How to preserve brand health during an economic crisis? Go Organic…
If the pandemic taught us anything (not that we asked for the lessons), it’s that brands thrive when they understand the gear shift required during ‘belt tightening’ season. Your audience might not be buying now. But that doesn’t mean they’re not listening, reading, watching, creating…
Here’s why you might invest in boosting your brand presence and brand perception during an economic downturn. And how social media can help you do it.
1. Firstly, if a brand falls outside of an audience’s peripheral view, they also fall out of favour. ‘Mere exposure effect’ or ‘availability bias’ recognises that we have a subconscious preference for what is most familiar.1
Organic social media affords you a platform to stay in conversation with your audience and remain top of mind. It’s tempting to cut back on digital comms if it’s not directly driving sales right now, but the long game is brand salience. This is generated when you effectively engage an audience in what you’re delivering consistently…
Which brings me onto my next point: frequent posting isn’t a standalone tactic. Posting seven times a week about your services is on par with shouting through your neighbour’s letterbox daily to let them know you still live next door. It’s not necessary or enjoyable as an experience. Instead, organisations should consider how they draw together a community based on interest-led and value-driven content.
There’s a lot of talk about ‘online communities’ and an assumption that brands can simply assemble them, so it’s worth exploring this further. Typically, online communities are created when people are united by content experiences. Often it’s not led by anyone in particular, it’s not instructed or formal. Users are moved to either engage with the content, share it, or create their own expression using ‘memetic vernacular’ specific to social media platforms2. It means that digital communities are often fluid – congregating and dispersing based on trends, ‘moments’, or pieces of content that resonate with them.
So, what does this mean for brands? It means that we can use those transient communities to glean insights and tap into what resonates, considering how it relates to brand values, in order to then carve a role at the helm of a ‘fixed’ community.
Take, for example, our work for This Girl Can (TGC) on Strava. The majority of our returning-to-exercise audience would not describe themselves as ‘athletes’ – the term used by Strava to refer to their app users. In order to build a community in this app we had to overcome perception barriers therefore and go against the grain with the content to make women feel welcome in this space. Rather than focus on leader-boards and competition, TGC club content centres on the real, vulnerable emotions that women experience in their relationship with exercise. Hubs of ‘real talk’ online about women’s health have been attracting increasing engagement in the past few years, with a marked and active shift away from influencers’ curated perfection, particularly in fitness spheres3. By listening to and harnessing the conversation themes from these topic-led digital communities, we shaped a content strategy that would resonate with our target audience, attracting 20k+ members to the club4. This Girl Can continues to host the online Strava community which has become known for being inclusive and supportive, with member contributions now providing a large portion of the value – the true mark of a community.
To conclude this point; when we leverage audience insights (from sources including more ‘fluid’ digital trends) for organic content creation, it helps brands to spark conversations that draw the right crowd to their longer-term online community, securing brand salience.
2. Secondly, brand perception can’t be forged from the front. But a deep understanding of it affords you the opportunity to influence and shape perception for long-term favour, conversion and loyalty.
To understand what the ‘organic’ perception of your brand is we should examine how people are interacting with your service or product on social media platforms. We can then use those observations to discern how you elevate or influence consumer interactions. It’s worth reiterating that this extends beyond how people interact with your online content, but how they feature your brand in their ‘original’ content. Alessandro Caliandro and Guido Anselmi articulate how meme culture and platform-affordances have shaped how consumers relate to brands online, I recommend their paper for further reading on this, linked at the end of this article.5
By using social listening tools, organisations can understand the ways in which your brand, product or service is talked about. You can understand who is talking about it too; what role your brand plays in their personal brand, and how you can leverage or seek to change it. For example, many fashion retailers feature social media posts from their brand-clad customers on the sales page of their website – flexing the images as social proof, demonstrating the social signals it affords the customer.
Leveraging influential voices has been a smart tactic for a while – we know that young people especially prefer getting news and views from individuals rather than ‘big corps’6. But do brands achieve true cut-through when an influencer is a paid-for mouthpiece? Engagement and impressions dip on most content labelled #ad, compared to a creator’s normal impact. It moves us to consider how brands can influence the influencers, capturing attention to become part of their organic discourse.
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Starbucks serves a useful example of how user-generated content can spark a meaningful online campaign – helping them to demonstrate their values as an inclusive and progressive brand. Customers frequently share photos on social media of their takeaway cup with their name written on it – often for comedic value if it’s wildly misheard. Starbucks successfully joined in with this user-generated trend with their campaign #WhatsYourName when they learned that Starbucks stores were considered a safe space for transgender and gender diverse people to try out their new name in public. It became a self-fulfilling loop, with people using the hashtag as permission to contribute their own stories, further fuelling the campaign reach and brand values7.
To conclude this point, organic social media is more than just the content you put out, it’s about how you successfully listen and leverage the ways consumers are natively interacting with your brand.
In summary, the brands that remain relevant and find favourable perception with their audiences online are those that are invested in understanding the native landscape and language of the platforms. It’s this deep understanding and ability to attract communities online that helps your long term ‘nurture’ strategy, which pays off when economic storms inevitably pass and spending power returns.
If you would like any further information on organic social media strategy, social listening or content for your digital channels, please reach out to [email protected].
Article by Verity Jones - Social Lead at 23red
References:
2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051211021367#body-ref-bibr101-20563051211021367
5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051211021367#body-ref-bibr101-20563051211021367
Senior Account Director at 23red
1 年Love the 'shouting through your neighbour’s letterbox' analogy Verity Jones; super-interesting