With customers’ increasingly shrinking attention spans, content marketers need to keep up to date with marketing trends and adapt their strategies to continue drawing in customers. Whether it’s presenting key industry insights, offering free tips in the form of e-books or adding that hint of humour, every content marketer has a go-to method for creating spellbinding content that grabs viewers’ attentions. But are traditional attention-grabbing marketing tactics becoming outdated as the world enters a new normal? Here are three key ways you can create content-led campaigns that attract attention, increase recall and most importantly instil loyalty with your customers during these challenging times.
1. Stop Selling and Start Serving
Now more than ever, brands need to demonstrate their humanity. You may see many brands falling into old habits, spewing self-promotion in their content marketing messages, but this does not meet the needs of customers during these turbulent times. It’s a time for pitching solutions, not products. The successful brands are those that are communicating how their products and services solve customer’s problems and help bolster communities. In these difficult times, the act of serving and helping others is what grabs attention and builds trusting relationships.
Afdhel Aziz, one of the world’s leading experts in brand purpose says, “advertising, media and creative companies have a chance to step up and help in ways that have never been considered before. To partner with non-profits, social entrepreneurs, start-ups, governments and cities to find ways to improve our lives. What if all their energy could be redirected into creating content experiences at the intersection of “useful and delightful,” that lifted our spirits in this time of need and help those who need help the most?”
Former CMO of The North Face, Tom Herbst, agrees: “I would argue that the best thing brands can do is shift, and shift quickly, to creating useful and entertaining content and conversations that will help people cope with their new indoor lives. Brands can help make this time less painless, more useful and more fulfilling.”
Good, attention-grabbing content starts with active listening and using key insights to ensure you are producing customer-centric content. And nobody understands this better than Coca-Cola. Encouraging customers to persevere through the Coronavirus pandemic, their new creative content-led campaign salutes the generosity and courage of the everyday heroes from healthcare workers on the front lines, to those of us doing our part to stop the spread by staying at home.
Releasing a collection of social media films that celebrates the power of the human spirit, Coca-Cola is also grabbing attention by pledging more than $100 million through the Coca-Cola Foundation to support COVID-19 relief efforts in communities around the world. Finding new and innovative ways to help their customers, Coca Cola is actively communicating across their offline and online content how they are fighting the spread of COVID-19. Coca-Cola’s bottling plants in Brazil, Turkey, Swaziland and Japan have produced hand sanitisers for local hospitals, clinics and nursing homes. While in Coca-Cola North America, the company are donating plastic sheeting and lending transportation support to help a New Hampshire based non-profit, MakeIt Labs, produce protective face shields for front-line healthcare workers.
2. A little bit of humour goes a long way
Comedian and author of Humour that Works: The Missing Skill for Success and Happiness at Work, Andrew Tarvin explains, “Humour can help drive attention and break through the clutter. If you get a consumer to laugh, you get them to listen. If you get them to listen, you get them to learn, and ultimately act.” It’s widely accepted that humour often stands out from other marketing and advertising techniques as it’s naturally more colourful, original and can be seen as a great differentiator for any brand. But you’ll find more often than not, there’s a fine line between creating the perfect “inside joke” between you and your customers, and creating a content marketing blunder that makes your brand the butt of a joke – yet many businesses choose to take the risk in order to establish a personal connection with their audiences.
According to a Journal of Marketing study in 1993 that examined the multinational effects of humour on advertising, “Humour is more likely to enhance recall, evaluation, and purchase intention when the humourous message coincides with ad objectives, is well-integrated with those objectives and is viewed as appropriate for the product category. Under such circumstances, humourous advertising is more likely to secure audience attention, increase memorability, overcome sales resistance, and enhance message persuasiveness.” So, there you have it, with humour linked to increased attention and higher recall, it’s no wonder businesses are jumping at the chance to create well-crafted comedic marketing campaigns.
From Burger King’s full-page newspaper ad in USA Today announcing its new “Left-Handed Whopper” to Procter & Gamble announcing plans to produce a bacon-flavoured Scope mouthwash, businesses love to show the funnier, tongue-in-cheek personality of their brands on April Fool’s Day, but another Americanised holiday that has also become synonymous with side-splitting jokes comes around every year on Super Bowl Sunday.
To set themselves apart in highly-competitive and saturated industries, many brands see the Super Bowl as a great opportunity to grab attention and increase brand awareness by spreading the laughter, and Fiat Chrysler Automotive is no exception. Taking advantage of the fact that the Super Bowl fell on Groundhog Day, 2nd February 2020, Jeep partnered with actor Billy Murray reprising his role in the of the hit 1993 movie as Phil Connors, the Pittsburgh weather reporter who relives the same day over and over in snowy Punxsutawney, Pa. The result is pure entertainment. And it earned Jeep the highest rating for ads aired during Super Bowl LIV, according to USA Today’s Ad Meter results – but they didn’t stop there.
It turns out Groundhog Day is the movie that just keeps on giving, as Jeep decided to release an unedited extended version of the Super Bowl commercial to give house-bound Americans a welcomed bit of light comic relief. The somewhat slapstick similarity between the sameness of life day after day during lockdown to the plot of Groundhog Day is comedy gold, and Jeep capitalised on this by bringing it back, alongside a suite of new video ads on social media, with the Groundhog Day motif promoting the hashtag #StayOffTheRoad.
Chief Marketing Officer for Fiat Chrysler, Olivier Francois, believed that Jeep audiences were connected not just through their passion for adventure but also through a sense of social responsibility, explaining that, “Jeep clubs have cleared mountain trails for power utilities, brought supplies to hurricane survivors and transported doctors and nurses to work in blizzards. But in this crisis, nobody could move.” So, the brand cleverly tweaked their Super Bowl comedy to reiterate in a timely content-led campaign that customers should stay indoors - ending their advert with: "We understand that every day is starting to feel the same. Stay home. Stay healthy. When this is over the trails will be waiting."
3. Storytelling is still key
We don’t want to sound like a broken record but, you should never underestimate the power of a good story. As human beings, our psychological makeup is hardwired to be profoundly influenced by compellingly-told stories.
Countless studies show that stories stimulate the sensory and motor cortex of the human brain. When we read, watch or listen to a story, our brain produces simulations and tries to “feel” the subject of the story. Character-driven stories are shown to consistently cause oxytocin synthesis, a neurochemical that enhances the sense of trust and empathy to experience other’s emotions, especially the protagonist in the story. So, it’s understandable that storytelling, when done right, is one of the most powerful marketing techniques used by successful businesses and brand content innovators. In short – stories sell.
However, when it comes to navigating our new world during this global pandemic, brands need to pivot with purpose, particularly when it comes to emotive brand storytelling and meaningful marketing. The right story can help your brand stand out, grab attention, create trust, heighten engagement, inspire your audience and instil a sense of customer loyalty. But for many storytellers and content marketers, it can feel like our hands are tied as many of the traditional ways we used to craft stories are currently closed off.
Effortlessly blending your marketing message into a compelling narrative form isn’t about telling a story that shows a faceless organisation as the protagonist, it’s about building a story through the lens of a loyal customer or a passionate employee. This stimulates our basic human need to hear and be heard, helping to deliver a brand message in a way that doesn’t feel like marketing – it feels like a human connection. And this is exactly what tech giant, Apple, achieved through their emotive, “Creativity Goes on Campaign”.
Working together with ad agency, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Apple released a beautiful film montage and ode to creativity by collecting real-life footage of families, content creators and celebrities around the world keeping creativity alive under lockdown, whether by drawing on iPads, creating videos on Macbooks or using FaceTime to share creative and innovative ideas. Produced over two weeks, the film includes celebrities like Oprah Winfrey addressing #OprahTalks viewers on Apple TV+, John Krasinski working on his YouTube show #SomeGoodNews, and actress Lily James collaborating in the #SaveWithStories children’s book initiative on her iPad.
Building on the beautiful story of innovation during times of crisis, Apple comments, "We have always believed deeply in the power of creativity. Now, more than ever, we're inspired by people in every corner of the world finding new ways to share their creativity, ingenuity, humanity, and hope."
The touching commercial and social media campaign is also in line with Apple's ongoing "Behind the Mac" campaign that pulls together found scenes of famous people and normal families behind the scenes. Apple CEO, Tim Cook comments on the campaign and poignantly states that “Creativity is the light that shows us what’s possible, the fuel that drives progress, the beauty that makes us human.”
Tom La Vecchia of X Factor Media, explains that the success of campaign like Apple’s lies in documenting what goes on behind the scenes from a customer’s perspective: “The best form of content is when you’re simply documenting what you are doing so people can see your product or service from the inside. It increases the know, like and trust factors, which leads to a higher conversion of new leads as well as creating advocates and loyalists.”
More than ever before, brands are playing an important role in bringing people together. Instead of seeing this time as simply damaging to your bottom line, you should instead be innovative and think of different ways your content can contribute to helping the fight against COVID-19. Whether it’s creating content that gives light comic relief during trying times; communicating how your products are helping wider communities or inspiring your customers through compelling user-generated stories, it’s tactics like these that will not only grab your audiences’ attention, it will keep them coming back for more.