Yannick Bolloré, CEO of Havas Group said it best: “We live in a world of content overload. A world where every day 500 million tweets, 4.3 billion Facebook messages and 500 million hours of YouTube footage are sent, posted and uploaded. In this world, only brands that form more meaningful connections with people will prosper. It’s no longer enough to produce products that work. Brands need to know why people care, and what makes their brands meaningful.”
We all have a love-hate relationship with advertising. We mute videos, skip YouTube ads, change the channel, yet it still surrounds us and influences us under our noses. Cutting through the sales pitches and creating emotive, meaningful content is a notion that increasingly being adopted by marketers. Sparked off by John Lewis’ Christmas adverts, the response that surrounded the campaigns proved to be a wake-up call for marketers, to “appeal to just more that the customer’s wallet, [and] provide benefits that go beyond financial gain”.
According to Havas Group’ research project ‘Meaningful Brands’, 75% of us feel brands should make more of a contribution to our quality of life and wellbeing, however, feel that only 40% brands actually do so.
But how?
It’s clear that we’re tired of advertising that focuses on sole financial incentives. We’re social beings that want to be positively affected by what we see, want to be able to converse and discuss it and make decisions on how we believe the product/service will increase our wellbeing and make our lives easier and happier.
The ability to create this content stems from one thing: knowledge. It’s being able to acknowledge growing trends and interests, know what works, and translate this into a way that defines that brand and encourages loyalty and respect. In eCommerce, studies have shown that users experiencing strong emotions from a brand have a much higher intent to buy than those that don’t. Although may not literally make you get up out of your seat and walk to the shop, it creates an implicit opinion that influences your buying attitude in the future by reigniting the emotions that were provoked with your initial encounter.
How can I apply this?
User experience should be underlying everything you do as a business. We want to see what makes that stay on a page longer, why they left a certain page, what brought them there, and what would encourage them to interact. Brands that are creating meaningful content are doing just that, and by putting the user’s experience first and are successful in doing so. Considering how your service or product can genuinely improve the life of your customers and potential customers will allow you to create promotional content that not only increases conversions, but memorability and loyalty.
By Adriana Scala, digital marketing analyst for Neptik
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