That’s right. After a decade killing chain restaurants, marriage, and the McDonald’s McWrap, millennials have grown strong and are entering their peak earning years. Simultaneously, Gen Z—which you may know from the popular mobile application, TikTok—is graduating college and taking over the coveted 18-25 consumer segment.

I’m a card-carrying millennial. I’ve survived graduating into a recession and strangled an Applebees with my own two hands. And you know what my generation wants? To buy stuff from companies that reflect our values, so we can feel good about ourselves when we pop a CBD gummy and start clicking on Instagram ads.

The age of conscious consumerism is here, driven by the under 40-set. According to 5Ws 2020 Consumer Culture Report, 83 percent of millennials say that it’s important for the companies they buy from to align with their beliefs and values, and 76 percent of 18-34 year-olds like when the CEOs of companies they buy from speak out on issues they care for.

Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer also found that values are driving purchase decisions. The most important attributes to consumers today being able to trust that what the brand does is right, reputation, values, and environmental impact. As climate change worsens, sustainability is only going to become more important; turns out, we really want a planet to live on.

Companies today not only need to do good; they also need to tell stories about the good that they’re doing so consumers know about it. It’s not a nice-to-have anymore; it’s a necessity.

That’s why social impact storytelling was one of the top content trends I presented in our State of Content Marketing 2021 trends webinar (which you can get on-demand here.)

One of the coolest things is that telling these stories will not only help your company’s bottom line—it’ll help the world, too.

That’s because when you tell great stories about the good your company is doing, it creates a positive feedback loop that encourages your company to invest more in CSR efforts.

Skeptical? Then say it to the face of this awesome diagram.

Social impact storytelling needs to be a part of your content strategy in 2021. And in the webinar, I suggested taking three steps:

1. Put on your reporter’s hat to find compelling social impact stories

Companies don’t often do a great job of talking about the good that they’re doing—even to their own employees. That means that you need do the dirty work to find them.

This is something that GE Reports does extremely well. Led by chief storyteller Tomas Kellner—a former editor at Forbes—GE Reports has amassed a loyal audience of over 100,000 subscribers through what Kellner calls “shoe leather reporting“—developing sources inside the company to break stories of the amazing innovations happening inside the company.

While its sustainability storytelling has often gone viral on Reddit, GE Reports shifted focus in the spring to cover how GE Healthcare—and the rest of the world-was fighting back against COVID-19.

GE Reports did a remarkable job telling the stories of employees who were going above-and-beyond in the fight against COVID, and the role GE Healthcare was playing in combatting the pandemic. Just check out this story about GE Healthcare employee who traveled 1,400 miles through an earthquake and blizzard to help step up the production of ventilators at a key plant, or this story about a breakthrough in AI-enhanced ultrasound that was saving lives during the darkest days of the outbreak in Italy.

They also published a weekly roundup of five ways the world fought back, which included non-GE stories, and was my daily dose of optimism as I hunkered down in downtown Manhattan, clutching a bottle of hand sanitizer like it was the last Infinity Stone.

GE Reports’ coverage not only made me feel better—it helped me see GE Healthcare in a new, extremely positive light. If I was in the market for an MRI machine, I would definitely buy it from them!

You can follow Kellner’s lead, especially if you work inside a large corporation. Find out who’s in charge of your social impact and CSR initiatives, and who else is working on them. Bond with them. Interview them. Do the same thing with your product and engineering teams—your company’s product might be doing good and serving people in ways you don’t even know about. Put on your reporter hat, and get to work.

2. Tell narrative stories that communicate your company’s values and how they set you apart from the competition

The morning after the 2016 election, Rose Marcario, the CEO of Patagonia, woke up at 4 AM and decided that it was time to double down on the company’s activism.

As Fast Company reported, by 9:30 AM, she had penned a company-wide call-to-action to “defend wilderness, to defend air, soil, and water.” Facing widespread rollback of environmental regulations, she galvanized the company around its mission to protect the planet—a mission dear to not only employees at the company, but Patagonia’s customers, too.

Ever since Marcario took over as Patagonia’s CEO in 2008 and made a huge bet on sustainable manufacturing and design, the company’s revenue has grown more than 500 percent.

Much of that is its mission-led marketing; the outdoor apparel brand donates 1 percent of all profits to environmental causes, turns its stores into a repair shop for used gear on Black Friday, and tells stories about sustainability in Hollywood-quality films and four-word rallying cries on its clothing. Patagonia’s ethics and values are the competitive differentiator that shines through in every story they tell, and their customers are fiercely loyal to the brand as a result.

A big reason that Patagonia’s approach works so well is the ridiculous quality of their storytelling. One of their latest documentaries, Public Trust, about the battle to save public land from development, won awards at the Big Sky Documentary Festival and Mountainview.

They tailor their content to the channels where their audience spends their time—short films on YouTube, compelling 30-second sizzle trailers on Instagram, climate news and calls-to-action on Twitter—and truly stand apart, growing their business at an exponential rate.

3. When possible, align your social impact storytelling with a product

In recent years, Bank of the West has been doubling down on ethical and sustainable investing through its Impact Solutions investment arm. In 2019, it became the first bank to empower customers to track the CO2 impact of their purchases, and this year, launched its 1% for the Planet account to donate 1 percent of revenues to environmental non-profits.

They tell the story of their sustainability initiatives through Means & Matters, its sustainability-focused content hub. The site covers everything from how the private sector can step in where the public sector has failed to how to work in sustainability. It even puts other banks that invest in arctic drilling on blast.

(Disclosure: Bank of the West is Contently client, and partnered with Contently on Means & Matters.)

This content communicates a clear reason why people like me who care about the planet should invest with Bank of the West over competitors. There’s also an added bonus, as all of this sustainable investing content is an SEO goldmine, helping attract potential buyers who would be extremely interested in investing with Bank of the West—making it much easier to tie the content to business results.

This all, of course, leaves one very important question: What if your company isn’t investing in any initiatives worthy of social impact storytelling?

Well, then hit your leadership team with the stats and examples in this post, and make the case why it’s just good business to stand for something and do good in the world. And once they do, tell the story of how you made it happen. I can’t wait to see it.

The post Why Social Impact Storytelling Will Be 2021’s Hottest Content Trend appeared first on Contently.

Last year, just after Thanksgiving, a post by the menswear brand Noah appeared in my Instagram feed. The ad was out of step with the Black Friday content I’d been seeing—it appeared to be a protest message. Noah posted an image of a skull and crossbones with the message that the online and New York flagship store would be closed for Black Friday. When you clicked that image, a small Marie Kondo-esque manifesto loaded: “We Are Drowning in Stuff.” The brand advocated for, “a tiny rebellion against the mindless (and lately dangerous) shopping that’s encouraged on Black Friday.”

There were a few naysayers in the hundreds of comments, a handful of shoppers assuming the brand just didn’t want to have a sale. But for the most part, Noah’s IG followers responded positively, showering the brand with heart emojis and even debating doubtful commenters. I scrolled through to get a sense of Noah beyond the holiday. It isn’t just that they’re telling the right story, but that they invested time in telling it again and again.

Hitting the right tone

Noah’s stand against Black Friday is just one way the company has made corporate responsibility a part of its messaging. From the website: “Noah seeks to take a stand against many of the appalling practices of the fashion industry. Our clothes are made in countries, mills and factories where tradition, expertise and human dignity take precedence over the bottom line. We donate portions of our profits to causes we believe in.”

That commitment to envisioning a more ethical fashion industry is starting to pick up support. Other “slow fashion” brands like womenswear darlings Elizabeth Suzanne and Jamie + the Jones also divested from Black Friday last year. Other companies have taken it even further. Patagonia, a company that already donates 1 percent of its annual profits, or over $89 million over the last three decades, gave 100 percent of its 2016 Black Friday profits to charity.

“Cause-based brands provide something clear that consumers can relate to and feel good about supporting,” said Elliot Fox, senior brand strategist at Complex Networks. “It accomplishes making their mission and M.O. clear from the jump.”

Like a non-profit, brands can engender support, trust, and loyalty by infusing their content and company vision with a progressive message. But that doesn’t mean brands can jump on the bandwagon of the latest cause. Those moves can backfire like Starbucks urging its baristas to have conversations with customers about race or Kendall Jenner leading the most selfie-worthy protest for Pepsi. They can also befuddle consumers, like Burger King taking a stand on net neutrality.

Instead of the big splashy commercial like Pepsi’s featuring really good looking people using hot-button topics as a way to sell soda, brands that thread their message into what they do very delicately, using social media as a needle, tend to do best.

“We see a trend among Gen. Z that they are interested in supporting brands with a mission that are doing good,” Fox said. “So it’s no big surprise that Noah is a thriving brand in the youth culture and streetwear scene.”

According to one report put out last year by MNI Targeted Media, over half of Generation Z members surveyed about their interests and habits said that knowing a brand is socially conscious influences their purchasing decisions.

Maybe now more than ever, consultants to CEOs are preaching the gospel of instilling brand confidence in savvy consumers. Target audiences have more company information at their fingertips than ever before. And brands are thinking outside the box to build trust.

Honesty is everything

How should a brand use content to prove its ethical practices and connect with people? To start, the progressive causes have to align with your brand values. Virtue signaling is one thing, but publicly adhering to social and political principles, and making sure your staff represents those principles, is another.

The Sprout Social report found that most consumers define transparency as being open, clear, and honest. That’s not as a clear-cut as it sounds. Customers are more equipped than ever to investigate what a company does behind the scenes. Brands that sell a message of inclusivity or environmentally conscious better be ready to back up that messaging with action.

If companies aren’t honest, they’re risking very public pushback from a consumer base that’s constantly expressing itself online. Consider 2017’s viral #DeleteUber campaign on Twitter if you need an example of how company policies can tarnish a brand’s reputation. The company continued to service JFK airport while taxi drivers went on strike against the government’s immigration ban. After the backlash, the ride-sharing app lost a reported 200,000 users.

Uber has gone to great lengths to try and win back the trust of consumers, ousting its own CEO and even setting aside $3 million to help drivers affected by the ban. While the public donations are a good start, maintaining consumer trust really hinges on a consistent, long-term commitment to transparency. The Sprout Social report cites how favored brands like Blue Apron communicate vendor information through their social channels, using Twitter to post recipes and profiles of their suppliers, and creating YouTube content to illuminate how they make certain ingredients.

Admit your mistakes, then fix them

Companies like Noah and Patagonia have used corporate responsibility to earn the trust of customers (for now). But what if they were to betray it?

Janine Robertson, a PR and marketing manager for Insect Shield, said transparency continues to remain important if things go wrong. “Own the issue or problem. Apologize openly. Outline the impact and changes in effect,” she said. “Essentially eat crow with grace, armed with meaningful follow-up strategies.”

Nike is one example of a brand that managed to change public perception, but it took time. In the past, the company had a bruised image due to ongoing allegations of sweatshop labor. Instead of trying to cover that controversy up, Nike decided to “publicly eat crow” long before Twitter or Facebook existed. “The Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse,” Nike CEO Phil Knight said in a game-changing 1998 speech. “I truly believe the American consumer doesn’t want to buy products made under abusive conditions.”

It was a huge deal to admit that in those pre-social media days. After that, the company looked to change course by raising wages, improving factory conditions and their environmental impact, and regularly documenting their progress via a sustainability report. While accusations of Nike using sweatshops have followed the company to this day, the brand is overwhelmingly favored over the competition by millenials, and it’s not just because the company knows how to market Air Jordans. Nike learned how to craft a message and put collective weight behind it.

In 2018, Nike continued its focus on corporate responsibility by featuring former quarterback Colin Kaepernick in an ad campaign with the slogan: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” The ads spoke to a younger, more politically conscious audience. Then came the ensuing backlash. Videos of people lighting their Air Max shoes on fire, waged by people who believe NFL players don’t have a right to protest police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem, only fueled the passions of the core audience that Nike wants to capture.

Sure, the commercial was noteworthy, but Nike was being tested—were they really a progressive corporation that could connect with people?

“I think it’s about not being afraid to be open and honest with consumers, which sometimes means taking a risk,” Fox said. “Nike’s Kaepernick campaign was a good example of that last year. When they rolled out the campaign, there were various posts and quotes in articles with people from Nike discussing their inspiration and opinions behind the campaign. They came out across various platforms with a unified voice and opinion about what they were doing, and they stuck to their guns the entire time.”

The gamble ended up netting the company $6 billion in profits. But how long will consumers champion a brand that strives to be responsible on one front while organizations like the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) continue to call for boycotts?

In an environment where transparency and a progressive mission are key to the hearts of many consumers, only time will tell. But as the saying goes, trust takes a long time to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.

The post Corporate Responsibility in the Age of Content and Social Media appeared first on Contently.

The internet has come a long way since then, but websites are still essential homes for brands. Your homepage makes the first impression, signaling what’s new and important about your company. The ‘About Us’ page, usually one click away, is the second date, where visitors can understand more about a brand’s mission and purpose, which customers, prospects, employees, job-seekers, investors, and the press all crave.

But while homepage design and copy are labored over and always on display, About Us pages seem to be both under-appreciated and under-leveraged. That’s a missed content opportunity for too many brands.

As the content strategy leader at Prophet, I wanted to investigate what the biggest players were doing with their company pages to see if there were any patterns or tactics that could help marketers create value. I teamed up with my colleague Jesse Guzman, Prophet’s digital strategist, as we analyzed more than 100 About Us pages from a variety of sources including the Fortune 500®, Forbes Best Places to Work, and our own Prophet Brand Relevance Index®.

The vast majority of companies we looked at still have their work cut out for them, but through our research, we found a few brands that may have the blueprint for success.

Wide Broadcast

More than 65 percent of pages illustrated what we call a “wide broadcast” approach, which just means they offer a bit of content for everyone. For these brands, content gets evenly spread across topics such as leadership, corporate responsibility, and services. Within this approach, some brands prioritized a founding story, mission statement, or product and services descriptions.

During our research, we also paid close attention to structure. Was there a deliberate strategy for the page, or was it just a hodgepodge of information thrown together with little connective tissue? Three brands stood out when it came to cohesion.

Patagonia’s corporate transparency is famous in marketing circles, and its mission-driven company page reinforces that reputation. The page shares the corporate mission (“Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”) but also goes into detail for why the company exists, almost like an open letter. The page is really more like a series of pages, since there are six links under the main “Company Info” header. There, users can find everything from field reports about the outdoors to thorough details of the brand’s history. Consumers can feel the sincerity, and marketers can respect how the corporate mission relates back to the entire site experience.

Accenture, meanwhile, goes down a different path from the altruistic philosophy. If Patagonia gives you a sense of the why, then Accenture is more concerned with the how. The professional services company has an About Us page driven by its services, which is unusual. (Only 3 percent of the brands we reviewed have this setup.) In this case, the page explains what Accenture does for customers, before helping users navigate its many sub-brands. The context is important because it gives a glimpse into the commitment to R&D and innovation that Accenture can use to separate itself from competitors.

Lastly, there’s Shire, a large biotech company that recently merged with Baxalta. Shire’s “Who We Are” page speaks the corporate narrative to a broader set of audiences—investors, job-seekers, patient advocates. The mission flags its role within its category (“Champions for people around the world who are struggling with rare diseases”) and then hands you off to content about history, leadership, corporate responsibility, and its operational model.

Modern Face

A majority of brands we looked at passed the modernity test. The design on these pages tends to be easily digestible, with bold headlines and mobile-friendly UX. But a sleek look doesn’t guarantee that a brand is maximizing the potential for an About Us page. The best examples in this category went above and beyond by working in visuals like videos and interactive elements. And as more companies get comfortable experimenting with multimedia, we expect them to apply those formats to their company pages in the future.

One of the most striking examples in our study is General Motors, which we expected to be a bit, well, old GM. The About Us page, however, is unconventional from the start, boldly declaring its mission “To Earn Customers for Life.” The design includes smart little animations and a vertical scroll like an interactive book. As you move down (and you’ll want to explore) you’re rewarded by illustrated cars zipping by, infinite scroll stats, and details about the company’s energy programs.

Nike is another case where a brand that could’ve coasted on its reputation put in a strong creative effort. The mission sits up front: “Bring Inspiration and Innovation to Every Athlete in the World,” with a parenthetical wink that “if you have a body, you are an athlete.”

The image-driven page continues to modules on company profile, executives, and “sustainable innovation”, which, yes, is apparently a thing. The copy tries to be a tad too clever at times, but that doesn’t take away from how great the section looks.

Then there’s GE, which has consistently received high marks for its savvy digital presence. Rather than the traditional About Us page, GE actually has multiple iterations linked to different purposes (Building, Curing, Moving, Powering). You have to dig a bit to find them, but the robust experience on the GE site is rich with interesting facts and high-quality stories about company projects, past and present.

Pure and Simple

The main reason most people overlook the About Us page is because it’s associated with an inherent stiffness. Brands don’t want to offend or alienate anyone, so they play it safe to appeal to everyone. As we’ve seen firsthand, that strategy doesn’t work. Each brand has a voice and a style, and it helps when they embrace that instead of just posting headshots of the C suite.

As you enter the McDonald’s About Us page, for instance, a sign-up box pops up for the company newsletter, unique among the 100 brands we reviewed. It’s easy to hate pop-ups, but in this case, the choice makes sense. If you’re already putting in the effort to learn about the company, then this is another chance to build a long-term relationship with the user. The top of the page is dedicated to the company’s origins, specifically highlighting founder Ray Kroc with a few brief sentences. As you scroll down, you can learn how the humble beginnings led to billions of customers served.

Speaking of billions served—that takes us to our last example: Alphabet, or the artist formerly known as Google. In addition to the unique URL (https://abc.xyz), Alphabet’s company page is among the simplest and most creative, an expandable letter from Larry Page that weaves in mission, history, and future plans. The lesson here is to be yourself. Telling your story in a clear way doesn’t hurt either.

If you’d like to see the complete list of pages we reviewed or have any questions about our analysis, you can email the author at mzucker@prophet.com or reach him at @matzucker on Twitter.

The post What the Internet’s Best ‘About Us’ Pages Can Teach Brands appeared first on Contently.