Three Strategies To Fix Your Content
Make your messaging irresistible
In previous posts, I make the case that one reason content marketing can be frustrating is that the approach is outdated and we need a new one.
So what kind of content strategies do we need now? What’s a brand to do to get off the exhausting content and customer churnfest?
How do you fine-tune content to build trust and create a steady stream of Customers for Life (CFLs)? (or is it CsFL?)
Fix 1: Shared values
If trust is so important, it must be hard, right? Actually, it’s not as hard as you might think. This is where your ideal customer personas come in handy. What are your personas’ values?
David Allison, the creator of Valuegraphics, has a huge database of results from surveying people about their values. His work gives marketers an important tool to understand what makes their audience tick, no matter what the demographic. You can check out some of his free reports here.
Demonstrating authentic shared values with your audience helps you build trust faster than left-brain information. Values are a modern key to more effective marketing.
Appealing to shared values is effective across industries, whether you are B2C or B2B, consumer or tech. In fact, it’s true for NPOs and causes as well. People are people. Examples of brands appealing to values include:
Apple: Think Different.
IBM: Transformation is a Journey. What Big Blue also knows is that transformation is scary. Don’t we all want some trusted advisors during transformation?
Cardano (blockchain): Making The World Work Better For All
Cardano is a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change.
Spanx: Our Purpose: Elevating Women
SPANX® is a brand for women, by women.
The shapewear company built a raving fan base and billion-dollar business that spawned a whole slew of competitors. They maintain their dominance and growth largely because they innovate based on their intimate (no pun intended) knowledge of women’s feelings as they relate to body image and shapewear.
Honest Company: We care about the people and the planet. We make clean, sustainable, well-designed products that work. Jessica Alba’s Honest Company content is a master class in relatability to its target audience.
Politicians: Most followers of political leaders do not have in-depth knowledge of complex policy issues. Left-brain knowledge of the issues is not what gets people out to vote. What gets people to the polls is fear that their shared values are under attack.
Fix 2: Bake impact into your business DNA
Since the 1990s we’ve seen the evolution of the idea that business should include more than just profits in its mission. Muhammad Yunus wrote the book on Social Business, and John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods, founded the Conscious Capitalism movement. BCorps have been around since 2007.
Public Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that place social and environmental values on an equal footing with profits.
Examples of PBCs and BCorps include:
- Yard Stick: a startup that measures soil carbon
- Living Carbon: a synbio-focused carbon capture and storage startup
- Landon Brand: a carbon offset startup
- Patagonia
- PeaceWorks Technology Solutions: supplies accessible and affordable information technology services, software development, and technology consulting to non-profit organizations
- Worldcoo: a free online tool to allow e-commerce sites to fund social and cooperation projects through their users.
- Rubicon: a digital marketplace that helps companies use technology to improve waste processes and meet their sustainability goals.
Given that 50 to 70% of consumers✎ EditSign✎ EditSign✎ EditSign✎ EditSign factor in a brand’s stance on social or environmental issues when making purchases, baking beneficial impact into your business DNA not only gives you an edge with consumers, it might even make your business more attractive to funders.
Fix 3: Collaborations with causes and NPOs
The Edelman Barometer of Trust report?✎ EditSign✎ EditSign✎ EditSign✎ EditSign found that societal leadership is now a core function of business, from the customer’s point of view.
How do you show leadership if you don’t want to tie your whole business model to beneficial impact, as in the examples above? The answer lies in collaborating with causes and NPOs on outreach campaigns.
You can spike awareness, engagement, and emotion by offering people actionable, easy, fun experiences that help them live their values and help causes they care about.
The challenge for companies is building relationships and campaigns with non-profits can take time and resources. Lucky for you, shortcuts exist.
Check out Impactoverse, a new impact ecosystem bringing together brands, causes, and creators in new ways, including hosting NFT and tokenization marketing campaigns. (Full disclosure — I am Co-Founder of Impactoverse).
Leveraging the strengths of blockchain, Impactoverse vets NPOs and campaigns for legitimacy. They also provide automation and transparency around results so that your brand doesn’t get conflated with greenwashing or impact fakery.
Example:
Impactoverse’s homegrown impact initiative PetDropsNFT gives people a fun, accessible way to immortalize their pets on the blockchain and help animals in need.
Brands can easily create campaigns that partner with PetDropsNFT. You can collab with artists to create art NFTs of pets, and even invite followers to create NFTs of their pets to sell on the marketplace.
A portion of the sales goes to animal welfare organizations and the brand. With PetDropsNFT, brands enable their fans to show off and express their love for their pet in an exciting new way.
This is powerful stuff because you are associating your brand with the strong emotional connection people have with their pets.
NFTs are coming on strong for good reason. Beyond the initial hype, they are purpose-built for nurturing two-way relationships in ways current social media marketing can’t touch. If you have questions, feel free to reach out.
Metrics for Measuring Trust
How do we measure trust? Well, it’s not perfect, but one indication of trust is how much money a customer spends with a company over time.
One KPI companies use to tie trust to a dollar estimate is called the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). This excellent article from HubSpot goes into more detail. The estimated CLV is how much revenue a company estimates it will receive from a customer over time. The actual CLV is a historical number of how much the customer spent.
Activating Your Funnel
So there you have it, the content marketing funnel concept, updated for the post-pandemic world where change happens rapidly, people are looking to fill a trust void yet they are warier and more connected than ever.
As the wily old sage once said, may you live in interesting times.
Thanks for reading!
This is an excerpt from my complete Customer for Life (CFL) Trust Content Marketing Report. If you would like a copy of the whole report, which cites additional resources and tips, you can grab one here.
