CONTENT STRANDS IN COVID TIMES
Like everyone else, over the past few months we’ve been glued to every new government announcement – not just for our own personal lives but also the respective businesses of our clients. Normally our content strategy falls into two strands; brand awareness and/or product push, with various pillars of conversation sitting underneath. The pandemic however added another key pillar – ‘covid reactionary’, this is content that was created under the reactive/topical content pillar but hosted a mix of vital service updates and relevant trends – reflective of each government announcement.
While each client has nuanced and different ways of communicating with its audience, and the pandemic affected businesses in many different ways, we’ve seen our content within this timeframe fall into three categories; procedural updates, relevant & topical, and the hard sell.
1) Procedural Updates were created for brands that needed to let their audiences know the steps they were taking to keep both their customers and staff as safe as possible. For clients like Pizza Hut and Bombay Pantry, this was to assure people that they were taking all necessary precautions in the cooking and delivery of their food. Whilst listed as essential services – takeaways saw a dramatic drop off in orders as people foolishly stockpiled from their local supermarkets, but with clear social media content constantly reassuring them the safety of a delivery treat – much of the stockpiled food is likely still sitting in the freezers in homes. Here are examples of smart, clear and effective animations we created for each to highlight contactless delivery.
2) Relevant & Topical posts were quick to jump on all the trending topics – from the deluge of Insta Live Streams, the emergence of House Party App, running out of things to keep the kids entertained, the viral marble race video, the Netflix Watch Parties or Zoom Call Dates, and the home workouts – dear god the Home Workouts?! We covered it all for our brands by creating premium quality animated videos and images which highlighted the oddness of the situation while putting the brands to the fore, tongues placed firmly in cheeks.
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3) Product Sell Whilst the two above pillars cover mostly brand awareness pieces – we had to make our targeted dark ads for some brands much more detailed and leaner. Audiences which would normally have been split broadly were now hyper-targeted through interest groups, demographics, and geo-location. The functionality of these posts is to shorten the user journey to purchase as much as possible with product sell and offers the main feature. The content is then tailored to the specific message we need to deliver. This is a method we always approach our social advertising in H+B, but the pressure is heightened in a pandemic to account for every last click/cent – thankfully we’ve been able to celebrate success throughout delivery real measurable ROI for clients.
The above examples give brief insight into the effective content pieces we’ve created for our clients throughout this pandemic. Each brand had its own set of challenges – from staffing restrictions, to supply line interruptions, to the general drop off in consumerism as people hunkered down. As lockdown eases and we see more new conversations evolve and trending topics to latch on to; keep an eye on our clients’ channels for plenty more of the same.
To read up on the results and effectiveness of our COVID content strategy for Pizza Hut, see our case study here.