Brands wanting to build communities and loyal followers should ensure their content is authentic, consistent and fresh, say brand owners and influencers at the India D2C Summit 2024
Mumbai: We live in a content era. And content plays a critical role in building a brand, especially if it is in the D2C space. There has been an explosion of niche D2C brands in recent years. Some brands solve specific problems for consumers ranging from gut issues to problems managing a specific hair type. The key to the success of such brands is building strong communities through relatable content, said brand owners and influencers speaking at the India D2C Summit in Mumbai.
The 3 Golden Rules of building relatable content are:
Authenticity: Consumers love brand stories and they work well especially if it is promoter-generated content. “People don’t like faceless brands. That is why founder-generated content works well. However, the stories have to be authentic,” said Nikita Khanna, Founder of hair care brand Moxie Beauty. “People want to interact with a person and not a brand,” she added.
Khanna said that she was able to build a thriving community on social media when she started sharing videos discussing her hair issues and how she launched the brand to solve them. She shared that she would get hundreds of messages from people facing similar issues. It also gave her insight into other problems that she could solve with her products.
Social media influencer and content creator Aina Jain felt that the content from a brand is better received if it is by a person rather than just text.
“To get genuine engagement brands should ensure that there is a human touch,” she said.
Consistency: Brands also need to ensure that they put out content regularly. Also, consistency needs to be in the brand language and the ethos that the brands stand for, said brand owners speaking at the Summit.
Arjun Vaidya, Co-founder, of V3 Ventures who also has launched his brands and has used content marketing to engage said that founders putting themselves in front of the camera, should be wary of vanity metrics and should always keep the objective of the content in mind.
“The problem with straying from the objective is users get confused about what they come to you for. Therefore, the objective has to be very clear,” he said.
Freshness: Freshness can come from changing the setting of where the content has been created and creativity. Vaidya said that he noticed a stagnation in the number of followers after a year of shooting in the same setting.
“Brands need to think out of the box. Creativity is very important,” Jain said.
Prabhu Karthikeyan V, The Good Bug said that freshness of content is critical and his company brings that in by varying the speaker in the videos. “Sometimes we put out content by genuine customers and sometimes we get experts to speak about gut health.
The other important factor according to the experts was the relevance of the content. The content should not be put out just to follow a trend but it should be meaningful to the target audience, they said.
