If you look at viral as a gimmick, it will always be out of reach… but if you look at it with a method… it’s the best way to market your brand.. :)
Everyone loves a viral, the uptick in engagement, talk of the town, 15 sec of fame… but loving the outcome and not the process is a dangerous path in my experience.
It’s not about viral, it’s not about the outcome; it’s about the process. The goal is driving engagement regularly, so we are part of our audience’s life as often as we can because branding today is about relevance.
How many conversations can we start? How many are we a part of? It’s not about recall, where we keep yelling at the user.
With the goal of engagement, the way we look at content becomes crucial—the only thing that matters is “share-worthiness” in my experience. If the content is not worth sharing, it just dies down, or you need to spend a lot of money to bring it in front of people.
Viral is just an outcome; like laughter on a joke is an outcome, But what’s the process? Are we obsessed about if people will laugh or do we work on our setup and punch line?
It’s the process of creating shareworthy content, the creative culture to enjoy the game and not be under pressure to hit a six on every ball… so we can focus to create ten pieces hoping two will work.
I feel everything a brand creates, any marketing communication must be shareworthy, period.
Learning from the trenches over 10 years has taught me to focus on only one thing which matters in all of marketing mumbo jumbo :)
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Thanks for the poke Sandeep Balaji on Arindam Paul ‘s post.. suno fir ;)
Tag: content marketing
From War to Love in Marketing
Ads vs. Content – Capturing Roller Coaster Experiences at Imagica Behind-the-scenes
Ads focus on the brand, the USP—how cool we are, look at our shiny logo or products. Content that is share-worthy starts from the audience, is made for them, and the brand goes along for the ride when it goes big. The content shouldn’t be about the brand or category but about the people, the audience who would use it.
Not about roller coasters, but about the people who take them.
To get a sense of the place and the rides, I took a cab from Pune all the way to Imagicaa, an incredible theme park near Mumbai. Spent hours going through it all, and then came back, jammed with the team, and settled for a simple one shot taken with a GoPro tied to the roller coaster, compared to fancy drone shots or showcasing how cool the place is.
That simplicity of idea and execution made all the difference. The roller coaster was an amazing metaphor for life. The team worked and deep-dived on the list of pointers many times until the flow seemed natural; then it was ready.
It’s not about how fancy the production is, it’s about storytelling—about how simply we can connect A to B and make it for and about the audience, and that starts by exhaustive deep dive, looking at the audience from multiple vantage points, creating for them :)
Proud of how the team executed, shot, and stitched it together with multiple rounds of reviews.
Now, imagine this format for your brand or your audience, what real life experiences can be metaphors for your audience’s pain points or user journeys.. fill in the blank, and you may have content that is truly for your audience
Performance Marketing vs. Content Marketing: What Keeps Your Brand Flying?
Your brand is like an airplane, and when investors put pressure on, budget for burns comes in, throwing it all into performance marketing. The ads start showing some results, your plane seems to be flying, engines running. And you keep burning through to show the numbers.
But in this exercise, you never invested or looked at building your brand. Because this burn will stop one day or slow down, and if one day you turn the engines off and your plane keeps flying, it’s because of brand and organic content and engagement with your audience. And if it falls, you never invested in building your brand and nurturing customer love.
Performance marketing is important, sure, but experimenting in the 6, 10, 15 seconds video formats or images, it’s about getting more creative beyond just tired old best practices (which IMO are tired old practices given by platforms), because the only thing which matters in all of marketing is ‘engagement’, and if your ads start getting engagement, your quality score goes up, more bang for your buck, and you see magical results in your conversions, that’s the holy grail.
So keep the burns on when needed, but with it, invest in building your brand with content that drives engagement, that’s share-worthy, which is for and about your audience, so in times of zero or low budgets, your brand keeps flying, not because of any fuel burns, but out of sheer momentum of your content, engagement, and love from your audience.