content do those brands publish? What formats (video, articles, images) do they share? When you get a better sense of your audience’s interests, it helps you determine the type of content that they will respond to.
How will they consume the content?
You should also consider how your audience is getting your message. The survey found that more than 90 percent of all respondents spent the most time interacting with branded content on their smartphones, so you should ensure that content is optimized for mobile if you’re using digital channels.
Who is communicating the message?
Respondents overwhelmingly said they were more likely to purchase from a brand that produced its own content. That makes the case for communicating directly with your customers. Again, authenticity is paramount to these consumers, and they said they trusted brands slightly more than influencers.
Influencers can be very effective, particularly micro-influencers who have niche audiences that trust them as a source of recommendations and knowledge.
What is the message?
Producing branded content is an opportunity to directly engage with customers without your message being diluted or miscommunicated by another party. So make sure you have a clear message is that you can communicate in a simple way. Remember, you want to create content that entertains, informs, and delights your audience while staying true to your brand.
Need some help getting started? Here are four super-easy content marketing ideas.
