State of Content Marketing: Europe

Table of Contents:

I. Introduction

II. Trends

III. Best-in-Class

IV. What the Experts Are Saying

V. Predictions

VI. Conclusion

“It’s not about being the coolest kid in town, but about being the most reliable and valuable.”

I. Introduction

Call it crazy, but Adidas went into the FIFA World Cup in Brazil with the singular, ambitious goal of dominating the event on social media.

To do so, the brand would have to compete against dozens of sponsors, including heavy hitters like Coca- Cola, Sony, McDonald’s, and Hyundai.

But Adidas had an edge.

Not only was it producing the World Cup’s official match ball, but it was also busily creating an abundance of original content for its social feeds. The strategy ultimately led to 1.59 million campaign- related conversations and the title of most talked-about brand on Twitter during the global event.

“Adidas is one of the best examples of a brand creating good stories that people want to be a part of,” said Luca Della Dora, editorial director of Adidas’s social agency We Are Social in Milan. “Adidas engaged and entertained people by bringing its hero product, the World Cup ball, to life.”

Bringing their products to life is the ultimate goal for brands all over the world. In Europe, they’re succeeding more and more—thanks, in large part, to content marketing. About 71 percent of European marketers created more content in 2015 than they did the year prior. In Finland, 80 percent of marketers use original content to target their customers; in Denmark, that number rises to 86 percent.

While output levels are high, so, too, is quality. Brands are pushing the envelope by experimenting with new formats and finding fresh ways to leverage the tried-and-true tactics they’ve used in the past.

In this report, we’ll look at the latest European marketing trends and examine how top brands are consistently creating world-class content marketing campaigns.

II. Trends

Mobile video

With more than 1 billion active mobile subscriptions in Europe, video consumption on smartphones and tablets has been steadily rising, and European audiences are among those devoting more time to mobile video. In Austria, 34 percent of consumers said they watch more mobile video now than they did a year ago. In Italy, that figure was 35 percent; in Sweden, 36; and in Denmark and Finland, 39 percent.

Other studies show that smartphones and tablets are gaining on desktops. It’s a neck-and-neck race between tablets and desktops in Germany, while nearly as many Italian consumers choose to watch videos on their tablets as on a desktop computer.

DigitalVideo_EU5

As a result of this evolution, marketers across Europe are shoring up their mobile video investments. For example, since 2013, Philips has been running a digital campaign to promote its Click & Style shaving toolkit that uses mobile interactive video to let potential customers experiment with shaving. Created by Ogilvy & Mather Düsseldorf—and using video technology from Rapt Media—the campaign, available in four languages, was touted as “the world’s first fully mobile- enabled interactive video experience.”

“Designed to Play” produced some impressive results: The average viewing time of the mobile video surpassed four minutes, and consumers engaged with the media an average of three to four times.

As Lenze Boonstra, head of the global marketing team for Philips Personal Care, put it, “Given the fact that we are the first ones to launch a mobile- enabled campaign like this, I think we have delivered something promising.”

Philips_mobilevideo

Social media-exclusive content

Brands are quickly realizing the importance of providing their social media followers with original media assets. Let’s look again at Adidas. For six months prior to its 2014 FIFA World Cup campaign, the German athletic brand and its social media agency, We Are Social, collected photos and footage of Adidas-sponsored soccer players.

This exclusive content was pushed out for the brand’s “#allin or nothing” social campaign. With 1,000 images and 160 videos at its disposal, Adidas doubled its YouTube audience, attracted over a million new fans on Facebook, and generated 2.1 million mentions on Twitter—more than any other FIFA World Cup sponsor.

Adidas_Twitter

“The work Adidas did during the 2014 World Cup was outstanding in terms of content planning at scale,” Della Dora said. “It created thousands of pieces of content in order to be able to react to every single crucial moment of the competition in real time on social. It was a huge success and created a real relationship between a soccer ball and the soccer enthusiasts.”

Adidas has said that it achieved record soccer-related sales amounting to 2 billion euros as a result of the campaign. Eight million jerseys and 14 million soccer balls in the Brazuca design were sold. That’s 1 million more balls than Adidas sold in 2010.

In addition to more than 1.5 million social conversations, Adidas received 5.8 million new followers across all social platforms and 917,000 #allin hashtag mentions on Twitter. And the @brazuca Twitter account grew by 603 percent, generating over 530,000 user interactions.

Brand series

Longform video, specifically the concept of the brand series, is a rapidly emerging format among marketers, who promote everything from blouses to beer with collections of high-quality videos that embody the spirit and lifestyle associated with their brands. Since 2012, Prada’s women’s-only Miu Miu label has been enlisting female filmmakers to help craft its feminine films, which together are known as “The Miu Miu Women’s Tales.” In addition to being available online, the short films are routinely screened at the Venice Film Festival. In keeping with the mobile video trend, they can also be viewed by way of a project-specific app.

MiuMiu_app

Perrier’s five-part brand series, called “Tales of the District,” uses animation, narration, and its distinctive shade of green to tell the story of a man who is besotted by the hostess of fictional locale District Perrier, which followers can find on Tumblr.

Dutch brewing company Heineken, meanwhile, earned itself more than 6.5 million views for “The Experiment,” a three-minute original video that’s part of the ongoing global project “Enjoy Heineken Responsibly,” designed to encourage drinking in moderation. Launched in 2014 with the slogan “Dance More, Drink Slow,” the campaign has been promoted in more than 20 countries and demonstrates how a great DJ can decrease the amount that party- goers drink. Additional video content, like a behind-the-scenes look at DJ Armin van Buuren and a video offering even more insight into “the experiment,” creates an in-depth brand experience.

Inspirational storytelling

Video may be popular, but don’t let it detract from the value of longform written content. French mountaineering equipment brand Quechua uses it on its blog, Hiking on the Moon, where readers can find inspirational adventure stories of mountain-loving customers like photographer Théo Giacometti through episodic posts. With the help of articles in both English and French, photography, maps, and video, the audience can follow him through Norway’s Hardangervidda National Park, where reindeer run wild.

HikingOnTheMoon

The Swiss beverage brand Schweeps has also covered immersive territory with the digital culture and lifestyle magazine Villa Schweppes, which features articles on music festivals, Parisian bars, and fashion trends along with cocktail recipes. DJs, designers, and mixologists designed to inspire readers to adopt the brand’s hip nightlife vibe.

VillaSchweppes

Widespread influencer marketing

Last year, a Dutch startup called Influencers at Work launched Europe’s first fully automated influencer marketing service, and already, we’re starting to see major brands including Lancôme Italy and Beck’s Brewery embrace influencer campaigns.

To promote its Hypnôse Volume-à-Porter mascara, Lancôme recently partnered with social media influencers and bloggers to create a series of Facebook and Instagram videos. The campaign reportedly reached more than 5 million users and saw engagement rates as high as 2.5 percent. For Beck’s, influencers helped the beer brand promote a consumer contest with 30 social media posts, which reached 6.8 million consumers and generated 170,000 social interactions.

stefano-tratto-beck's

III. Best in class

Volvo Trucks

For both B2C and B2B consumers, Volvo Cars has a strong reputation for unique video content. In 2013, the brand partnered with Swedish House Mafia to create the wildly popular music video “Leave the World Behind,” which offered a behind-the-scenes look at the Swedish electronic group’s split and featured the auto brand’s XC60 cross-country vehicles. This year, fans got the haunting “Made by Sweden,” a four-minute visual love letter about the country. (Both projects were developed by Volvo’s agency Forsman & Bodenfors.)

But there’s another side to Volvo, and an entirely separate audience to woo. In recent years, Volvo Trucks—the brand’s commercial truck manufacturer— has emerged as a major player in the B2B content space with videos like “The Epic Split,” viewed more than 81 million times since 2013.

Most recently, Volvo Trucks launched a new video that aims to be equally as effective and engaging. “Volvo Trucks vs. Koenigsegg” was designed to extend the brand’s long-running video investment by promoting the company’s latest innovation: a dual clutch gearbox for heavy-duty trucks. It came with the tagline, “a sportscar under the hood.” To prove this claim, Volvo pitted its truck against a Swedish high-performance sports car and invited Tiff Needell, a famed motor journalist and former racecar driver, to provide commentary.

The video was the centerpiece of a multi-platform campaign that included two behind-the-scenes films, press releases, and 70 social media posts that were deployed daily over the course of the 20-day campaign.

“To build up an interest before the launch of the movie was vital,” said Björn Owen Glad, marketing manager with Volvo Trucks’ content marketing shop Spoon, the largest agency of its kind in the Nordic region.

“To succeed with content marketing, you must have a multi-channel way of thinking simply because a brand’s audience is scattered among a lot of different platforms, channels, and media.” According to Glad, this approach led to earned media in the form of 412 headlines in 35 different countries, plus a million views of the film just a week after it went live.

“To use content marketing to tell stories, build an audience, and grow your business is simply the future of marketing,” Glad said.

Lufthansa

In 2013, German airline Lufthansa did something amazing and absurd: It convinced 42 Swedes—both men and women—to legally change their names to Klaus- Heidi. Doing so gave participants a chance to win an all-expenses-paid year living in Berlin. There was only one winner, but today half of those consumers still carry the name, and Lufthansa’s “Klaus-Heidi” campaign content is the stuff of marketing legend.

“The media is still reporting about the campaign,” said Carmen Eschenbach, marketing manager with Deutsche Lufthansa AG. “And [PR firm] Burson- Marsteller happily called us the other week to inform us we were among the top 50 PR campaigns in the world.”

Credit the brand’s stellar storytelling. The goal of the unique campaign, created by DDB Stockholm, was to call attention to Lufthansa’s Stockholm-to- Berlin flight route.

“At the time, we had been in a fierce price war ever since the launch of the route,” Eschenbach explained. “Everyone was communicating the same thing: price. Our motivation was to get an emotional edge over our four competitors on the STO–BER route. We decided to sell the dream of Berlin rather than the cheap Berlin.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL1bc32t3fU

Working with a limited budget, Lufthansa used original video, a microsite that walked participants through their potential “new life” in Berlin, and the #klausheidi hashtag to spread the word about the campaign without paid media. “Klaus-Heidi” generated more than 240 million impressions and became the main driver of traffic to Lufthansa.com, second only to Google. Above all, though, the campaign invited would-be passengers to imagine themselves living in Berlin—and, by association, traveling there.

Lufthansa’s content strategy is heavy on consumer participation. The “Nonstop You” campaign that launched last year uses mobile and visual media to encourage customer interaction. A video-rich interactive microsite follows passenger storylines and allows users to experience their trips—whether business or leisure—while learning about various Lufthansa destinations, planes, and products (like mobile boarding passes).

Lufthansa_Nonstopyou

Like some airlines, Lufthansa also relies on in-flight magazines. Originally called the Lufthansa Bordbuch, the company created a magazine in 1996 and brought G+J Corporate Editors on board to develop and produce it in 1998.

But the difference between Lufthansa and other airline publishers is out. The company now has three publications in all. Lufthansa Magazin caters to “passengers on board, but also everybody who loves the world of aviation and travel.” In November, it launched a new platform for the magazine that includes videos and slideshows and make its content more readily available to consumers.

Lufthansa Exclusive, for frequent flyers, offers a blend of business, travel, and lifestyle information while also serving as a source for company and frequent flyer news. Interestingly, the publication is branded as a collector series: Each issue gets labeled with an edition number. (The magazine is also available online and through an iPad app.)

“We know our customers value quality and tend to keep the magazines for a long time and spread them to a wider audience as well,” Eschenbach said, noting that the magazine was relaunched in September of 2015 to feature upgraded paper and covers.

In addition to these two projects, Lufthansa distributes a monthly magazine for women business travelers called Lufthansa Woman’s World. Each issue zeros in on a single destination and features an expert on that area. “It is a very personal view and contains unknown features and insights,” Eschenbach said. “Lufthansa Woman’s World is very much appreciated by our business clientele, especially the main target audience, the female business travelers.”

As Alexander Schlaubitz, Lufthansa’s VP of marketing, told The Drum: “Content marketing is a fantastic opportunity for us, and I think one of the privileges that we have as a category [is that] we’re already publishers. It really can solve for things as much as it can inspire.”

Credit Suisse

“Content marketing must have a call to arms—a house point of view to differentiate in a crowded market,” said Simon Carlton Rhodes, head of thought leadership and messaging with financial services company Credit Suisse AG. He happens to be speaking about content marketing in the European market, but the same rules apply to his company’s digital magazine.

The Financialist, the company’s bedrock publication, went live in 2012 to provide news, commentary, market trends, and economic analysis for ultra-high- net-worth individuals (UHNWI), the brand’s primary target audience. The site offers weekly updates in tandem with curated content from internal sources. Stories are developed both in-house as well as by a team of veteran freelance writers with experience in the financial services industry.

TheFinancialist

Knowing what this niche audience wants is where Credit Suisse really excels. Content ranges from special reports on Indonesia to infographics explaining Europe’s labor market to articles on the potential impact of biosimilar drugs. Original videos are posted to the Credit Suisse YouTube page, where visitors can watch, for example, a three-minute animated history of the company.

But The Financialist isn’t all business—it has a lifestyle section too. “Living Well” consists of features, commentaries, and Q&As. Executives can peruse articles on preventing “text neck” and consider an adventure vacation locale. They can read about entrepreneur Alejandro Agag, who created a Grand Prix for electric cars, or tennis champ Roger Federer.

“Content must either enable relationship management, repetitional development, or potential revenue generation,” Rhodes said. For Credit Suisse, The Financialist does all three.

IKEA

You’ve got to hand it to IKEA for understanding the consumer mindset and plugging into cultural conversations. The Swedish furniture brand’s “bookbook” video—a parody of the iPhone 6 obsession that also happens to highlight the catalog IKEA has been publishing since 1951—resonated to such a degree with viewers that it has more than 18 million views since debuting last year.

IKEA’s ability to produce engaging content is nothing new. Its branded web series, “Easy to Assemble,” has been running since 2008. In 2011, it developed a community sharing site called Share Space and a related blog, both of which are still live today. The year prior, IKEA offered up an augmented reality app that allows users to virtually place its products in their homes during the decision-making process. And last year, it released a Halloween parody of horror film The Shining.

The brand’s objective for such projects is really quite simple: Provide value in an entertaining way. As Christine Scoma Whitehawk, IKEA’s communications manager, told Contently last year, “[Content marketing] gives us the opportunities to start telling some of our IKEA stories so we can really share with people how IKEA can improve their lives.”

IV. What the experts are saying

“The key is to understand what content works on which platform—how it works—and to build your strategy around using each network to its fullest potential.”

Evan James, head of Americas marketing, Socialbakers

“The biggest lesson we have learned is that you don’t need multiple authors to write several blog posts per week. In 2012, we started with 14 authors and three posts per week. We barely saw any organic traffic improvements at all. We then changed strategy and published one post per week, with a higher emphasis on quality content—switched from 500 words per post to 1000 words per post—and we’ve since seen organic traffic explode.”

Steven Macdonald, content marketer, SuperOffice

“For the businesses big and small that want to take up the promise of ‘being a publisher,’ it means learning a different way to market yourself and a new set of rules. If they get it wrong, the same Internet that had offered the promise will bite back hard and fast. When they get it right, we might even see the magic return.”

Jeff Israely, co-founder, Worldcrunch

“When you communicate, you spread your message and that’s about it, but to reach a real engagement with your reader, you have to be really at the heart of what they want to hear from you. Our profession is ‘communications,’ but I believe more in ‘engaging,’ so I would prefer to be called an ‘engagement manager’ rather than a ‘communication manager.'”

Dagmar van der Plas, senior advisor, ING

“What Siemens has been observing is that the conversion rates on content are much higher than on branded advertising. So we expect a shift from a traditional media but also digital media, our digital advertising, into storytelling, into content marketing.” 

Michael Stenberg, vice president of digital marketing, Siemens

V. Predictions

Live-streaming video

As the popularity of both online and mobile video rises, more brands will explore live-streaming video. We Are Social’s Della Dora—whose clients include BMW, Campari, and Beck’s—believes that European brands are starting to see video as “the perfect fit for their needs.” Increasingly, those needs include platforms like Twitter-owned live-streaming video app Periscope.

In April, for example, We Are Social launched a Periscope campaign for the Discovery Networks channel DMAX (@dmaxitalia). The video stream took viewers to a live event in Milan that featured the cast of American reality series Hardcore Pawn, which airs on DMAX in Italy as La Famiglia Gold.

DMAX_Persicope

A major advantage of using a tool like Periscope or Meerkat for video is the convenient linking to Twitter. Both allow Twitter users to comment on live streams in real time, essentially turning a one-way brand story into a dialogue.

“I don’t think that brands are winning their challenges in the long-term perspective by creating one-shot campaigns that will not involve people as a key part,” Della Dora said. “It’s not about being the coolest kid in town, but about being the most reliable and valuable. And it’s not only about the customer support, it’s about being able to deliver entertainment to people.”

Chat apps

For brands with a mandate to connect with young consumers, chat apps are increasingly top of mind. Platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are now extremely popular among European mobile users. As we said back in June, “Make no mistake: Messaging apps are just getting started.”

In general, WhatsApp is the preferred chat app among consumers in Western Europe, with 73 percent of mobile users investing, on average, 612 minutes per month. But Facebook Messenger has the corner of 60 percent of the market, and its users spend 500 minutes per month using the app. In Ireland, where Facebook Messenger has an edge, 43 percent of consumers have an account, but of those who use WhatsApp, more than half do so daily.

Ireland_chatapps

What’s more, the IAB Europe and IHT Technology report that while spending on mobile messaging in Europe doesn’t yet rival that in Asia or North America, it’s steadily rising.

IAB_mobilemessagingEurope

Snapchat

After its launch in 2011, mobile chat app Snapchat became one of the fastest-growing social apps to date—and not just in America. Business Insider reported last year that Snapchat is a top-three iPhone app in nearly a dozen European countries.

Teens, as expected, are the primary users, but the extent to which young consumers engage depends on where they live. Q1 2015 data shared by eMarketer found Ireland to have the largest percentage of
teen users (52 percent), followed by Belgium and Sweden (46 percent).

Further data shows that 63 percent of Irish teens who use Snapchat do so on a daily basis, beating out both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This suggests a level of engagement too good for brands to pass up.

TeensSnapchatEurope

Multi-screen marketing

As platforms expand their advertising offerings to make it easier for brands to create and distribute content, multi-screen marketing will become a necessity. Brands are starting to see the value in using multiple platforms to tell a cohesive brand story and reach the customer at key touch points.

When HubSpot asked European marketers about the extent to which they had embraced content, 37 percent said their investments were still inconsistent. Those who are already seeing success said this: “If you really want to take content seriously, you can’t pick favorites—your content is everything from your 404 messages and subject lines to your product pages, ebooks and white papers.”

A unified global content strategy

Creating a global strategy requires in-depth knowledge of each country’s behavior, content preferences, and sensitivities. “It’s not only about language—translating is a simple task—but also understanding and using cultural differences in different markets,” Glad said. “It’s always a challenge to get everything right, both with language—subtitles, voiceover, and so on—and also with local adaptions. It’s important to adapt the message and the tone of voice to fit a local audience.”

Therefore, instead of investing in content to use across the board, brands will choose to optimize their content for each individual audience, taking into consideration the cultural preferences and norms of each country they hope to target. By working with local journalists, native speakers, and on-site production teams, they can develop brand stories that resonate with each unique market.

VI. Conclusion

Across Europe, so many smart companies have produced content campaigns full of creativity and originality over the last few years.

Brands have driven real business results through high-quality videos, longform reports, and, remarkably, even contests that convince dozens of people to change their names.

With today’s top brands projects taking on such ambitious projects across platforms, marketers will have to be more creative than ever if they want to keep audiences engaged.

“Content marketing is growing year after year in terms of marketers’ attention and investments. It makes the scenario more competitive than ever,” Della Dora said. As marketers ratchet up their efforts, the rest of the world—consumers and marketers alike—will be watching.

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