BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

How To Use Your Brand To Inspire Your Content

Forbes Communications Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Bryn Dodson

Producing content regularly is hard. No matter how many brilliant ideas you generate, there will come a time when you’ve used them all, and you’re staring at a blank whiteboard or leading an awkward, silent brainstorm in an effort to produce more.

When that time comes, you need a new angle for your content creation. A lot of digital content focuses on what a business does or what it sells. Often, people forget to explore what a company’s brand is -- what the brand believes in and stands for.

Done correctly, content built around a brand’s key values and strengths is very effective because it reinforces the brand associations you most want people to have. We’ll look at a couple of great examples, as well as some tips on how to generate your own ideas.

Momondo: “Let’s Open Our World”

Momondo is a Danish search engine for flights, hotels and car rentals. It aims to be a single, convenient place to compare prices from online travel agents. However, it’s not a unique business -- it’s similar to the better-known Kayak and competitors, such as Skyscanner.

One way Momondo competes is by paying close attention to user experience, design and the functionality that helps to manage hundreds of search results. Momondo has also invested in practical and inspirational content for travelers. Momondo does both of these things well, but there is a ton of general travel content on the internet and there’s no opportunity to be truly distinctive.

So Momondo took their content a step further. They created a campaign around something they valued, which is also part of the experience of travel: encountering diversity and being open to new experiences.

The Let’s Open Our World competition is designed to show how genetically diverse people are by offering winners a free trip to the countries their ancestors come from. Competition participants explain how they’d open the world through travel. A few are chosen to submit a video showing their reaction to learning where their ancestors are from (thus providing great user-generated content). Momondo has also produced its own videos, showing people from around the world reacting to discovering their ancestry.

This campaign does a lot of different things very well. It takes a stance on openness and diversity at a time when those values aren’t going unquestioned. It seeks to prove a point about diversity. And it does so by sharing powerful, emotional experiences and discoveries.

Spotify: “Found Them First”

Spotify is a music streaming service that competes with a host of other services supported by some combination of advertising and subscriptions. Some, like Tidal, have more star power, while others, like Apple Music, are backed by more cash.

Spotify seeks to differentiate itself through its use of data, using its algorithms and a user's listening history to more intelligently predict which songs you’ll like and which you won’t. It serves as a discovery tool for new music, which is what makes its Found Them First tool so clever.

Found Them First, released in late 2015, sits at the intersection of music, discovery and data. If you’re a Spotify member, you choose an artist and the tool will tell you when you started listening to an artist relative to the rest of Spotify.

Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only organization for communications, public relations, public affairs and media relations executives. Do I qualify?

It’s a fun idea (unless you discover you’re more of a follower than a tastemaker) but what makes it so effective is that it merges passion about music -- everyone wants to imagine they were first to appreciate a new artist -- with the unique data at Spotify’s disposal.

What We Can Learn From These Campaigns

Even if you’re not at a large technology company with a giant marketing budget, here are three pieces of advice when brainstorming content:

  • Tie content to your brand and what you value. Start with something essential to your brand. It might be a belief your brand is committed to. It might be something you do better than competitors. Creating content that demonstrates what you believe or that shows your competitive advantage in a surprising way is potentially powerful and more likely to be unique.
  • Think about emotional angles. Raw information is plentiful on the internet. These campaigns remind us that people are curious about themselves, they like to compare themselves to others and they like and share emotional, unscripted moments.
  • Offer value to the user. Anything you ask people to do online has to be worth their time. Spotify’s tool offers interesting information for relatively little work. By contrast, entering Momondo’s competition is more effort, so there are significant incentives to do so.

So the next time you’re facing a blank whiteboard, consider how your brand might be deployed in support of your content goals. It might make generating ideas just a little less frustrating.