How brands can create relevant and authentic content in no time

Brands can - and must - get in touch with their target groups through a wide variety of channels. In addition to the traditional advertising and communication options, marketing managers need constantly new, relevant content for social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest to perform well. It goes without saying that customers expect interesting storytelling across all different channels. Hence, each communication channel should always be filled with tailored content, raising production needs immensely.

The challenge for brands is to keep up with the ever-increasing need for content without compromising on quality, authenticity and relevance. After all, with marketing budgets remaining the same, more and more content must be created in an ever-shorter amount of time.

Linear production models are out of date

Therefore, traditional production models, that allow brands to create a handful of large campaigns in a year, no longer work today. An advertising campaign is unable to keep the target group's attention long-term and individual ads are also not an effective tactic in the digital marketing mix.

When creating visual content for a constantly growing number of customer contact points, marketing managers must also keep an eye on diversity and scope, as well as the posting frequency. In addition, brands generally have several social platforms - often in different languages and regions - that they must continuously fill with appealing, brand-linked content in order to stay at the top of their customers and stand out from the competition.

The amount of content demanded by consumers requires more resources, more time and more budget. With the increased demand for content, the linear production process takes too long and is too expensive on top. Briefing a production agency traditionally often took several weeks: with the amount of different content required today, this is no longer possible. The production of content needs a transformation to meet today's brand appearances in terms of budget and authenticity.

The new way of content production

More and more brands are looking for ways to get high-quality, creative content in various formats from a single source. Platforms like Shutterstock Custom, for instance, offer companies and agencies an infrastructure for easy content creation. Visual content that is authentic, inexpensive and scalable is created efficiently for different channels. The corresponding brand guidelines and briefing are created within an intuitive dashboard. Among the 750,000 Shutterstock producers, there are suitable providers all over the world who will carry out the briefing accordingly within a short time. Customers then simply use the platform to select their assets, such as photos, video clips, GIFs or cinematographs, and edit them further as required.

This type of content production is particularly interesting for international campaigns and those that require a local focus. Due to the global presence of Shutterstock providers, worldwide shootings do not mean an explosion in costs. To create a global brand campaign, teams often must be sent around the world to produce the content defined in the campaign briefing. The cost of flights and accommodation alone meant that a substantial part of the budget was spent before filming began.

Working with international photographers, videographers and creatives helps cut costs and reduces the time it takes to create content. because they are already on site and can quickly complete the job. Even global campaigns can be easily adapted to different local peculiarities by producing special content for different sales markets.

By automating the content production process, marketing managers can quickly generate locally relevant and authentic content for a wide variety of channels and offer their target groups real brand experiences. (Source: Shutterstock)

By MediaBUZZ