So what is content seeding? Well, a good content seeding strategy will involve content creation approach. Content seeding is what you do with that content once you've created it. We're going to look at ways in which you can target different audiences using different business objectives. And also delivering that content to the right place at the right time. What are the benefits of contents seeding? Well, this content will deliver in wider reach the more traditional forms of marketing if done correctly. By tailoring your content to your specific audiences, you can make sure that you're reaching the right audience with a highly relevant message, increasing your relevancy at that moment in time. You can increase traffic and awareness of your brand using content seeding, benefit your SEO on your search engine ranking. And also generate sales leads and business interests leads into what it is that you're selling. So when we look at the ecosystem in which content can be seeded, there are three main areas. The first of which are your own channels. These are channels in which you have full creative and administrative control over. Indeed, these can feature your social media platforms for your business or brand, your company website or any collateral that you use for marketing purposes that you have full control and autonomy over. Another area to consider is the earned and paid section. These are essentially third party channels that you necessarily don't have full control over. But you can help influence either through trying to pay for placement of your business or product message or trying to use methods like pr to try and generate organic coverage for your brand or business. The center objective in this particular slide is the collaborative space. This is where your earned and paid channels also work well with your own channels. Where we look at this kind of space stuff for forums, review sites, influencer marketing, a collaborative approach helps benefit your brand. But also the third party channels by providing content that benefits both of you. Mechanics of content seeding can involve items like posting. So this is publishing native to your social media channels, what we then look at as a form of measurement. How are we deciding on how this is being successful with our intended audience? Or what the resonance? So stuff like measuring the reach, the engagements or indeed the sentiment, which is hugely important. A particular post is published on a social media platform channel may have huge engagement. But that engagement might be negative. So make sure to measure the sentiment of any engagements if that is okay with that you want to measure. We then consider boosting. So if a piece of content has been published to a channel and it gets great pick up organically, then it may be worth considering putting some paid investment behind to get it out to a wider audience and further your business message. And lastly, amplifying. So if a consumer or a third party or a member of the media has engaged with your brand or your business in a positive way, why not amplify that and leverage it to its maximum potential? This may involve putting some media placement or media spend behind it to get it out to a much wider audience. Again, leveraging this UGC or user generated content form of marketing can be very impactful for your business. So what are some challenges when it comes to content seeding? Well, reach can be a challenge. Many of the social media platforms now charge brands and businesses to achieve great reach. This is part of their own wider business model to charge brands to get seen by consumers. Understanding that social media is a pay for play space will be integral to your social media strategy. And also to getting great content seeding. Relevancy, making sure that your brand or your business message is seen at the right space at the right time can be challenging. News agendas, topical moments, everything shifts. So trying to keep up to date date with that can be quite a challenge. Transparency, making sure that all of your content is very clearly paid for if it is indeed paid for organic. To not mislead consumers, we have to be very careful to declare anything that is a paid promotion or an advertisement and can be dressed up as essentially organic content. This is very important when we get on to the point of discussing influencer marketing. The content creation itself, so making sure that you have the resource adequate to create content, whether that be video, graphic design or indeed copyrighting, and making sure that you can fulfill the content needs of your intended audience. Measurement can be a tricky area for a lot of businesses. Being able to determine the success or indeed the failures of a piece of content and being able to learn from an optimized going forward can be a challenge if you're new to content seeding and content outreach. Make sure you invest some time in preparing what success looks like for your brand or business before you invest in the content creation aspect. And be able to track and measure the benefits and the return on your investment. Budget and resource as we touched on obviously, resource in terms of content creation can be a challenge. Especially for smaller businesses, budget can be a difficult space to play in. This is important to consider when we do talk about the reach and how the social media platforms are now charging brands for them to be seen within an algorithm based news feed. And lastly, tight collaboration. Making sure that all of your marketing materials have a consistent narrative that your social media isn't telling a different story to your above the line TV ad or that your outdoor advertising isn't consistent with your Instagram or your Twitter campaign that you're running at present. Making sure that all of your business aspects, whether they be online or offline, are all working together in the one direction with a consistent brand tone of voice and message. This can be a challenge when contents seeding as it may be very enticing or impulsive to kind of jump on a trend that might be really topical at the moment. But trying to make sure that your campaign and your strategy ties through to your entire brand positioning piece can be a real challenge. We're going to look at a case to leave from Unilever. This platform all things here was set up to help them market their hair care offering. This is a great example of contents seeding that used owned earned and collaborative channels altogether. The brands that look after hair care and Unilever including Dove, Treasure May and Suave. All put together their resources to create a YouTube channel that created their own content. But also employed the use of third party content. They used beauty bloggers from across the UK and Ireland to help create content for that channel. Leveraging on their own audience and their own influence, they were able to build out a very cohesive campaign that reached over 64 million people globally. This campaign reached as far as Russia and Brazil being able to show people great inspiration for hairstyles that were quite topical using their products at the heart of it all. This was a masterclass in content seeding. And was a great success for the brand continuing to grow to this day. An example of bad content seeding came from Honda. They decided one year to redirect their entire television advertising budget and try to create a media platform around the brand. This included live gigs and product reviews, some lifestyle pieces that necessarily weren't very easily linked back to the brand. Ultimately, it was deemed a bit of a failure. The campaign and the product in terms of the website was rushed to market. Users were very confused by the consumer journey in which they were supposed to carry out on the site. And ultimately, it was a great example of good content, but probably just seeded in the wrong way. Consumers just didn't see Honda as a media channel and really didn't buy into the process. When looking at engagement on content, it's worth considering different platforms. When we talk about this, essentially that audiences engage differently on different platforms, the same person could retweet something on Twitter but could decide they are only going to comment on Facebook. Really, the audiences interact in very different ways when they're brought to different social media platforms. Key things to consider in this area are that there is no one size that fits all. Largely different audiences for different businesses will really interact in very different ways. It's important for you to trial and trial again and try and identify exactly how your audience interact with certain elements of content as per the individual channels. Have a look at what content formats are available on the different channels. So Facebook 360, lead generation tools that are available through Twitter, LinkedIn in males. There's a whole host of very unique content formats that are individual to each of the platforms. Being familiar with these content formats for seeding your content will help you optimize correctly as per the social media platform. Consider your personas. We're going to develop this later on this presentation. However, it is very important to mention it now that you're different intended users at the different stages of their buying process or, indeed, their awareness of your brand or business will want different types of content from you. Make sure that you're creating content that is mapped out against an individual content persona. And it's based on real insights about your target audience. And lastly, trial and test. In saying this again and again, you have maybe find a nugget or a gem where something exceeds expectations and really performs very well. Sometimes there's no rhyme or reason to this. And it might be just that you've stumbled upon a spot of sheer look. Being able to try and emulate this again and again and learn from your mistakes will help you gain great engagement on your social media content. It's important not to mislead audiences when seeding your content. So important things to consider other following, declarations on your content. Certainly, if you're seeing a piece of paid for media through an influencer channel or indeed through a third party publisher, it is definitely worth declaring on that piece of content that what you're seeding is in fact a paid for advertisement. We must never to mislead consumers and they can often be harsh repercussions, including fines. Individual business verticals such as pharmaceuticals or indeed, the banking or industries around insurance, all have their own set of rules for declaring content that is paid for. Make sure that you're familiar if you operate in one of these regulated industries. Truthful messaging, making sure essentially that you're not misleading customers by effectively telling them lies through your content. Make sure that you are always truthful in the content that you put out, or anybody who is employed on your behalf to put out content. Make sure that the veracity of what they're saying is always checked. Clarity on involvement must be stated by your third party publishers. This might be as simple as a fee was paid to me for X or indeed, I was supplied with free products for a review of the latest pharmaceutical product. Making sure that you're declaring exactly what your relationship is with the influencer or with the third party channel, and that they declare it to. And lastly, bio declaration. This may sound a bit complex, but it's actually quite simple. Very much it means that it's a declaration or a line in your bio your about section to inform people who follow you or like your brand exactly what it is that you're going to be speaking about. That way, you're not necessarily seeding out cat videos all day but actually subtly suggesting insurance messages by night. Essentially, what you're doing is you're letting your social audiences know what kind of content they should expect to see from you. So you're not misleading them.
