What Is Red Bull Doing Right with Their Content?
An F1 racing team. An in-house record label. A magazine with a weekly circulation of five million. Sounds like a pretty epic combination right? Red Bull doesn’t just mess around with its content marketing; it employs over 100 people just to work on the stuff. This group of editors, journalists, TV producers, athletes (you get the picture) make up Red Bull Media House, the content production and marketing machine that’s been killing it for years and first put the brand on the map.
You already know what I’m about to say next—brands need to create content that is EPIC! But how can they do that without spending billions on sponsoring a jump from the edge of space or slapping its name on primetime TV show produced in-house (although that would be AWESOME)? Here are a couple lessons in content creation that brands can take away from Red Bull.
1) Create content around the essence your brand embodies.
Be more than just the product you sell. This one’s a pretty “Duh” statement (but one that plenty of marketers still overlook somehow) – obviously your brand is more than just the product you sell. The millions of dollars you’ve already spent on positioning your brand hopefully created some kind of image for your consumers. What is positioning anyway? It’s basically putting an idea in your customer’s head about why they should buy your brand—that’s something you learn in Marketing 101 (which I took last year by the way). I would take it a step further and call this idea the essence of the brand.
When Red Bull sells a can of its product, its also selling the highflying, adrenaline-pumping culture it embodies. Brands need to understand that there’s also a market for the essence that they’ve spent so much money on developing. If there’s a market for it, then your content marketing should revolve around your brand’s essence.
2) Reach people emotionally by playing to THEIR passions.
Even if your product is “boring,” your brand can be EPIC and emotionally involved in the lives of consumers by posting great content they love. Does this mean you can’t ever post about a product again? Of course not. It just means your brand can’t be boring, even if the product is.
Take Xerox for example: their Facebook page is covered in random photos of their products, happy people, a few videos here and there, and a cat taking photocopies of itself. YAWN, Unlike, and move onto something more fun like a man standing at the mouth of a volcanic lake (covered by the Red Bulletin).
(Ed. note: Gary Vaynerchuk’s upcoming book discusses the idea above with a concept called Jab-Jab-Jab-Jab-Jab Right Hook. He basically means, give-give-give, then ask. Focus on consumer-consumer-consumer, then product/brand. It’s a basic human principle: you have an easier time pitching a product or service to someone with whom you’ve developed a real relationship. Back to Xerox…)
What Xerox can do is create content showing how essential the brand is to life as we know it. Every business needs and makes copies daily. You know what would be sweet? If Xerox started posting content about how life would be without it. They could create photos of monks in suits copying documents by hand under candlelight, which they could adapt into a short video series about warring companies fighting over blank paper with Xerox being the only hope left for humanity.
SO CHOOSE YOUR M.O. WISELY
Content marketing needs to be a mantra, not just for social media but also for every medium and marketing channel that your brand uses. It needs to transcend your customer’s perception of just your product and should be based on the essence of your brand—that’s the only way you can produce epic content.
As for me, I think I’ll go crack open a Red Bull and jump out of a plane. Or watch videos of someone else doing it.
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Shaman Kothari is regular contributor to Boston Content blog…all the way from Paris! A rising senior at Boston University, Shaman is studying business management and marketing. Offline, he’s in Paris for the semester. Online, he can be found via LinkedIn and Twitter.

















