Narrative marketing themes aren’t just for ad campaigns. They can and should guide larger, more complex content marketing campaigns. The ultimate goal of a brand narrative is to align the big idea behind your video and content strategy to your brand. “Isn’t this a brand thing?” You might think this type of direction should come from the brand team. The best campaigns and content focus on helping and connecting with customers, not patting your brand on the back. In the agency world, we’re often helping our clients to make their solutions “easy to sell” and “easy to buy.” When it comes to developing your brand narrative, the purpose is to make your story “easy to tell.” In other words, a killer integrated creative strategy will allow you to connect all of your content and campaigns into a simple, central idea. Tips for avoiding random acts of video creation Step up and lead Who should own integrated video strategy and theme development? Or, it could be anyone in the marketing organization with a vision. Don’t get overly prescriptive with your video branding guidelines or your marketing themes. Attach Log in with or sign up with Disqus or pick a name Disqus is a discussion network Disqus never moderates or censors.
If you’ve been a marketer for very long, you’ve probably experienced that moment when you realize your campaign (video or otherwise) doesn’t seem to fit with any other aspects of your brand narrative. I stress brand narrative here. This isn’t about the incorporation of your tagline, branded bumpers, company typeface or the color palette. No, I’m referring to content that doesn’t fit into any real narrative at all. And frankly, I’m talking about most of the branded content out there.
Narrative marketing themes aren’t just for ad campaigns. They can and should guide larger, more complex content marketing campaigns. The ultimate goal of a brand narrative is to align the big idea behind your video and content strategy to your brand. It’s the central chassis you should be able to plug all of your campaign ideas into.
One of my favorite definitions of brand is “the sum of what the market thinks about your business.” As you work to create more exciting, effective, on-brand content, make sure the market doesn’t think that your business has multiple personality disorder. Ideally, this type of creative planning is done in tandem with your annual marketing plan. For many marketers, that time is right now.
So, let’s take a look at why so many marketers struggle to develop a big idea that can guide all of their various content campaigns. During my own work with hundreds of enterprise (and midsize) B2B brands over the last decade, a few challenges have been commonly cited:
- “We’re too big.”
In enterprise brands,
size is the challenge. With scale comes siloed marketing
departments: brand marketing, acquisition (demand gen) marketing,
channel marketing, product marketing and customer marketing. Then
there are different business units – each with many of these same
marketing functions. And to top it off, global companies often use
regional teams that operate with a surprising level of
autonomy.Organization complexity leads many enterprises to a common
conclusion: the cultural nuances of different geographies and the
variety of marketing goals across teams are just too hard to direct
from central leadership. Instead, they opt to leave the various
teams and geographies to operate from a common set of branding
guidelines. My experience with these teams is that they’re looking
for a little more. This is where a brand narrative can provide a
common theme to steer strategic planning.
- “Isn’t this a brand thing?”
You might think this type of direction should come from the brand
team. But many of the largest brand agencies in the world tend to
bring an outdated approach to this type of planning. Namely, they
focus nearly all of their energy on how to talk about the
company. More relevant is how and why their customers buy –
and what’s important to them. The best campaigns and content focus
on helping and connecting with customers, not patting your brand on
the back.
- “We’ll nail down the story later.”
For
small- to medium-sized businesses, video is often a one-off. When
the annual marketing plans are drafted up for the year, creative
strategy isn’t typically the focus. Most SMB organizations begin
with business goals that quickly branch down to discrete budgets
for events and other marketing…
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