The Science Behind Why the Biggest Brands on the Planet are Obsessed with Content Marketing

Audio and video content define your brand and web presence in this digital era. From your website to every social media platform, these elements powerfully communicate to buyers on a primal, emotional level. Here’s how high-quality media in your content creation can strengthen your brand, boost sales, and forge a lasting image in your buyer’s mind.

Website Media That Drive Sales

The experience of consuming begins with the senses. Did you know: When evaluating the experience of buying a product, 83% of U.S. online consumers rate high-quality product images as the most important factor when thinking about purchasing from a specific brand. In comparison, 36% of respondents are influenced by video.

Reducing Bounce Rates

Employing high-quality audio and engaging videos on your website can reduce your bounce rate – the percentage of people that leave your website without visiting a second page. A poorly constructed site with low-quality videos will have a seriously high bounce rate. Seasoned professionals understand how to create media that will keep your customers wanting more.

Communicate What Sets Your Brand Apart

The second benefit to having quality media on your website is originality. The more original the media you have, the better experience for the users. By creating your own high-quality media and embedding metadata in them that reflects your key phrases, you can greatly increase your ranking on Google. It would be counterintuitive to use the same weak media as your competitors when trying to communicate how your product stands out from the pack.

Tips for Website Media

Your job as a business owner or marketer is to create an experiential, compelling pathway for your buyer that takes them from awareness of your brand, to consideration, to the decision stage. Here are the best practices to attract, engage, and capture the buyer’s attention on your website:

1. Place aesthetically pleasing, quality videos optimized for the respective areas of your website (e.g., wide/horizontal images for hero banners, square images for your online store, or whatever the placeholders on your website call for)
2.  Create custom media that highlight your brand’s key differentiators and showcase what makes your products unique
3.  Think of your buyer’s problems and needs and direct them visually to solutions (recipe videos, educational blog content, health benefits, product comparisons graphs/charts)

Using Social Media to Foster Brand Loyalty

Brand-led communication with compelling audio and video can strongly impact people’s shopping experiences because social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are purely visual. Did you know: When asked about how brand content can help them on social media, 42% of Instagram users surveyed said it helps with discovering new products, and 44% said it helps them find new information about a product or service. 

Social media can be leveraged to legitimize your brand in the mind of the buyer. You can create authenticity for your brand by using intentional elements that engage the buyer in a two-way dialogue. Here’s how –

Telling A Story

Customers look for products that add value to their life and communicate who they are to the world. Without being able to experience your product, how can the customer get a sense of the product’s quality? Through seeing quality in the media.

Consistent media that showcases what your brands are all about, creates a mental placeholder between the buyer’s imagination and your tangible products. Curate what the buyer sees and believes about your brand in the blink of an eye by creating unique and believable media that tell a story, align with your brand’s values, and connect with your target customer.  

Building Trust

Secondly, customers want to purchase from brands they trust. With the barrage of marketing and advertising engaged in social media, a key difference is if the buyer perceives your brand to be honest, transparent and reliable. In social media campaigns, brands should consider incorporating content that shows the ways in which the brand considers the needs of their buyers. 

For example, are your ingredients sustainably sourced? Do you give back to your community or donate a portion of your proceeds to charity or important social causes? Tell the origin story in a brand video. Every company has a rich story to tell, and your audience wants to hear all about it!

Tips for Social Media Video & Audio

In summary, when producing high-quality media for your social media accounts, consider these key tips:

1. Develop social media content that looks appealing but also aligns with the everyday person’s lifestyle and/or features a story that feels attainable to the buyer.
2. Use social media posts to showcase your brand’s expertise in the industry. Consider your target demographic and position a campaign. You can accomplish this by using compelling visuals to convey what experience your brand has in the field and how you’ve achieved success in reaching your mission.
3. Foster a two-way dialogue that holds captive your customer’s attention by creating content that showcases your brand’s personality. Implement relevant images with a clear message, call to action, or ask for feedback and reviews. The key to engagement is keeping and establishing the communication lines consistent. Remember, social media engagement is an investment in long-term relationships. Additionally, this type of engagement activates Instagram’s ranking algorithm. The rankings are based on your relationship with the user, the interest the user has conveyed in similar content, and the relevancy of the post. The more the customer interacts with your brand’s content (likes, comments, visits to your profile page), the more of your content they will see.
4. Weave focused rhetoric with visual elements that create an immediate reaction, beg the question, and stick out from the average social media scroll that gets your audience viscerally engaged. That is, post something surprising, extraordinary, or thought-provoking.

The goal of the aforementioned tips is to spark engagement in your audience and hopefully inspire them to connect with you in some way. Once the dialogue begins, it is your job to keep the conversation going. This means responding to every comment and message you receive promptly and consistently. By doing this, you’re telling your customers and community: “We hear you, and we appreciate you.”

THE BIG PICTURE

Investing in content marketing is an investment in building your brand’s public persona and will elevate your brand over time. High-quality media clearly communicates who your brand is and what you value to the client – helping you develop a lasting impression in the buyer’s mind. Be consistent and intentional with the visuals you implement, your visual identity is also your brand identity.