“Don’t take that tone with me!”

“Instead, take a test with me.”

No logos, no brand names.

Can you identify which condom brand is this witty copy from?

If you were able to identify the brand from the type of content and its elements (wit, irreverence, outspokenness, etc.), it is because of its Tone of Voice. For instance the two pictures above — minimalist posters with subtle but suggestive wordplays and at times audacious attempts to talk about sex and physical intimacy, you know it has to be Durex.

Collaterals Assemble!

As the Content Marketing Institute puts it, get hold of all the content that is representative of your brand. Social media, websites, e-books, whitepapers — everything. Do you see any of them which make you go like, “This could have come from any of our competitors”? Cast them aside.

Select the content that is unique to your brand.

You can also filter it according to the response you’ve received on various forms of content but I’d suggest going with the former method.

Being Human!

If your brand was to be a person, what’d it be like?

Diligent, Smart and Courageous like Hermione?

Or Innocent, Quirky and Authentic like Ron Weasley?

Characterize your brand with key adjectives (preferably 3). It is, however, not as easy as it sounds. You need to work with all the elements of your brand identity and perception to decide these adjectives. These adjectives are the ‘Voice’ of your brand.

This & Not That!

Decide what your brand is and what it is not.

You say your brand is ‘Passionate’, clarify that it is so because ‘It has an undying spirit’ and not because ‘It is radical or aggressive’. This means that you have to curate the communication you send out accordingly. Each type of marketing collateral, from temporary stories on social media to permanent ones like your website, the message should be uniform and focused on the three adjectives you’ve chosen.

Get Going!

After you’ve decided what to do and what not to do in order to maintain the desired tone for your brand, it is time to put it into action. Start aligning your communication, presence and thereby your perception according to it. Easier said than done, I know! Get hold of your team, make them sit down over an uninterrupted supply of coffee and show them what examples of how to modify the tone. Remember, this is important because it’s not mathematics, the level of subjectivity is higher and your team should know exactly what you want to do with the brand.

Do this every time there is a shift in the course of your organisation or the brand. Regular reviews and corrective measures will keep your communication on track and increasingly impactful.

This isn’t coming from an expert but I hope reading this makes your brand talk the way you want it to!

May you pick all Elaichis off your Biryani!

“I hate cake!”

“I love Elaichi in my biryani!”

“I love filling out forms!”

Said no one ever!

In the age where smart handhelds are deemed to be omnipotent, the potential customers of businesses advertising online expect certain ease and convenience even when they are being exposed to advertisements. Facebook’s new advertising option, Facebook Lead Ads, cater to the same requirement.

Rony, the owner of a local bookstore in Bengaluru, India often uses Facebook Ads as a tool to get newsletter sign-ups for his business. Viny, the founder of an Online Creative Writing School uses Facebook Ads to make her potential customers aware of her business and its services. Like Rony and Viny, there are innumerable other marketers and business owners that use highly targeted Facebook Adverts to connect to people who are interested in their business.

Say What?

A Facebook Lead Ad is a Facebook Advert that is meant to capture information (leads) of a potential customer in a form that is hosted locally on Facebook itself.

As Facebook puts it,

“Facebook lead ads make the lead generation process easy. People can simply tap your ad and a form pops up — it’s already pre-populated with their Facebook contact information and ready to be sent directly to you. With just a few taps, they can get the information they want, and you generate a qualified lead for your business”.

This is the convenience that helps the target audience react better to these advertisements. Easy few-taps lead capture mechanism, auto-filled form fields and no redirecting to a third-party website make lead generation easier and faster than ever.

So, What’s Different About Lead Ads?

Take-offs and no landing!

A lot of things are different about Lead Ads, but most importantly the absence of a landing page. As and when a thumb taps on a Facebook Lead Advert, a form pops open — On Facebook Itself! Yes, the advertisement will not lead the audience to the advertiser’s landing page. The person seeing the advertisement will make a decision to tap on the advertisement or not solely based on the information available in the copy of the advertisement in the person’s Facebook feed. This is a challenge for the advertisers to get their creative hats on to have compelling information about their business in the advertisement. The advertisers have a little help in terms of an increased character limit for the copy of their ads with the help of tools like Power Editor while setting up their ads. Also, the audience will not be redirected to the advertiser’s website after they submit their information in the lead capture fields. This means that the advertisers will have to make sure that they deliver on their promises (through e-mails or any other form of communication) that they made while taking required information from the audience.

An observation that is of key importance while lead advertising on Facebook is that once a person has tapped and submitted his/her information into the advertisement, there is an option of visiting the advertiser’s website that is not mandatory. While this on one hand gives the person the freedom to close the tab and browse on, it may cause confusion in his/her mind as to what to do next to get the resource that was promised for the information he provided. This could affect the campaign performance adversely.

Not Customary but Custom Questions!

Yes, gone are the days when advertisers could simply ask the customers their contact information as leads. Facebook Lead Ads lets them ask customised questions — “How often do you want to hear from us?” for a newsletter sign-up or “How many people are in your household?” for just sampling. This is a huge plus when it comes to generating quality leads.

Facebook also has something to say on the art of asking the right questions in order to accomplish business goals: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1607931762802448?helpref=faq_content

Accessing the Leads

Facebook Lead Ads collect the lead data on the Facebook page of the advertiser. The advertisers need to transfer this information from their Facebook page to their Lead Management System/CRM software for its effective utilisation by their tele-calling teams or backend operations.

If only there was a way to bridge the advertisers’ Facebook data and their CRM software, in real time!

There are players in the industry which offer a real-time updating tool (not mentioning them here intentionally) that pulls the lead information as and when it is recorded on the advertisers’ Facebook Ad and uploads it into the Lead Management Systems or CRM software for the advertisers to get going on converting them. The macro-based transformations that some of these tools provide help the cause of the CRM software by pulling in information from the capturing fields in the form required (Example- First Name and Last Name pulled separately but pushed into the CRM as one [First Name][Last Name]). Apart from this, a whole array of analytical insights help you segregate the leads based on their quality/utility for the business. This is made possible by an end-to-end tracking system.

All in all, Facebook Lead Ads are a step towards a mini revolution in the arena of direct response marketers. An effective Lead Generation campaign could do wonders at the top of the funnel to provide just the boost your business needs. Getting aboard with the new feature from Facebook could benefit in future as this new ad type will revolutionize the scenario with a few augmentations that might (read should) not be far away.

So, if you, like Rony and Viny are all geared up to ‘lead’ the way with your business, Facebook Lead Ads could very well be the way to go!

Hope this was a useful read!

Until Next Time!

May you pick all the Elaichis out of your Biryani!

TVF Play is back with a bang and how! A sabbatical after the recent unpleasant events surely has helped. “Yeh Meri Family” packs more than a punch or two in terms of content strategy. The crisp 7-episode web series wraps nostalgia in simple memories without being emotionally exhausting or didactical in its approach. The series is a result of the second partnership between TVF and AMFI (Association of Mutual Funds of India) and is a brilliant effort in terms of educating and nurturing its target audience. The series is a mosaic of classic incidents which form a part of every 90s kid’s childhood. The show is set in Jaipur over the events of a 12-year-old’s summer vacation of 1998, revolving around the simplicity in conflicts, emotions and bonding of the five-member Gupta family.

What makes this gem a Content Strategy masterpiece? Read On…

The series is the result of the collaboration between TVF and “Mutual Fund Sahi hai”, the extensive campaign by Association of Mutual Funds of India’s (AMFI) which makes it the content masterstroke it is. Targeting the Tier — II and nearby cities (in terms of demographics), the show is set in Jaipur. It showcases a middle-class family delivering the most nostalgic dose of light-hearted dramedy. The show focuses on the deeply embedded concept of an important social institution — the family.

Crisp — 7 Episodes, around 30 minutes each. The episodes are light, both in content and in duration. This is important as the audience that it seeks is the one that watches content on-the-go during coffee/lunch breaks, metro rides and occasional smoking breaks during work. Each subsequent episode is not very heavily dependent on the previous one which makes it easier for a viewer to relate to any of the episodes independently. This helps the social media case as these videos have been shared randomly on platforms like Facebook in the form of short clips or links to the episodes on YouTube. A viewer who comes across a random video clip from the series can relate to it instantly without having watched any of the previous episodes.

Relevant — The Slice-of-life show targets the 90s kids — a population which is the prime target for mutual funds currently, to deliver a strong dose of nostalgia and all things relatable. The central character of the show, Harshu, is a 12-year-old in the year 1998. This puts him in the age bracket that is the sweet spot as far as the target audience for mutual funds is concerned. The middle class is another segment that has immense potential for AMFI’s current plan of expanding mutual fund investments on a large scale. The previous partnership of TVF and AMFI was with “The Aam Aadmi Family” which also had the middle class as its focal point. Further, Relatable Content, like always, proves to be the game changer here. The deftness lies in the ease with which the series has been kept simple and avoids the overuse of relatability. Investor Education is done through scenes which somehow manage to not look out of place during an episode. The content of the show employs customer success stories, the proven tactic to influence the audience — Harshu’s father, played by Akarsh Khurana is an investment advisor and is all praises for mutual funds. The ideal, loving and adorable father image of the character evokes a sense of credibility when he advises his clients on matters such as risks associated with mutual funds.

The story appeals to the Family-Oriented Lifestyle Segment wherein the decisions as important as financial investments are made by the elders of the family keeping in mind the well-being of the family and not just financial gains. Apart from that, in any piece of drama that aims to cater to a specific audience, it is extremely important that the audience takes sides — the viewer should ‘want’ something good to happen to the main character. For this, the characters should not be larger-than-life or unrelatable to the audience. “Yeh Meri Family” hits the nail on the head — Mr Gupta is not an ideal, preaching father but the one with his own shortcomings; Dabbu, the elder son of the family is not entirely the ideal, scripture of a son — he has his ‘bad habits’ that he hides from his parents like any other teenager. Similarly, Harshu, the 12-year-old is not entirely mischievous, but is an adorable, kind-hearted kid.

The Buying Cycle — While I enjoyed every bit of this amazing work, I could not help but think where does this entire concept of marketing a financial product subtly fit in the buying cycle?

Attract — Capture — Nurture — Convert — Expand

Every episode begins with an advertisement about mutual funds and contains one or more scenes on the same. The major thrust points were — Risks associated and Benefits. These advertisements are conversational that ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ the audience what they are trying to sell. While some strategically placed scenes on mutual fund awareness and the ads talk about ‘Mutual Fund Sahi Hai’ website, a definite call-to-action is missing, which is simply because this is not a case of in-your-face product placement.

The scenes depict a conversation between Akarsh Khurana (Mr Gupta) and his clients wherein he is shown busting myths (like mutual funds can invest solely in stock markets) and focusing on the importance of patience in investments like these during tough times. While the Benefits part tends to ‘Attract’ the customer, it is the other one that does it better along with nurturing the already existing customers. With financial products and services, marketing does not have to focus on telling ‘what the product/service can do’ as much as it needs to focus on showing the customer how ‘what it can’t do’ will affect him.

All in all, the storytelling genius wins it for TVF in this one. Tightly woven, simple plot arrests the viewer right from the start almost in a comatose grip refusing to let go. The ease with which the incidents are illustrated with meticulous detailing is truly admirable. “Yeh Meri Family” is truly a gem in terms of Content Strategy with its ordinary brilliance that at times, caresses and wrenches the heart of the viewer at the same time.