Branded Content Definition: 3 Content Marketing Examples

Branded content is a marketing tool you can use to tell the story of your company.

What Constitutes Branded Content?

Branded content serves as a marketing strategy geared towards enhancing brand recognition for a product or service. Such campaigns may involve partnerships or paid collaborations with influencers, celebrities, or other businesses, with the crucial requirement that potential customers can readily associate the content with the sponsoring brand.

Business associates may disseminate branded content by narrating the brand's story or conveying its values to a specific audience. Unlike conventional advertising approaches, a branded content marketing campaign often focuses on selling an idea or emotion rather than the product itself. Depending on various factors, this approach can prove more effective in fostering brand loyalty. Branded content comes in diverse formats, encompassing social media posts, podcasts, short films, blog entries, artistic works, and various other creative endeavors.

How Branded Content Operates

A branded content marketing strategy establishes a rapport and ongoing conversation with your customer base through the art of storytelling. For instance, company-branded podcasts and social media posts foster connections and discussions between businesses and their audience or potential customers. When individuals engage with a brand's content pieces or community, their likelihood of purchasing the brand's products or services increases.

To gain a clearer grasp of branded content marketing, it proves useful to contrast it with traditional marketing approaches, where companies cast a broad net to capture the attention of diverse customer demographics. Conventional methods encompass product placements in movies or television shows, TV or radio commercials, and online advertisements. The drawback to these strategies lies in their direct and overt nature, which savvy consumers may overlook or actively avoid. Conversely, branded content tends to highlight the content itself and incorporates subtler advertising elements, enhancing its appeal to potential customers.

Examples of Branded Content:

1. Podcasts: A brand may opt to develop a podcast centered around a theme closely tied to its products or services. The objective is to captivate a targeted audience by providing informative or entertaining content, simultaneously fostering brand awareness and loyalty. For instance, a mattress company could create a branded podcast offering tips for achieving a better night's sleep. This differs from the traditional approach of a mattress company simply placing a commercial in a third-party podcast.

2. Social Media: Communities and social media platforms serve as online arenas where companies can generate content, establish networks, and utilize digital marketing metrics like search engine optimization (SEO). Branded content on these platforms might feature images and video clips accompanied by a hashtag, or it could involve collaborations with influencers whose values align with the company's messaging. Such content aims to encourage follower engagement and establish a mutually beneficial value exchange between brand partners.

3. Videos: Brands may produce video segments that aren't overt advertisements but convey ideas or compelling stories central to the company's identity. For example, a business might create a video highlighting its stance on a social issue or espousing its core values. As a strategic marketing approach, companies can craft branded content like this to articulate their values while adapting to evolving online marketing trends.