Engaging content is not only for holidays

Valentine’s Day, Chinese New Year, Father’s Day, Hari Raya... The list of special hallmark days is endless. Why do some brands only focus on sharing content that is themed around these days? Why don’t brands look more holistically and share content all year round?

With every celebratory day comes a stream of related content from a myriad of different brands that are merging into one and consequently have no cut-through with the consumer. Many brands must have a brainstorm for that special occasion at the same time and come up with a very similar content marketing strategy. And it shows.

This is not only increasing the amount of content related to that special day being produced and broadcast but increasingly that content and therefore the brand owner is getting lost because every other brand is doing the same thing.

Ambiguous content doesn’t benefit anyone or any brand. Brands ideally should create content around a truth and a marketing theme, not around convenient dates. Consumers expect brands to be more sophisticated in their storytelling and more creative in trying to attract their attention.

Brands who focus their content marketing strategy outside of these special event days will actually gain greater cut through. Why? Because most other brands have followed other brands like sheep to create the same content at the same time of year.

In that context it’s better to stand out and go against the tide not follow it. Consumers only have so much time to read content, if they are all bombarded at the same time of the year with the same kind of content less of it will be engaged with or even noticed.

You don’t stop being a father or a mother for example outside of father’s day or mother’s day so why would the relevant brand pitching to this market stop sharing relevant content outside of these days? The more sophisticated ones don’t and benefit as a result.

The lazy ones that just think that they can say “special father’s day” promotion as countless restaurants did in Singapore or quote CoolDad as a discount code as airline Scoot did here in Singapore for example are merely being opportunistic rather than creating a long term content marketing plan to engage dads.

Having an objective for your content marketing means that you will answer these questions.

• How does content marketing fit into the broad marketing plan of the company all year around?
• How will content marketing grow the business annually not just on hallmark days?
• What are the specific business objectives of content marketing?
• How will content marketing drive sales every day?

There is plenty of research that actually shows that brands who only do content marketing or in fact any marketing or advertising in general around the special event days like Christmas, Ramadan and National Day here in Singapore actually lose out to brands who look at more holistic 365 days of the year content marketing.

Why would consumers remember your brand if you only talked to them at selective times of the year like a birthday which countless brands in Singapore do for example? Consumers will remember brands who look more long term, plan on going content marketing and make an impact and engage with consumers every day not just on themed day. They also appreciate delights and surprises outside of special days like birthdays.

According to two recent surveys by Outbrain and Waggener Edstrom (WE) Communications consumers in Singapore are less engaged with brands online and with paid content than other Asian countries. They ranked 7th in one study in Asia and last in another for brand engagement.

Could the reason for this be that marketers here are lazier than in other countries and that Singaporean consumers are more sophisticated and therefore expect more from their brands storytelling than in other less sophisticated content marketing countries?

Could it also be that Singaporean consumers are also becoming immune to predictable hallmark day content marketing messages and want brands to engage them with more relevant content all year round?

Amy Lavalette heads up Evidently Asia