Movie Marketing

Content Marketing Should Entertain…When Appropriate

A story came out yesterday reporting on the results of a study showing that, with so much content being shared by family and friends, the best way for brands to connect and spur engagement on social media was by providing entertainment. Stop selling and informing and entertain people.

ray-liotta-goodfellas

There’s something to that, but as usual for me it comes back to how well do you know, as the lead on a content marketing program, understand your audience?

Not all brands can – or should – be funny or lighthearted on social media. While IHOP can go deep with hip language and Taco Bell can create 600 emojis for a single campaign that doesn’t mean their tone or style should be adopted by every brand publisher. If the brand you manage does not have a fun, not-so-serious reputation with the audience then coming out of the gate with a bunch of jokes and funny GIFs just isn’t going to work. Those on the receiving end of the message will sniff that out and this will backfire on you before too much time goes by.

Even if you’re an entertainment brand who can easily work some gags into your Twitter publishing cadence this is a tricky line to walk. You have to make sure that your content team is well-versed in not just being funny but being funny in the voice of the brand. That’s a much trickier proposition and takes a talented writer to pull off.

Not wanting to sound like a finger-wagging naysayer, here are some things to keep in mind when trying to bring more humor and entertainment into your content marketing program:

  • Make sure everyone is on board: Ideally when you launched your content program you developed workflows and systems so that all relevant stakeholders know what’s going on. They may not have direct involvement but they are aware of changes in the program. Develop your proposal and make sure you have buy-in from all these parties. Nothing’s going to derail this faster than someone who doesn’t see it until a month after the change and pulls the plug for a seemingly inconsequential reason like they weren’t told.
  • Develop the style guide: You do have a style guide, right? Make sure that changes to the tone and voice you’re using in the program are developed and reflected in that document so that you, your team and any future team members can all refer to it and are approaching things in the same way.
  • Phase it in over time: Don’t just flip the switch. This is likely to turn off some members of the audience who are taken aback by and don’t like the change just because it’s different. Be 20% more funny in Month One, 30% more in Month Two and then go all-in on the new tone in Month Three. That will help, for lack of a better analogy, boil the frog.
  • Remember that character is cumulative: It’s not always being about as funny as you can in every single Tweet. Some still need to be sales or otherwise oriented in order to achieve business goals and satisfy various stakeholders. But if over the course of a month you can say you can say that you achieved the goal of working looser, hipper language into 67% of your updates you’re doing pretty good and should, assuming the audience reacts well, see an overall lift to the program. In your style guide you should identify various voice characteristics, of which “humor” is one, that you are consciously working in to various degrees with every update. No one single update will have all those characteristics, but cumulatively they should add up to an identifiable persona.