Our content creation strategy: Hello!

Q: How is your content strategy evolving?

A: Hello! and H Fashion's creative content strategy is constantly evolving to adapt with the ever-changing media landscape and the shift in which audience's consume content. When I first joined the company just over five years ago, our creative content offering was small but mighty, with most of our collaborations focusing on long-form branded content articles and sponsored photo / video shoots. Fast-forward to 2025, and we have a versatile and deeply engaging creative content portfolio which spans everything from sponsored podcast boxsets to cover shoots, and affiliate tenancy articles to UGC reels — all underpinned with a strong storytelling ethos.

Working closely with editorial, we have built a scaled approach to branded content for our vast audience who engage across vertical content pillars, allowing brands to maximise contextual relevance across our channels. But our strategy and offering are always being refined. For example, across digital, whilst longer-form content still prevails on site and across newsletters, a consumer's attention span on social is becoming increasingly shorter. Therefore, our branded content portfolio has been adapted to offer shorter, snappier, attention-grabbing formats like bitesize reels and interactive gamification. Across print, we are investing in launching standalone supplement titles with completely new content formats, like Hello! London which just launched its first issue in April. This offers our advertising partners a shiny, new product and opportunity to align with contextually relevant content.

To ensure we are continuously improving our branded content offering, we aim to launch new formats on a regular basis — every quarter, in fact. Some of these are born out of editorial ideas and brainstorms that relate to key upcoming calendar events, like gifting occasions or important cultural moments where we see a gap in the market for commercial opportunity. Others are commercial blue-sky thinking concepts that we can only to bring to life with the support of an advertising partner.

Whilst some media brands have a strict church and state divide between editorial and commercial departments, Hello! operates in a different way. A true USP for us is our ability for brands to access our influential editorial talent for use in branded content partnerships. This may be in the form of providing quotes, selecting shopping edits or featuring in video and photoshoots endorsing the brand and products.

Across H Fashion, we see strong editorial success and community building benefits by utilising our editorial team as influencers across our social platforms, and we adopt this approach across our sponsored social posts so that advertisers can also reap these benefits.

Q: What have you learned when making content strategy changes?

A: Be flexible and agile — we constantly monitor the success of new content formats, based on key data metrics such as click-through rate, dwell time, pageviews, and brand uplift studies. If a format is not performing to the level we expect, we optimise it. If a format is performing well, we brainstorm about how it can perform better to maximise success for advertisers, as well as provide genuine value for our audience. Don't be afraid to scrap an idea if it's not working, either.

In addition, in the world of branded content, transparency with our audience is key. I have found that audiences prefer when branded content demonstrates clear commercial intent and product mentions / brand messaging are woven in naturally with Hello!'s tone of voice and brand style. This helps to build trust with readers and positions the advertiser as a favourable brand.

Three top tips

1. When coming up with new creative content formats and strategies, I find the most successful launches are ones that marry up data insight and editorial instinct. This powerful combination allows you to produce content that truly has significant impact and influence on your readers. Brands also want to pay for content that performs, so relying on data (search keywords, audience trends and past campaign results) can help shape the content to be successful.
2. Utilise experts (editorial team members or industry professionals) to add weight and credibility to branded content features. This is especially important for SEO, where expert quotes woven into features can help stories rank higher on Google and therefore perform better.
3. Include only one clear call to action to guide your audience on how to engage with your branded content feature. More than one CTA (eg. shop the product, sign up to newsletter, enter the competition) can muddy the waters and confuse your audience, resulting in weakened results. Keep things simplified, streamlined and focus on the most important KPI.

This article was included in the Content Creation Special, published by InPublishing in June 2025. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.