No one cares about your brand, until…
This is one of the phrases that has stuck with me continuously as a marketer. I’ve managed agency marketing for around three years in the influencer marketing space and worked on marketing strategies for just over five years. I was first told this during one of my very first roles at IBM and it’s true – no one cares about your brand.
No one cares about your brand, until…
No one cares about you, or understands you, as much as you do. That is, until that moment you do something that relates to them, that helps the customer understand your brand and why it should, and does, resonate with them.
Many people forget this when they’re creating campaigns. You naturally think that people should care about what you’re doing or they should naturally read through your entire advert or even through your entire article (don’t worry, no hard feelings if you dip out now).
But the truth is, they don’t care until you do something that grabs their attention and adds value to their lives. You need to demonstrate consistently why people should care about your brand. You need to think about this across every piece of content you do, imagining each one as a first introduction to that customer and giving it the best chance to get your message across.
Because ultimately, you are too involved and emotionally invested to imagine your brand from an outside perspective. You know the history, the nuances of different activations or the work you’re doing behind the scenes, but your audience doesn’t. There may be a layer of inner fans who are invested and this radiates out to those who know of your brand but not the details right through to people who haven’t yet heard of you – unless you’re Google or Facebook, of course. In which case, hey Mark, how’s it going? Thanks for dropping by, feel free to share with your people.
So how do you get people to care about your brand? How do you craft the perfect ‘until’ moment?
Well as I said, it’s all about looking at each piece individually and as a whole. As you create a piece of content or activation, consider how it introduces your brand to people who have never heard of you. Also, consider how it fits into and resonates with the messaging and brand persona you have already planned out.
Consider how each touchpoint with a customer builds a new perspective of who you are and what you stand for. Now obviously every single piece of content can’t communicate every aspect of your business, which is why it’s so important to understand the values that make up your brand and pick one to emulate through activations.
To truly get your audience to care about your brand you must align your values with theirs. By this, I don’t mean change who you are to fit everyone’s interests because if governments and buffet restaurants have taught us anything, trying to please everyone can only lead to failure.
What I mean is that you should understand your values and identify distribution channels that align with those values.
For example, Oatly, every single year launches a huge OOH campaign around Spitalfields at the same time. Why? Because the London Coffee Festival pitches up in Spitalfields every year and they want to reach that audience. The company caters its messaging to fit the interests of that audience: the power of the barista-style oat milk.
Now of course you’re wondering how to do this on a large scale and within your own brand values. Not every brand has its own version of the London Coffee Festival, or the budget to take over an entire area of London to reach the right audience.
Influencers. There are over 100 million influencers worldwide, from wide-reaching, lip-kit-selling entrepreneurs to super-niche artists who use coffee sleeves to paint their favourite musician of the week. The opportunity of social is the ability to express your brand value in a very specific way to an audience that is already engaged and interested in that value.
For example, are your t-shirts made from sustainable fabrics that support cotton farmers? Brilliant, here are 1,000 influencers within the sustainability space with a predominantly female audience inside the UK. Now filter by CTR, sales and previous performance metrics and find your top 50 to reach out to.
Note: This is much easier through an influencer agency that has an AI influencer selection tool. Also note: Tailify has an AI influencer selection tool.
That is how you get people to care about your brand. You analyse and understand what connects you, what your audience already cares about and how you can reach them to share your mission.
So that’s the ‘until’ moment. I don’t care about your brand until I realise that your brand cares about the same things I do. Whether it’s sustainability, price-points, pop-culture, or even Charli D’amelio.
When you’re planning for 2021, first take a look at your brand values and see who you want to introduce yourself as in the New Year. Identify those channels who can emulate these values, reach that audience and tell your customers why they should care about your brand as much as you do.
Esme Rice is marketing director at Tailify.
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