Brands tweak content marketing strategy to tackle immediate business challenges in post-Covid era

Brands and agencies have already started preparing for a post-Covid-19 and lockdown phase where consumers will start shopping again for items other than essentials. Competition will get stiff to retain or gain consumers and only those who understand the new consumer’s behaviour and needs will survive. In the post-Covid period, consumers will become very cautious about their purchases and safety concerns will be on top of their mind before they even buy something.

Zameer Kochar

Zameer Kochar, Vice-President, Marketing and Member Engagement, InterMiles, said, “Consumers are and will continue to undergo various behavioural changes in the way they interact with brands and categories. Online adoption across categories is a shift that is likely to be permanent as a large, new segment of consumers in India get used to transacting from the comfort of their homes. These behavioural shifts will need brands to adopt digital transformation in the way they operate going forward to stay relevant. Businesses will need to do multiple scenario planning and be prepared to plug and plug different business and engagement models as the situation and environment keep evolving.”

While content marketing is essential, it will become even more critical in a post-Covid era. Content marketing has been considered a consistent exercise that fetches maximum ROI in the long term. But the sudden changes are causing marketers to look at it from more of a performance marketing lens of getting businesses in the short term as well.

Content is replacing the salesman

Linking performance marketing to content has always been in the marketers’ playbook but in such a crisis, it has become even more important than ever. Therefore, brands have already started focusing on content ideas that are directly linked with business or even direct sales leads rather than taking the longer route where content first helps in building brand love and then it takes time for the consumer to buy the product finally over a period of time.

Smita Murarka

Smita Murarka, Vice-President, Marketing, Duroflex Mattresses, India, said, “From a business standpoint in the post-Covid lockdown phase, there would be a pressure on the marketers as currently, it is a period of almost zero sales. Content is the only tool that one can use to sell a product these days. Content marketing has become a replacement for a salesman also. The salesman makes the conversation, talks about the product benefits, answers the queries and engages with the consumers. All this is what content is online.”

A few content marketing agencies told BuzzInContent.com that brands have already started sending out content briefs that can help fetch them immediate business results, which helps in maintaining immediate cash flow to keep the business running.

Asif Upadhye

Asif Upadhye, Co-founder, Director and Story Teller at Yellow Seed, said, “Briefs to help generate leads and direct performance-driven campaigns have always been around. There is a renewed focus among clients to create more awareness about services and prepare to share that their services will resume and once they do, things will get back to normal. F&B clients are focusing on communicating to convey that their service offerings remain safe and that they are taking every measure to ensure service delivery remains the way it used to be.”

According to Kochar, content in the right context will drive commerce going forward as well. “At InterMiles, our focus is to drive customer relevancy and engagement at all times during this current situation. Our focus is to create an agile, flexible, adaptive as well as high-impact engagement idea funnel, which can be rolled out with quick speed as part of the immediate to short-term business continuity plans,” he added.

Need for a fine balance between brand purpose and performance marketing

Nishith Srivastava

Nishith Srivastava, Former Head of Strategy at Indigo Consulting, believes that even if marketers want each penny spent on content to get business, keeping brand purpose at the core at all level would be the main ingredient. Interestingly, total customer value (TCV) is calculated only on the number of repeat purchases or the amount spent; advocacy and engagement make it more holistic and aligned with the complete cycle of human purchase behaviour.

He said, “The core ingredient (need of the hour) is brand purpose-led content marketing which further branches into various objectives such as creating realisation, awareness, consideration, preference, purchase (repeat) and advocacy. Hence, at each stage of the consumer journey, there is a brand purpose-driven objective and a call-to-action as an outcome. This approach solves not only the transactional requirements in the short term but also builds a long-term alignment, engagement and brand love, resulting in a solid foundation of brand building.”

There has to be a delicate balance between brand purpose and performance marketing for immediate results. “Faced with this surplus, consumers are choosing to engage only with content that is personally relevant to them, their purpose and their passions. This new consumer mindset has implications for their purchasing behaviour—consumers shop with the same purpose that they consume content. Path-to-Purchase is now Path-to-Purpose. They need to adopt holistic yet perfectly balanced thinking of brand purpose and performance marketing in their post-Covid-19 content marketing strategy,” Srivastava said.

Keeping brand building first

Zubin Sarkari

Zubin Sarkari, Founder, Glamrs, holds an entirely different view. He is receiving briefs that are more in the brand building flavour than spilt with the objective of fetching short-term business leads.

He said, “For most of the brands we work with, the primary effect of content marketing, especially video, is first and foremost to drive brand awareness through messaging, targeting, engagement and providing helpful and insightful content. This has been especially true in the current Covid phase, where the audience is relying on us for content that helps them, and we see this definitely continue in the post-Covid phase.”

He said performance marketing could then dove-tail into a content marketing strategy, and it is the successful combination of the two that has proven really effective for the brands we work with and us.

Upadhye seconded, “When it comes to content strategy, long-term brand building objectives are what form the base and are never really out of the picture while taking on tactical campaigns focused on lead generation.”

“However, ‘performance-led content strategy’ sounds suspiciously misleading, and seems to be just a bastardised disguise for plain old ‘performance marketing’ campaigns. Reminds me very much of when brands were trying to pass off long-form ads as ‘content’ while saying that they are now ‘doing content’,” Sarkari said.

Things to keep in mind while culling out content strategy linked to short-term results

Srivastava said that there is always the left as well as the right side of the brain that comes into play when people make a purchase. For better conversion rates, when the consumers’ rationale to buy a specific product is driven by ‘value’, ‘best value for money’ becomes the core proposition and is established with content around brands owning the category with product benefits, best price perception, meaningful selection, and friendly post-purchase policies.

Murarka of Duroflex added, “In the performance-led content strategy, one needs content to talk about how the product is differentiated and helpful in these times. In our business, we talk about the quality and warranty of our products. If you are in a retail business, a lot of brands in our category would like to talk about the stores and warehouses being sanitised, making hygiene checks because the consumers want to know the environment from where the products are coming. This content becomes important as it’s more informative and helps in conversion a lot more. The content needs to be extremely relevant, precise for the post-Covid 30-60 days. If the lockdown gets lifted, brands need to talk about how they are taking care of their ecosystem.”

Upadhye suggested that at the end, it boils down to targeting. “Getting your content published in the right places, forums and using re-targeting to push purchase decisions is not new. While focusing on short-term goals, the idea is to keep the messaging direct, use more click-bait-led terminologies and clearly highlight USPs while communicating are some of the things to keep in mind,” he said.

Murarka ended, “Brands need to highlight what problems they are solving for the consumers. They need to create a need. Just by creating viral content, no one is going to come and shop.”