Branded Content For Startups

“Content precedes design.
Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” - Jeffrey Zeldman

Back in 1900, Andre and Edouard Michelin were thinking up ways of boosting sales for their tyre company.
With only 3,000 cars in all of France, they were somewhat at the mercy of these drivers, and realised that a way to increase sales was to encourage more long car trips.
How do you entice someone to take a long car trip?
By giving them an incentive, a reason to go.
The Michelin brothers released the “Guide Michelin 1900”, advertising the best restaurants and experiences around the country.

They even had a ratings system:
1 star meant “worth stopping for”
2 stars meant “worth a detour”
3 stars meant “worth a special trip”

They gave the guides out for free, which soon took on a life of their own and spawned the Michelin star system for the world’s best restaurants.

Anyone who was on YouTube back in 2007 will likely remember a video series called “Will It Blend?” – some captivating demonstrations where Tom Dickson would put on a lab coat, stick an iPod in a blender and instantly turn it into smoking grey dust.
Viewers were transfixed, and couldn’t wait to watch the next clip of a roast chicken being blended with Coca Cola, or a video camera being obliterated.
It turns out that Tom Dickson was the CEO of Blendtec, the maker of those blenders, and saw a substantial jump in sales from their YouTube clips.

This is the ever-evolving world of branded content – creative work that capture attention and let the market know who you are.
We’ve previously explored the “world’s simplest marketing lesson” – that people need to know who you are, like what you do, and trust that you can deliver on your promises.
Know, Like and Trust.
Branded content is so effective because it offers a trade – something of value to the audience in exchange for a favourable recollection, that might turn into a sale or a recommendation in the future.

Here’s where it gets interesting: branded content is one of the only areas of business where a startup has an advantage over their much larger competitors.
That’s because you can’t pay your way into good content, it takes care, creativity and a bit of risk.
And it turns out, care, creativity and risk are three things that large brands actively avoid – they want safe, predictable and inoffensive.
If you make something unpopular, almost nobody will notice.
If your rivals make something unpopular, they get dragged into a meeting to defend themselves.
That’s why they’ll avoid making unpopular things, and in the process ensure that they don’t make anything interesting either.

So if you’re a founder with a new brand, and you want to find and engage your audience, you have a potentially lucrative opportunity: to test and iterate with different types of branded content, to see what resonates with your audience and converts into sales.
It will take a decent amount of work, but it draws on your creative energy more than your marketing budget.
Let’s take a closer look at the deal…

A Mixed Blessing

It’s helpful to get some of the tough realities out of the way:

Despite the work you’ve put into your style guide, this is the main application of your brand. Your future customers are most likely to evaluate your content, rather than judge your typeface and colour scheme. If your style guide doesn’t help you create good work, it isn’t doing its job.
Content is essential for your business – you’re going to have to get in front of your audience, and create something good enough that it holds their attention. You have lots of choices, but “doing nothing” isn’t a viable option.
The tools are accessible to everyone – you have more content creation assistance than ever before. Articles, videos, classes, apps, platforms, recording equipment, publishing and distribution has never been easier.
Attention has never been harder to capture, because you’re competing with an abundance of other engaging distractions. People tune out advertising, use ad blockers on their browsers, and no longer answer unknown numbers.
Most startups talk a big game then lose their momentum – they make three good posts/articles, life gets in the way, and they end up abandoning their progress. We need to develop a habit, not a handful of flawless content.
Content creation looks to be cheap but is surprisingly costly – especially when time and creative energy are scarce. It takes a few dollars but a lot of your attention. It can also involve the risk of looking silly, or of being criticised in the public arena.
So many founders start to make content in the wrong way, either because it’s too sales-y and selfish, or it’s too fearful and has nothing to do with your business. If you’re looking for fast money, this isn’t the best way to go about it.

The Problem With “Simple Steps”

There’s a lot of content creation advice our there for startups, but the problem is it talks about the benefits and glosses over the challenges.
They use case studies of brands that “went viral” without mentioning that going viral is not a repeatable strategy.
It also neglects to cover the mindset challenges of launching your branded content; when you’ve made it yourself, it opens up a lot of complex feelings around rejection, worthiness and imposter syndrome.
It is reminiscent of the famous “Draw the rest of the owl” illustration:

Just because you can draw up a process in a few simple steps doesn’t mean that each step is equally easy or intuitive.
Nor does it mean that a beginner can draw something as well as a veteran can, even with the veteran’s instruction.

Here’s a better for drawing owls – more steps, more realistic outcomes.

That’s what you’re looking for - an approach that suits your startup, with steps you can follow, and with impressive-yet-believable results.

What Are We Trying To Do?

The first question when designing branded content has to be “who is this for?”.
It’s good to describe your target audience, both in terms of their demographics and psychographics.
It’s also important to establish if this work is in their in their interest, or yours.
Seth Godin puts it bluntly:

“In the life of every enterprise, the moment arises when a choice has to be made:
Are you here for your customers, to give them what they seek, or are you trying to do something to your customers, to squeeze out extra income?

When a company makes it hard to unsubscribe, or pushes needless options (“362 people are currently signing up for the insurance…”) or hustles people, they’ve forgotten the lesson that got them here in the first place.
Eventually, organizations that serve themselves lose the ability to continue serving others.”

It’s possible to create a win-win situation, but people aren’t going to indulge content that is thinly veiled advertising, not with so many other options of things to read, watch or do.

What Are We Hoping Will Happen?

If we don’t know who it’s for, we can’t get to the second question; “what do we want people to do?”.

This where a startup has an advantage over their established rivals.
A founder’s answer for these two questions might be:
“This content is for our two main customer segments, to educate and entertain them, and nudge them into visiting our site or contacting our team”.

A large company or bureaucracy’s answer is more likely to be:
“This content is for my boss’s boss, to show that we’re making content, and proving that we are running campaigns as instructed”.

Startups have the urgency and clarity of needing the content to work for the customer, or else they’re going to run out of money.
Their work is likely to be more interesting and more memorable, because it has to be.
There are so many content creators out there today, and so few of them are in big companies.
Check for yourself; who posts the best work on LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube?
Who has the best landing pages?
Whose work are you excited to engage with?
It’s probably made by people who are passionate and knowledgable, who understand the craft of their chosen channel.
That might be one person with two skills, or an expert who works with a talented media specialist.
It’s unlikely to be made by a committee, or by people who don’t care about the work they’re producing.
Anyone can create a content schedule, but it’s very hard to fake a sincere interest in your audience.

Fish Where The Fish Are

Once we know who we’re talking to and what we’re hoping that they do, we need to work out where and when to intercept them.
It’s the oldest sales advice – go fishing where the fish are.
Sometimes, the fish are in surprising locations, or respond to surprising messages.
Hugh Stephens described how his startup was struggling to engage hospitals and clinics to attend their webinars, until they changed their approach.
They discovered that doctors will ignore calls and emails, but will respond to almost anything that came through their fax machine (this was around 2017).
So they started to send their webinar signup forms as faxes, with little squares for medical receptionists to manually write in their details in pen, and fax it back.
Faxes, Hugh argued, were an amazing source of growth, because it’s what got past their customer’s defenses.

For this reason, don’t assume that you have to pick a style of valuable content in advance.
You get to explore a wide range of options, and run tests to see what generates a response from your customer base
These could be things like:

Outdoor posters that entertain, amuse or surprise the reader
How-To guides
Reviews and recommendations
Testimonials
Workshops and training
Day-in-the-life or behind the scenes content
Videos of your work / highlight reels
Commentary on your field and the trends you’ve observed
Responses to common customer questions

While technology and channels to market are guaranteed to change in the next 5 years, people don’t change very quickly, and their interests are likely to remain pretty consistent.
Each of the above work because they either persuade, entertain or inform, and they work particularly well if you can do two at once.
You might also choose to run two or three different types of branding content in parallel, each with it’s own specific purpose.
e.g. shortform ads and longform video, or shortform video and longform written content.
Some might be lighthearted, some might be detailed and niche.
Some might be for your company, whereas others might feature members of your team or your happy customers.

Recognition And Attribution

Crucially, you want your good work to be attributed back to you – if people like your content but forget who made it, then you’ve accidentally created a campaign for your competitors.
This means we want work that is distinctively yours, and generally the way to do that is to use simple templates.
That pre-determines your visual structure (headings, imagery, text placement) and your aesthetics (typefaces, colours and wordmark).
The gold standard of this is creators like Chris Do (TheFutur) and Shane Parrish (Farnham Street).

Within a split second, you’ll recognise their work in a feed, creating a “scroll-stopping moment” where you’re keen to see what they’re written.
Templates like these take out the design decisions, so you get to concentrate on the message, hook or punchline of the content.
It’s one less decision to make, one less barrier to posting content whenever you have an idea, and it gives you a better chance of being remembered.
Even if your audience doesn’t remember the content itself, it reinforces that they’ve been seeing your content around them, adding to your familiarity and credibility.

Use A Recipe, But Follow It All The Way Through

There are lots of good “recipes” for creating good content, updated for the current times and for your specific industry.
It might be clever options for branded merchandise at your trade show booth, a free book/ebook that you give away, social media content, all with step-by-step instructions.
Most of these recipes will work, if you actually follow all of the steps.

What doesn’t work is picking and choosing the easy, palatable steps and expecting the same results.
e.g. writing good blog posts, but only one a month.
Creating one variation and not running any split tests.
Sending good content to customers, but not soliciting any feedback.
Posting new content, but not asking for the sale.

Yes, the bit you’ve skipped is the worst bit, but it’s likely the reason why the recipe works.

Motivation vs Discipline

They say that motivation is doing something because you feel like it, whereas discipline is doing something even when you don’t feel like it.
For this reason, the aim for an entrepreneur isn’t to get excited about creating the one great ad/article/video that will transform your business.
The aim is to set up a consistent content creation process.
A habit, not a magic potion.
You’re going to publish content on days when you don’t feel like it, when you’re distracted, and likely in a different week to when you made the content.

Your audience will need to see the same sort of message repeatedly in order for your brand to wriggle into that “corner of their mind” that John Hegarty so eloquently described.
Dave Trott consistently talks about the research that proved that 4% of advertising is remembered favourably, 7% is remembered negatively and 89% isn’t remembered at all.
Interestingly, so many founders are concerned about avoiding the 7% of negative impressions that the willingly create content that is guaranteed to be in the 89% that will be forgotten.

If your audience is transient, you’ll have to repeat this content over and over, since they will have missed every post until they arrived or are suddenly receptive to your message.
David Ogilvy summarised it beautifully:

“You aren't advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who'll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.”

How To Post When You Don’t Feel Like It

Creating content is like cooking a meal.
If you wait to start the process until you’re hungry, you’re likely to end up in a cranky headspace.
Instead, treat content like meal-prepping – creating larger batches that can be stored and heated as needed.
Like meal prepping, there’s a cost efficiency and time efficiency to preparing in bulk – it’s not much harder to make 3x the quantity.
e.g. designing five variations of posters, filming 10 reels in an afternoon, writing a collection of articles that you can format and edit as a set, etc.

The best starting point is to brainstorm a list of 50 different content ideas, perhaps around 3-4 different themes.
This process tends to start slowly, and quickly gains momentum as you think of a few good ideas and then notice other good ideas adjacent to them.
You might think of 5-7 people you can interview, 5-7 books you want to summarize, 5-7 product feature demonstrations, 3-4 testimonials or before/afters, 5-7 eye-catching headlines, 3-4 different events or workshops you might host, 3-4 recordings from your workspace or client sites, or depending on your brand you might even have some fun content that doesn’t directly sell your products/services.

You can also look through your camera roll, notes or saved folder to see examples of other brand’s content that you might partially replicate, adding another wave of creative inspiration to your planning.

Next, you’re looking for the “quick wins” you can create within a week, sometimes within 20 minutes, which will get you started without too much emotional labour.
Don’t start with the riskiest or most time-consuming options, save those for when you’re feeling confident and want to go to the next level.
Early posts are experimentation – a chance to try different types of content, measuring the differences in engagement.
You’re experimenting with formats, targeted audiences, length, tone, and your call-to-action.
This is specific permission to try things that might not work, because founders are usually surprised by which sorts of posts get the most attention.
You can try a few versions of a piece of content, and easily measure the differences in views and response rates.
You’ll soon start knowing which formats aren’t working, and can double down on the ones that have above-average performance.
These simple split tests let your customers show you what they like, and gives you some instant feedback on what to create more of in the future.

Platform Advice vs Content Principles

Bill Bernbach said “Principles endure, formulas don’t”, and for that reason we won’t look at specific tips for optimising content on certain channels.
e.g. the best Instagram advice from 2020 is wildly outdated today, whereas a lot of sales principles from 50 years ago still hold true.
One of the trickiest parts of navigating marketing advice is that there’s a strong argument for every channel, if taken seriously.
These aren’t swindlers, they’re founders whose email campaigns genuinely grew their businesses, or whose tricks took them from 80k to 450k followers in under a year.
They’re telling their truth, but it usually doesn’t translate to today’s scenario or the specifics of your situation.

You Can’t Do All Channels Properly

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” – Ron Swanson

Realistically, a startup won’t have the capacity to properly serve all of the available media channels.
There are a few good reasons for this:

A piece of “good” content on one channel does not automatically translate to your other channels, since the audience is likely to be different and the platform comes with different expectations.
e.g. videos will perform differently on TikTok vs LinkedIn vs TV vs IG Ads
Check for yourself: do you follow the same brands across all platforms? Or do some just happen to make more sense in one location rather than the others?
What works on a particular channel changes rapidly, and it will probably take 50 hours to learn the ropes plus ongoing research every quarter.
If you can’t be bothered putting in 50 hours of research into a particular channel, why do you think you’ll do a good job of creating noteworthy content?
Platform advice is not universal, and American-centric advice may very well not suit your local market.
You also want to look for practitioner and their most recent advice/actions – that will be more telling than anything you read in a textbook.
You likely have a disproportionate advantage in one or two channels, and would be wise to prioritise your time, attention and budget where it will have the largest return-on-investment.

The deal with most modern channels is that they genuinely work, but they are temporary.
You’re potentially one algorithm shift away from losing your audience.
We’ve previously seen that there are three types of media advertising; paid, owned and earned.
Paid media like ads can work, but they are costly over time.
Owned media (like your email lists, subscribers, your premises, etc) are much cheaper to reach, but you start with a very limited audience and risk “preaching to the choir”.
Earned media, when other people willingly share your content, is exciting and profitable, but is also largely out of your control.

There are well-established methods that work for each of these, but they all take up a lot of your energy.
Founders will need to choose which 1-2 approaches they want to focus on in each stage of growth, and this might affect which channels you choose to prioritise.
Do you want to quickly test your content with lots of new customers?
Paid might be the most effective option.
Want to get PR attention without spending much money?
Focus your creative energy on Earned media.
Want to nurture future customers over time?
Time to create content for your Owned channels.

Creating Assets

Not all branded content is equally valuable for your business; some content can turn into more permanent assets.
Several of our favourite content creators use daily/weekly blogging to express their ideas and engage with their audience.
Every 1-2 years, these articles are edited and polished into beautifully written books – each page has been written with focus and intention, making for a better reading experience.
Articles can stack up over time, whereas content on IG stories don’t leave you with anything tangible at the end of the year.

Podcasts are another great example – once you have a decent number of episodes, you might find that some of the recurring themes and conversations become the basis of keynote talks or practical workshops.
You might also take 30-second clips and run them on your social platforms, or take specific quotes to publish on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Gary Vaynerchuk turns his longform content (presentations and interviews) into many bite-sized pieces, whereas Tim Ferriss turned his podcast into two of our favourite books – Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors.

You can create assets that work across each part of the customer journey (Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, Extend).
This might be introductory content for new prospective buyers, or extension content for customers who are already using/enjoying your work.
A good example of this is Michael Janda.
His IG content appears in a lot of paid advertisements, introducing his best short-form content to new customers each day.
Once you’ve seen 5-10 short clips or carousels, you can then progress to his YouTube channel and watch some of his 15-25 min videos, full of practical advice.
If you’ve watched over an hour of that, you’re probably going to be keen to buy his longer course, offering 40+ hours of material that you’ve already begun to experience.
It’s a clever on-ramp, and if there was no short/medium content, it’s hard to see who’d buy a 40+ hour course without knowing what to expect.

As you grow, these assets can also be used by other members of your team, so that they are not dependent on your being present in their sales conversations.
If you’re still deciding what sort of content to prioritise, then this “stackability” might be a good tie-breaker; go with the work that you can keep and reshape into something highly valuable in the future.

Going On Safari

One of the best ways of discovering what you’d like for your branded content is to take note of other people’s content that you find impressive and effective.
You can use your camera roll, your Saved folders on social media, clippings, anything that helps you take note of something that has at least one element that you think works.
It doesn’t need to be “perfect”, it might be a layout that you like, a tone of voice, a good use of a channel’s strengths, a trend you might join, a heading you’d like to adapt, etc.

Good taste can come from copying good taste, and you can create mood boards or scrapbooks featuring several similar examples that collectively represent what you want to create under your own banner.

One note on this – please don’t try to convince yourself that you’ll need to spend a lot of money just to start creating similar branded content to what’s on your mood board.
It’s better to earn your tools, spending money once you’ve used and outgrown the cheaper options.
If you’ve made 30 videos on your phone and want to upgrade to a better setup, you at least now know what you need.
It might be worth borrowing or renting podcast equipment to see what you like and what you need, then buy your own gear once you’ve developed the habit of recording episodes.

Mindsets And Objections

You’ve made it this far, and there’s probably some lingering resistance and barriers that are holding you back.
Here are some questions that often come up in our coaching sessions.
None of them magically solve anything, but they can name the real issue and give you some helpful language to describe what’s on your mind:

Is this a technical problem or an adaptive challenge?
e.g. do I not know how to use a certain channel, or am I not used to being the type of person that posts branded content?
Do I need a technical solution, or 20 seconds of great courage?
e.g. do I have a question about MailChimp, or do I need to press “Send” without overthinking it?
Michael Janda describes “Troll Maths”, arguing that 1 in every 100 people are mean spirited, and 1 in 100 of those mean spirited people are active trolls.
Therefore, for every 10,000 viewers on your content, you can expect 1 troll commenter.
Does this maths align with your experiences?
If that was “part of the territory” of having over 10,000 viewers per post, could you find a way to embrace it?
Do I have an aversion to paid ads? Do I feel icky or uncomfortable, or do I not think they’d work for this business?
Can I give myself a grace period, in which I do not criticise my work or my progress for an agreed time, while I learn this craft and learn the ropes?
Could I allocate a budget, a bit like a bounty, for either myself or another person to create this branded content?
What is it worth to me?
What’s the cost of us doing it ourselves vs outsourcing?
Do I like my reasons for not making branded content?
Are these reasons serving me well and making me happy?
If I never had to show my face, would that remove some of my reluctance?
How much do I value seeing founders on camera in the content I follow?
What are the vanity metrics that sound cool but mean very little, and what are the meaningful metrics that indicate true progress?

If nothing else, the smallest step you can take now is to spot good content out in the wild.
Start taking note of the branded content that you find impressive, or write out ideas for content that would genuinely serve and engage your market.

If you decide that you don’t have the battery for creative work, that’s ok too.
Please don’t get seduced by too-good-to-be-true offers from people offering to outsource all of the work, or offering magic formulas for virality.

Instead, talk to your coaches, advisors or other entrepreneur about what has worked for them, and what they think might work for you.
Once you’re inspired to get started, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how fulfilling the work can be.