Brands need to trust agencies for long-term content programmes, says WATConsult's Rajiv Dingra

To have great content marketing, brands should first focus on creating good content and then think about marketing it on various available platforms, feels Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO, WATConsult.

Dingra, who keeps content marketing at the core of what WATConsult does, said, “The problem I see most marketers have is that they do not have great content but then they want to do content marketing. Marketers and agencies need to keep it simple. First, they need to look at creating good content and then look at how content marketing could be used to promote that content across platforms through influencers, native sites and so on and so forth.”

Knowing that creating good content is the key to successful content marketing, WATConsult created its in-house production team four years ago. The agency boasts of having one of the largest production teams within the agency circles. It has a 25-member team purely in video content production other than the content marketing team.

Dingra said, “Content marketing has been at the heart of what we do at WatConsult. Putting a production team in place four years ago and scaling it to what it is today across Mumbai and Delhi shows our core focus. We produce six to eight films a month or 25 to 30 films a quarter for various brands. If you look at the number of videos we create for social media, like a 10-seconder for Instagram or a 30-seconder for YouTube, it would be between 150 and 200 every month.”

While a debate is already on among agencies, content creators, platforms and the marketers about the lack of understanding of content marketing, it’s time to develop long-term relationships between the brands and agencies for a better content marketing strategy. The agencies say marketers are not able to come out of the advertising mindset and brands blame agencies for not being able to understand their content needs.

Dingra said, “I think it is chicken and egg situation. Brands need to trust agencies for long-term programmes. For that to happen, you have to actually look at a yearly engagement with an agency around content marketing. And then, invest in content creation and content marketing on a yearly basis. There are a few marketers who are able to this. Like budgets for media, brands should have specific budgets for content creation through the year. I would not say that it is not happening at all but it is not happening across the board.”

A lot of times within the agencies, the same set of people who work on advertising work on content and end up producing long-form ads. So, Dingra thinks agencies need to have separate teams for content. This problem mostly happens when people come from TV ad background where brands are placed across the storyline of the advertisements.

Presenting the other side of the coin, Dingra said he feels creativity is creativity. “If you are creative at ad copies and advertising, I don’t see a reason why you can’t be creative with a long-form copy. A good content creator would create good advertising and good advertising person should be able to create good content.”