Who are the most important voices for YOUR brand in 2021?

From the moment we are born, we start to figure out who we like and who we trust. A newborn baby will often complain when picked up by a friend because they don’t smell right or feel right. We develop both conscious and unconscious choices about who we trust as we grow u and engage in adult life; making friends, getting jobs, voting, reading the news, buying products.

What I’ve found fascinating over the last few years, is watching how changes in society and widespread use of the internet have impacted buyers. And when I say buyers, it sounds fancy. I really mean people. People making everyday choices about where they spend their time and money.

5 years ago I was a ‘behind the screen’ marketing leader. Writing whitepapers, email advertising them to lists etc, watching interactions on google analytics and processing responses. Yes responses… not people.

In 2018 I made a decision to change everything I was doing. I wrote my first statement to that effect in our marketing strategy stating that “We will evolve from a product-led strategy, to an experience-led strategy.”  That was the polite version anyway.

We put people at the heart of that strategy and focused on what they needed personally to be successful. We stopped doing any marketing that was transactional or didn’t create an experience that mattered.

It was ground-breaking. 

We went on to grow 4 communities centred around the advancement of the members, and created the Social Organisation focused on using social media to close the gap between us and our clients online.

We learnt a lot about growing peer support communities that people trusted. To give you an illustration of this, the ClubCISO community was formed around 2014 but in 2018 we gave members WhatsApp as an experiment. Soon, the members were swapping 1000+ messages a month, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What started out as a community famous for its annual live vote of 50 London-centric CISOs, arguably became the biggest pool of real world, peer to peer, vendor free advice available almost 24/7 with ridiculously enviable response times. There was literally always someone there to help you out.

Who’s voice is most important when building trust for your brand?

 We are fortunate to have access to some brilliant research from the Edelman trust.

They publish a Trust Barometer which asks “If you heard information about a company from each person, how credible would that information be?”

This barometer lists the most trusted sources by rank.

Who matters most?

I’ve circled the roles that apply most to our Telstra Purple world:

1. Company Technical Expert
2. A Person Like Yourself
3. A Regular Employee

In 2019, A Person Like Yourself & A Regular Employee were the highest climbers in the Trust chart.

In both years – all 3 roles are more trusted than the CEO or the Board.

The message is loud and clear – activate your employee voices if you want people to trust your brand.

How you activate them matters

In research of our own, we discovered that when people connect with an individual from a company on a platform like LinkedIn – it’s the person they want to hear about, not the business.

In our study of 10 people, writing 288 articles & posts over 5 months we found that if you share your own thoughts, rather than other people’s, you’ll get twice as many likes and almost four times as many comments.

We also discovered that human stories about ourselves were magnitudes more popular than stories about our work.

What’s happening to the role of the salesperson?

This is an interesting one.

If we listen to Edelman then we know that the Salesperson’s voice can’t be the primary or solo arrowhead of our businesses.

And if we listen to Gartner then we know the sales role is about to go through one of the most fundamental shifts of the last few decades.

Gartner talk about changing buyer preferences. In this recent webinar, they tell us that B2B buyers are preferring to engage through digital and self-service channels. This was fact not opinion. They cite an increasing consumerisation of B2B buying, with a third of buyers being fine not meeting with a sales rep at all throughout the sales process. And if you look at millennials, that’s even higher – almost 50% don’t need to meet with a sales rep anymore. They want to do things online.

Combine the Edelman and Gartner viewpoints with our Social Organisation programme and it feels like we have a bit of a head start at Telstra Purple.

We’ve made our business considerably more visible to a broader spectrum of people, and have given our people their own microphone.

It’s not just a confident brand that people see now, but also the real people that work here, how they feel and the every-day work that’s being done. Our employees are publishing their own content on their personal social profiles – it’s incredibly powerful.

I don’t doubt there’s more adapting to do, but we’re ready.