Resonant Content, Defined

When your content shows the audience the brand knows them, that makes it resonant content. When content resonates with the audience, they feel greater trust in the message, and that reflects positively on brand performance. So how do you create resonant content?

Here's a story about a creative team, Ben and Benita. Assigned to their first new-business pitch for a cardiovascular brand, they started out acquiring as much knowledge that they could about this new drug and its target audience.

First, they embraced and stuck to the creative brief, then they inhaled the customer insights, and watched all the market research. They absorbed the SWOT analyses, dove into the science, and memorized the mechanisms. Pathology, etiology, diagnostics, efficacy, safety, dosing, even prescriber and patient demographics. All this new information was so interesting, they simply devoured it.

They prepared so well, you could say they knew as much -- if not more -- than the target audiences they were going to try to inform and persuade. Target audiences filled with some of the most highly educated people in the world.

Fair to say, their brains were in the right place to start coming up with resonant content. So where did those brains take them, creatively?

Ben's brain skipped right past what it just learned and took his thoughts to the zoo. His first concept involved an elephant. The second featured a snake. Then a shark, an alligator, and finally a scorpion. His wall was filled with "borrowed interest." Meaning his ideas had borrowed the interest from another topic to create interest in the drug he was trying to promote.

However, Benita's brain stayed with the science. She came up with concepts that were inspired by the fascinating new knowledge she just learned. Therefore, her concepts had a much better chance at resonating with the target audiences, and made her work more likely to be presented at the pitch. Why?

Because Benita's ideas followed a simple principle:

When you want your ideas to resonate with the people in the audience...

SHOW THEM YOU KNOW THEM.

Benita put images and terms in her concepts that were designed to show the target audience how deeply the brand knows them. She included imagery, language, any and all specific content that reflected what Benita now knows about her audiences. Her work better reflected the insights and the intimate knowledge she now possesses.

And her team mates could see it and feel it in the work. Going beyond borrowed interest, Benita's work showed the audiences that the science is interesting enough. That's why Benita's ideas went farther to resonate with the audiences, and make them feel greater trust in the brand's message.

When we reach our audiences in that way, they feel a mutual level of respect. "You respected me enough to not only learn my idioms, my shorthand, my terminologies, and my language, you spoke it. That made me more willing to listen -- and possibly -- even more willing to trust what you have to say."

When it comes to introducing new drugs, visual analogies and borrowed interest can be effective conceptual approaches.

But rarely do they lead to content that truly resonates.

Make no mistake: it's not easy to create resonant content. But resonance is the power behind concepts that win new business pitches, win the hearts of brand team members, win the attention, the loyalty, and the trust of your target audiences, and will win you fame and fortune in the pharmaceutical advertising business.

Want resonant content? Do what Benita did:

Show them you know them.

PS: To find out what Benita's resonant content was, email me at tbcjr@rxresonate.com