The Art of Building Content Campaigns

Maximize your ROI with boosted engagement and earned media.

First of all, what is a content campaign? It’s basically a series of content that contains some common thread such as a spokesperson, narrative, or subject. Essentially, you’re just expanding an ad campaign beyond ads. Now that same spokesperson on TV who made Bob bust a gut is on your website explaining to Bob how your tech works. This has two levels of benefits.

1. Your spokesperson earned Bob’s respect with their wit on TV, so now Bob is more inclined to listen to them when they pop up on his Facebook timeline or YouTube feed. You spend a decent amount of money getting your spokesperson in front of Bob, so securing that engagement is very important.

2. If executed perfectly, you can even get Bob to seek out the rest of your campaign. Now, instead of having to continually pay to get your message in front of Bob, he’s going out of his way to see what your spokesperson is up to these days. Oh yeah, and Bob’s probably sharing this with his friends. Congrats, you just got earned media.

Ok, now on to the tough part — executing. It’s going to be a ton of time and effort up front, but things will get more efficient with each subsequent piece of the campaign and the ROI will increase.

The way we start conceptualizing a content campaign is with a StoryForm (essentially an ad with a full emphasis on narrative). This serves as a good starting point because you develop characters, tone, world, and the beginnings of a meta-narrative. From there, we dissect and expand. Maybe this story leads to a BlueBook on your website to break down a product or service. Or maybe one of your characters appears on a foreshadowing vignette in TikTok ads. Once you’ve established an initial campaign concept, all bets are off.