How Content Marketing can be leveraged for brand success

The marketing world moves at the speed of light. But after the pandemic that speed has further increased as brands are enthusiastically geared up for the festive season. Adgully hosted the third edition of CMOs’ Charcha 2022 in Bengaluru on August 10, 2022. Keeping in mind the post-pandemic revival story, the theme for CMOs’ Charcha 2022 was ‘The Festive Blueprint for Brands’.

Content marketing has gained in significance over the years. Every aspect of our lives – right from the morning newspaper to the movie that we watch – is all about great storytelling. It’s something that aims to pull you in and help the marketer achieve their objective. Speakers at the third edition of the CMOs’ Charcha 2022, dwelled on ‘Content Marketing for Brand Success’ in a panel discussion. Moderated by R Sridharan, Managing Editor, TV9 Kannada, and the panellists included:

Vanda Ferrao, Head of Marketing, Fresh to Home

Ranjith Kumar, Head - Marketing, Digital and E-Commerce, AirAsia

Dr Sumesh Ramankutty, Chief Marketing Officer, Augmont - Gold For All

Ravanan N, Executive Director, DailyHunt

Tanveer Khan, GM - Brand, Dunzo

Commencing with the discussions, R Sridhadharan asked Fresh to Home’s Vanda Ferrao, “You in some sense have to change people’s habits, which is not an easy thing to do. How did you go about doing that? From a content perspective, what role did content play and defined the platforms where you would get your message across, which is fresh, chemical-free antibiotics. How did you reinforce this message and change consumer habits?”

Ferrao responded by saying, “That’s actually my brand strategy and it’s confidential! Though it’s quite a heavy topic, I’ll touch upon a couple of points. Content is very heavy and is anything you put out which the consumer assimilates. There are different platforms to put out content, there are TV ads, there is social media, there is your SMS, there are also the emails that you send across. All that constitutes content and it is important that you engage with consumers at the most important aspect. With respect to Fresh To Home, it is the world’s largest vertically integrated meat and seafood company. We sell chicken, fish, mutton across the country and for us, the problem statement is to actually get consumers to adopt buying meat and seafood online, which is quite difficult because no one’s really unhappy buying meat and seafood from the places they are already buying; so, there’s a behavioural change. Behavioural change happens over time, it happens when you deploy a lot of money. It is something akin to what Kellogg’s has been telling us to have Cornflakes for breakfast for so many years, but all of us have not shifted from our upma, poha and paratha.”

“This is a huge process and a behavioural change which we have to affect, and I think content plays a huge role in doing this. The type of content is very important, because you can’t talk down to the consumer. What you actually want to say, you have to say it in a very nice friendly manner. And, therefore, articulating the brand strategy, deciding what the communication platform is and then putting it across channels is very important.”

Moving on to Dunzo’s Tanveer Khan, Sridharan asked, “How do you go on convincing the people who need everything in life in 15 minutes?”

Khan noted that behaviour changes over a period of time. “It takes time, and with our Indian mindset, we take our own sweet time to change our perception about things. I think perception becomes very important for us. One good thing that happened is that people understood the importance of essential delivery during the lockdown period by default. What we have to be doing is to be consistent in our messaging. We chose all the channels wisely and tried to curate content accordingly, and for us, we follow this simple process of how we curated content, ours’ is not a secret.”

“The very basic thing that we do is we try to be as close as possible to our customers. We do a focus group study, we do consumer calling, we go and meet our consumers. It is very important for us to understand what is the lifestyle beyond Dunzo, what they like, and it helps us to build our own content. When you know what your consumer wants, you can choose your channel wisely. Then you start distributing content, but you need to be consistent in your messaging. I think you will be able to succeed in changing the behaviour. I think that’s the mantra for us.”

Posing his question to Air Asia’s Ranjith Kumar, R Sridharan asked, “Covid has been terrible and all flights were grounded. But you still had to keep the brand alive, so what are you really doing from a communication marketing perspective, what have you been up to?”

Kumar pointed out that travel is something that everybody wants to do, so we don’t need to change any behaviour as such, but then, the initial stage of the pandemic was very tough for us as we had not planned for so many cancellations. Infrastructure was built to get it with only so many queries. A lot of people get on social media asking for refunds and flight details. We did not have the capability of doing that, so all our crew pilots became volunteers at some point of time and we had to train them initially, but they took the call. In the first phase of the lockdown, people wanted to return to their hometowns, so it was one way full flight, nobody wanted to take a return flight. During that time, we started the ‘Umeed ki Udaan’ campaign, where one could help others who couldn’t afford to go back.”

To Dr Sumesh Ramankutty, Sridharan posed the question, “Yours is a gold and silver refining platform and a trading platform. It’s a fairly new idea and a new concept. How have you acquired customers through your power of content? How have you gone about it?”

Ramankutty explained, “The gold and silver has been purchased through the jewellers, and there is a perception that it is always a trusted neighbourhood jeweller that people go for purchases. There is always some scepticism when it comes to buying gold and silver online – is it safe, is it trustworthy, etc. The biggest challenge for the brand was to reduce the trust deficit. Secondly, we wanted to change the behaviour pattern amongst the millennials. Because when they come for investment of gold, they should also have a top choice; they should be investing in digital gold or gold SIP rather than jewellery. It was quite challenging because there are not many players in the market, and even if there are players, there is not much content for the consumers to consume. So, definitely the commodities market in the business news channels is one such way in which we did a lot of AFPs, associate brand partnership with them, got the leading anchors doing the programs for us, talking about the benefits of investing, etc. This content that gets consumed on television has got a lot of searching intent in Google. When we run a campaign on Google, we can see an increase in Google search. There’s a lot of experimenting happening.”

These are edited excerpts. For the complete discussion watch below:

https://www.linkedin.com/video/live/urn:li:ugcPost:6963084594065629184/