Blending Organic and Branded Content Marketing on Social

Branded content should be top of mind for social media professionals right now. According to The Brand Shop, 92% of consumers want ads that feel like a story — and that’s where branded content comes in, while 55% report they’re more likely to remember a story than a list of facts. By sharing entertaining content that connects to a narrative that resonates with their audience, brands can reach their audience in a more authentic way and build brand awareness among new and existing followers. 

Branded content ads have become a seamless solution for paid in-feed and story campaigns that help to build trust with your audience and convert more consumers. Marketers can not only leverage an influencer’s expertise in social-first content creation, but their credibility with audiences as well. 

What Is Branded Content?

Branded content is a marketing approach where content is specifically created for a brand — specifically, branded content is designed to promote a brand’s values and story to build connection and engagement with its audience by aligning with their interests and beliefs. This type of content incorporates storytelling, shared experiences or providing valuable content that resonates with consumers on a deep level. 

Branded content is also defined by some social platforms, like Meta, simply as content that an influencer or creator shares content made in partnership with a brand or with product sent to them by a brand, or any content made where you promote a product you made yourself. 

The goal of branded content is to entertain, educate or inspire others. Branded content can be created through paid ads, UGC, partnerships and other immersive experiences. These can range from something small, like a sponsored post where a creator talks about an issue in their life and how the brand or product in mind provided a solution, or something large, like the Lego Movie, which incorporates the Lego brand along with related brands like DC and the Cartoon Network. 

A great example of a brand that incorporates storytelling in their overall social media marketing strategy is Patagonia — on social media, you’ll rarely find them selling a specific product, instead, they share UGC and other visuals from their customer’s outdoor adventures taken while wearing Patagonia. This content demonstrates how their product is used and how it impacts their target demographic. They also highlight environmental initiatives throughout their feed, showcasing their commitment to keeping the landscapes they explore clean and preserved. This is also woven throughout their website and e-commerce strategy, with things like their ‘Running for Air’ challenge easy to find — and sign up for — while users are browsing their website. 

The ‘Running for Air’ challenge is a great example of branded content — this challenge aims to raise money for clean air advocacy, pushing participants to climb 1,000 feet in 10 days through the Strava app. This challenge and the social platform, Strava, connect to Patagonia’s brand identity that relates to climbing, environmental causes and physical activity. 

Why Brands and Creators Benefit from Branded Content

Branded content offers significant benefits for brands and creators — done well, branded content enhances visibility, credibility and engagement, and perhaps most importantly, helps your audience understand who you are, deeply and authentically. Let’s dive into the advantages of branded content for brands: 

Boost Authenticity and Trust 

Branded content often appears more authentic than traditional ads. By collaborating with creators who’ve established trust with their audience, brands can leverage their credibility to build a better connection with their audience. 

Increase Reach and Engagement

Partnering with creators allows brands to tap into established communities, helping them to build their own community. Creators have loyal followers who trust their recommendations, leading to higher engagement rates. This expanded reach can translate into increased brand awareness and customer acquisition. Along with increased reach, creators typically have a deep understanding of their audiences including their interests and behaviors. Brands can use this understanding to deliver more relevant content. 

Creative Storytelling 

Influencers are often skilled storytellers who can present brand messaging in unique, compelling ways. One of the keys of branded content is to avoid overtly ‘selling’ a product or brand — sharing a personal story that connects to the product or brand is a great way to bridge the gap between branded content and a straight-up sales pitch.

How To Create Engaging Branded Content

Creating engaging branded content requires a broad understanding of your audience and your brand narrative. 

Creating engaging branded content involves a strategic approach that combines audience insights, storytelling and data-driven optimization. Follow these steps to craft content that resonates with your audience and drives engagement.

Understand Your Audience 

Researching and analyzing your audience is typically the first step in crafting any strategy or tactic. In this step, you should examine demographic data such as your audience’s age, gender, location and occupation. 

From there, take time to look into their interests and behavior using tools like Google Analytics and Social Listening to determine what trends and topics your audience is interested in. This can also inform you of your audience’s pain points — if there’s an opportunity within your branded content to solve your audience’s pain points, you should incorporate this into upcoming content. 

Understanding your audience can also give you an idea of the best influencers or brands to partner with. For example, let’s say you’re an apparel brand with an audience who’s interested in golf. It would likely be advantageous to partner with a brand ambassador who plays gold professionally, an influencer in the space or even work on eventually creating golf apparel.

Define Brand Message 

Once you understand your audience’s motivations and interests, it’s time to define and refine your brand’s mission and values. This involves crafting your core message, determining the key message you want to share and honing your brand voice to establish a consistent tone and style that reflects your brand’s personality. This will ensure that you communicate your message in a way that feels authentic. 

Develop Your Content Strategy

Now it’s time to craft your content strategy and outline the tactics you’ll use to achieve success. Before you determine which partners, stories and visuals you’ll share, in this step, you should outline a rough calendar — beyond just determining when you’ll post content, you should also outline your timeline for reaching out to influencers and any internal deadlines and teams you’ll need to loop in. This is also the prime time to determine the type of content you want to share — will carousel posts, Reels or even Facebook posts reach your audience? 

Craft Your Narrative

Now that you’ve determined your content timeline and what type of content your audience wants, it’s time to get into the meat of your branded content campaign. Which brand story do you want to tell? Is there a specific solution you’d like to call out? 

Nivea, for example, highlights several issues their signature, classic cream solves in their TikTok strategy — from tattoo care to foot care for post-roller skating adventures. The influencers and UGC Nivea shares on its feed incorporate its product in a personal way that other people can connect with. To complement this content, they’ve included the tiktok hashtag ‘#TattooStories’ and ‘#GlowingSkin’ to bring more visibility to their content and reach those who may not be searching branded terms.

Identify Influencers and Brand Ambassadors

We mention above that learning more about your audience is a great way to determine which influencers they’ll resonate with. You should also plan your outreach, and determine which influencers, ambassadors or UGC you’ll use to fit various narratives.

David’s Bridal (@davidsbridal) tapped into the power and influence of reality TV, using Love is Blind star Jessica Vestal in their campaign — who didn’t find love on the show — instead falling in love with a number of David’s Bridal dresses for their 2024 campaign. This is a great example of a partnership who kept a consistent theme and tapped into a timely pop culture moment the majority of their audience was invested in.

Craft High-Quality Visuals 

Of course, creating high-quality visuals is a key component of sharing branded content. Whether you’re making content in-house or working with an influencer, your brief should include specific instructions surrounding filming orientation, length, content and context. You should also determine deadlines for both your in-house team and any partners you’re creating content with. 

Scripts are great, but not always necessary — if you’re tapping into an influencer who often engages with their audience in a specific way, you should lean into their authentic voice and tone and instead, offer guidelines of what to talk about or how to use a product, but not necessarily the specific words they should say. Audiences are savvy — if your content is reaching your intended audience and you work with more than one influencer, it’s highly likely they’ll catch onto a repetitive script. 

How To Run a Branded Content Ad and Measure Results

You can create branded content ads in Facebook Ads Manager or through your Instagram business account settings. Here’s how to run a branded content ad:

• First, give the creator permission to tag your brand in their content. 
• Go to your settings page and select ‘Business,’ then ‘Branded Content’. 
• Toggle the ‘Require Approvals’ button to on if it isn’t already (this will be toggled on by default). 
• Select ‘Approved Accounts,’ then search for and select your partner's handle to grant them permission to tag your brand. This also allows partners to promote these posts as ads. 
  

On the flip side, creators can select ‘Allow Business Partner to Promote’ when they share a piece of organic content and tag your profile. Static, video, carousel posts and Stories can all be boosted and promoted as branded ads. After your ad goes live, you can access all the reporting metrics you need in Ads Manager. For organic Instagram branded content, social teams can view insights in Brand Collabs Manager (accessed from Facebook Pages Settings).

Branded Content Policies You Need to Know

Though posting branded content is a quick and easy social advertising solution for brands and creators, both parties must comply with TikTok, Instagram and Facebook’s policies. While there are few guidelines aside from the typical rules to avoid harassment, hate and other content when sharing ‘content as usual’ from your own feed, things become a bit different when you’re working with influencers, collaborating with other brands or sharing sponsored content. Here are some of the branded content policies to consider on TikTok and Meta: 

Meta’s Branded Content Policies 

Meta’s branded content policies apply to both Instagram and Facebook. Meta defines branded content as ‘...a  creator or publisher’s content that features or is influenced by a business partner for an exchange of value, such as monetary payment or free gifts.’ 

Branded content must also be published with Meta’s branded content tool, which brands must apply for. When posting, they must obtain prior permission from all parties and tag the third-party product, brand or business featured in the post. In addition to this, creators are not allowed to be paid for and post content which they are not featured in or were not involved in the creation process. Depending on your region, you must also disclose whether or not a post is sponsored or an ad. 

Beyond this, there are a few types of products that social teams can’t promote or share with the branded content tool. These include: 

• Multi-level marketing companies. 
• Weapons, explosives and ammunition, including BB guns, paintball guns and non-culinary knives and weapons. 
• Regional lotteries. 
• Tobacco products. 
• Payday loans and bail bonds.
• Initial coin offerings, binary options or contract for difference trading.
• Controversial political or social issues.
• Discouraging census participation. 
• Illegal products or services.

In addition to these, brands sharing content from restricted segments — alcohol, subscription services, financial products, cosmetic procedure and family planning — must comply with age restrictions and any regional laws surrounding their respective products. 

Along with these restrictions, there are also strict rules about branded content format — these include: 

• You cannot include pre-, mid- or post-roll ads in video or audio content.
• You cannot share banner ads in videos or images.
• You cannot share title cards within the first three seconds of a video. Mid or end cards must not last longer than three consecutive seconds. 

Brands can only share branded content with the branded content tool pre, mid and post-roll ads in video and audio content, along with banner ads, title cards and card length. In essence, make sure you and your partners comply with any laws and regulations and provide all necessary disclosures to your audience when you use Facebook and Instagram for commercial content. 

TikTok Branded Content Policies 

While TikTok’s branded content policies aren’t quite as robust as Meta’s, but there are a few key things to consider when sharing branded content. Firstly, they define branded content as a product or service gifted to you, a post you’re being paid to share, an affiliate link or any company you have a relationship with and post for as a brand ambassador. Here’s what you need to take into account when sharing branded content on TikTok: 

• Ensure you follow all laws and regulations in your region or the region you target.
• Follow TikTok’s Community Guidelines and Terms of Service.

Boost Branded Content With Dash Hudson

With Dash Hudson, social teams are empowered to optimize their branded content — our Influencer and Creator ROI tool lets brands identify, track and analyze the performance of influencer partnerships to make sure partnerships and collaborations yield the best results. This data-driven approach to influencer marketing helps brands fine-tune their strategy and select the most impactful creators for their campaigns. 

Additionally, the Competitive Insights and Benchmarking tool gives brands insights into competitor performance. By benchmarking content against industry standards, brands can identify trends, discover new opportunities and pivot where needed. The combination of influencer analytics and competitive intelligence is the perfect balance to enhance your branded content strategy. 

FAQs

What does branded content mean?

Branded content means that a user (this could be the brand itself, a partner or influencer) is publishing content that works with a featured brand for either payment or product. 

What is branded content on social media? 

As we mentioned above, branded content is a transactional interaction, typically between creators or influencers and brands. On social media, it can be shown in different ways on different platforms. On most platforms, branded content is presented as either a photo or video. Photos are more common on channels like Instagram or Facebook, while video-branded content thrives on TikTok and YouTube. 

Why is branded content important?

Branded content is important as it gets to the ‘why’ and often the ‘how’ behind your organization’s or brand’s purpose. It helps your audience understand your values, which helps build an emotional connection along with the value your product offers. What’s more, branded content often employs brand partnerships (think the collaboration between the Lego Group and Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, Vertigo Entertainment and Rideback production companies to create the Lego Movie). Collaborations, whether from a brand or influencer, also open your brand to new audiences, which help increase reach and brand awareness.

What is an example of branded content?

Suppose you see a post tagged with #ad or #sponsored — that’s one example of branded content. 

Some of the most typical examples take place in the beauty industry, and fashion industry, but there are examples of branded content in just about every industry out there. 

Let’s use the home industry for example — a creator or influencer may make a post surrounding their new rug. They will discuss their favorite things about it, the details, and likely the brand. If the brand isn’t mentioned outright, it will definitely be tagged in the post. This is a very basic, but common example of branded content.

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