‘Conversation
marketing’ has been around since the first time one human voiced a recommendation to another. As marketers measured the influence of conversation, word-of-mouth marketing was shown to have unparalleled
influence:
Social
Media has reinvented conversation marketing. By the beginning of 2011, Social
Media had established a unique, powerful and ubiquitous conversation platform:
-
500 million Facebook users
-
153 million blogs
-
200 million Twitter users
-
2 billion YouTube videos watched
Marketers
must find a way to harness the power of Social Media . . . . to turn conversation into effective messaging that achieves specific
marketing objectives.
A
barrier to developing an effective strategic approach to Social Media has been that marketing thinking is constrained by the
old model of persuasion. Conversation marketing in Social Media requires a new
form of message – Engagement Messaging – making a connection with the consumer and creating involvement, resulting
in loyalty and evangelism.
The
active ingredient of Engagement Messaging is brand personality. Its power comes
from tapping into the most basic psychological determinant of human preference and behavior.
In the same way that people become friends or even connect as significant others, brand / corporate personality traits
attract consumers with similar traits – establishing self-expression and self-identity that creates a bond between brand
and consumer. Research shows that this is the determinant reason why some people
drink Coke and not Pepsi, why some drive a BMW and not a Mercedes, and so on.
Engagement
Messaging is created by integrating brand personality into Social Media content. This
is accomplished by:
-
Creating personality profiles at
the category, company / brand, and competitive brand levels
-
Identifying the cognitive, rational
characteristics (positive and negative) most associated with the company / brand
-
Discovering the unconscious, emotional
characteristics associated with the company / brand
-
Creating a brand narrative based
on the personality traits, providing a template to use when developing content and conversation
-
Identifying the brand’s Engagement Words-that-Work
– the language that will be more compelling, attracting consumers and engaging them in conversation
We
have developed a method for creating and managing Engagement Messaging in Social Media.
Our approach is based on psychological research methods used in clinical practice.
It is implemented online. Results and recommendations are developed through
multivariate statistical analysis.
Our
method – Unique Brand Personality – provides marketers with tools that enable them to harness the power of Social
Media:
-
A research-based creative strategy
for brand websites and blogs that can be used to shape information, features and news that engage customers and prospects
-
A brand-driven conversation strategy
for Facebook and other user-generated content sites that directs the online conversation to positively reinforce values that
resonate with brand users
-
A guide for creating tweets that
reinforce factors known to be the foundation of involvement by a brand’s consumers
-
A template for monitoring online discussion
using filters that enable marketers to focus only on relevant comments
Through
Unique Brand Personality research and consulting, Social Media becomes an effective component of the marketing mix:
-
Increasing brand preference: The more distinct the brand personality, the greater the preference. Preference increases with reinforcement of a consistent personality
-
Creating consumer↔brand identity: Establishing a bond which enables consumers
to express who they are or would like to be through the brand
-
Promoting desired Social Media conversation: Brand identify increases the consumer’s propensity to communicate and generates
a higher likelihood of positive comments
-
Increasing brand loyalty, resulting in increased
sales
