Anyone who has a product or service to sell needs to know about marketing, and one of the options businesses have for promoting themselves is entertainment marketing. This form of promotion has been around as long as mass media, perhaps longer, and there is nothing very complicated about it. It’s simply the use of entertainment to convey a brand message, and naturally, it’s used more often in business-to-consumer marketing than in business-to-business sales.
Examples of Entertainment in Marketing
In the marketing industry, the term entertainment marketing doesn’t have any official definition, and it isn’t specifically taught in universities. It can be found in a wide range of marketing categories, from engagement marketing to content marketing, and it’s most effective when presenting a brand to an audience, because this type of message doesn’t depend on a specific product offer as much as other conventional forms of marketing, according to Chiefmartec. For businesses that want to inform customers about their products and services, an entertainment format isn’t always a good idea because it’s less direct than traditional sales copy or media advertising.
Entertainment marketing is not quite the same concept as content marketing, which provides information and other types of content for an audience that is already actively engaged with it. Sometimes, content marketing can involve entertainment, but the relationship is only coincidental and happens when an audience is searching for entertainment.
A well-known example of entertainment in marketing is the series of Geico commercials that have used scripted comedy to promote the brand, but not necessarily any specific product offer. These commercials have run on TV and during commercial breaks in Web videos, such as Hulu and YouTube videos, but they aren’t an example of content marketing because they aren’t meant to attract an audience that is already searching for them.
When It’s Not a Good Idea to Use Entertainment
In content marketing, also sometimes called inbound marketing, businesses set up websites with content that already has an audience, and their focus goes into promoting the website through search engine optimization and social media, according to HubSpot. A lot of SEO companies that offer marketing services provide both content and entertainment marketing, but most marketing for small businesses these days is straightforward inbound marketing because it works so well on the Internet. Businesses need a much bigger budget to make the kind of mini-films that are used in entertainment marketing, but anyone with a network connection can get started in content marketing by purchasing a domain name and Web-hosting subscription.
In general, using entertainment to pass on a message to an audience is ineffective unless the message is meant to establish a brand reputation. People who see commercials on TV or in some other form of media respond to simple, direct sales messages, and they remember these messages more often when they are paying attention and aren’t distracted by irrelevant information. Entertainment is a way to get people to pay attention to an ad, but it usually includes a lot of irrelevant information that takes away from the message. It also requires a moderate amount of writing or artistic talent, which costs extra.
Related Resource: Become a Marketing Representative
Marketing is one of the core parts of a business, and without a channel of communication to an audience, businesses can’t promote their products or services. If you have a brand to build, entertainment marketing is an option, but most businesses will be better off using inbound marketing.
