How to be a content Hero

Zero to Hero

Hero content celebrates your major moments as a brand. Whether it’s in a featured blog, article, video or campaign, this is the inspirational and aspirational content that focuses on your brand’s story, identity or values. It is designed to raise awareness, be shared widely and bring new audiences to your brand.

While some brands still have the expectation that all their marketing content needs to go viral, this perception is slowly diminishing. Hero content is designed to have the potential to go viral – it is the crown jewel in your content strategy tiara – but its main goal is to boost brand visibility in the short term so you can build an engaged audience with other content.

Schedule your Hero pieces to promote the most important events of the year or an exciting new product launch. Great examples from 2017 that entertain and inspire with emotional storytelling are John Lewis Christmas advert #MoztheMonster and Audi: Clowns TV advert for new intelligent technology.

Here at the Outlook Creative Group, we’ve created Hero content for big brands, including the inspiring 1000 Days video for EDF Energy for 2012 London Olympic Games:

Make the most of your Hero content

The YouTube Brand Playbook, which pioneered the Hero, Hub, Help strategy, includes advice for maximising your Hero content:

• Use Google Trends to gauge how much early and sustained interest there is around an event.
• Develop a programming calendar covering all the Hub content you are going to create or curate for the event.
• Ask yourself: Would people bother to share this on social media? Would this make a good newspaper headline? Can you imagine your audience paying for this content?
• Ask for your audience’s participation in the event. Can they design it? Star in it? Vote for it? Turn your audience into advocates who will promote ahead of the launch.
• Use offline advertising, social media posts and influencer support. Planned promotional strategies that build over time work better than one-off flashes of activity.

Although it’s roots are in YouTube, Hero content is more than just video. Create and promote as many different content types on the platforms your audience regularly uses to develop shared passions and start building your community.

We can help turn you into the hero of your business. Get in touch to start the conversation.