10 Ways to Build a Strong Emotional Connection with Your Customers!
Sep 18, 2022
10 min read
Building strong emotional relations with customers is a must to make them loyal customers and maintain sustainable revenue. But doing so requires a lot of effort. However, when you correctly approach, it will be like a left-hand game for you. Here's how you can do this.
The UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising looked at almost 1,400 case studies of successful advertising initiatives. They concluded that emotional appeals were more effective than logical ones. In other words, brands do well when buyers feel an emotional connection to them.
A major obstacle for many brands is learning to successfully create these emotional connections in their marketing efforts, not just in their campaigns. An emotional connection is a potent tool, but only if it is genuine and authentic. It can go badly when clients sense insincerity or efforts fall short of expectations. When consumers feel that a company is trying too hard to impress them, they tend to turn away.
Making authentic, long-lasting connections with your clients is the key to success. Building and keeping these relationships is crucial to succeeding in today's market, where consumers have many options and fierce competition.
Why Is It Crucial to Create an Emotional Connection with Your Clientele?
Relationship-building with customers is crucial due to its many benefits ranging from an increase in leads to a rise in customer loyalty. Here are the three most important reasons why you should focus on fostering positive relationships with your customers.
- Increase the Customer's Lifetime Value (CLV)
The lifetime value offered to customers grows in direct proportion to the time they remain a customer. If your CLV is high, that means more sales you can generate. You shouldn't skimp on connection building when it comes to customer retention.
- A Decrease in The Rate of Customers Leaving
A recent study found that if a customer has a negative experience with a company, 61% of them will quit making future purchases. Great customer experiences are what keep consumers coming back. Customers won't leave your brand if you consistently meet or exceed their expectations.
- Improve Customer Loyalty
It can be five times more expensive to attract a new customer than to keep an old one. The loyalty of your clientele depends on how well you stay in touch with them. Customers' experience can be improved by providing them with the excellent service they expect. When consumers have a good experience with your company, they will continue to spread the word about it.
How to Make Emotional Connections with Customers?
1. Develop Your Sense of Empathy
Do they value me as a customer? Does the company respect me as a person and a customer? Many customers attribute their loyalty to a business more directly to how these questions are answered than to the cost of individual purchases. If your frontline workers genuinely care about their customers, it will foster a strong relationship between you and your customers. You should train your team so that they can better build a bond with your customers.
2. Be Authentic
Brands die when they become indistinguishable from other brands in the marketplace. The days of using ridiculous corporate jargon to sell products are long gone. Instead, customers nowadays want to feel a personal connection with a brand. The key to achieving this is to discover and subtly promote the things that set your business apart from the competition.
Genuinely engaging with clients is the best approach to strike an emotional chord with them. When interacting with customers, it's important to be genuine.
At the outset of the conversation, salespeople use to establish instant rapport with their customers by asking open-ended questions about the prospect's needs and interests. For instance, if you know where your client resides, you may mention the city and inquire about what drew them there. If you find out why a customer moved to a certain city, you may start a conversation about their family or favorite pastimes; this can help you connect with them on a more personal level.
3. Figure Out What Motivates Your Target Group
Connecting on an emotional level with your audience can be fostered by honing in on their driving emotions. Many consumers, for instance, might like the idea of being treated as a special case. In this scenario, marketing activities should be particularly tailored to the individual client.
4. Recognize the Client
When a hotel staff greets you upon your entrance, when a server anticipates your order, or when a stylist asks how your mother is doing, we know that the person serving us cares about us. In those times, they become more than just a vendor to us. They may become friends or only familiar faces.
Encourage your employees who interact with customers to do the same. Certainly, in some fields, the requisite level of expertise is more difficult to acquire. A server at a local diner knows their regulars better than a customer care representative at a multinational software corporation. Nevertheless, it is possible to make an effort to link a customer's preferences and interests with their service history. This data allows you to show genuine interest in your customer.
5. Get in Touch as Often as You Can
Always try to see things from the client's perspective when communicating with them. I mean, what really matters to them? In what ways will you be able to communicate with them in their "language"? Communicate with clients in person and online via channels such as social media.
6. Tell Stories
When people learn about one another's backgrounds, they come closer. The same can be said of brands and the individuals who create them. That's why anecdotes are so effective in bridging gaps in knowledge and fostering understanding. People will relate to what you're selling and to you if you present it as a tale.
The potential to write and share tales is all around us. Explain what happened to you first. You can connect with your target market by sharing tales about your company's origin, the people who work for you, and the goods or services you're most proud of. Include them in your online writings and on your website. Add some life to these tales with some high-quality visuals.
In business, storytelling isn't limited to recounting the past. You can even tell stories in which your future consumers play starring roles. Tell them tales about how your products and services have helped others and how they can help your potential customers. Do not be shy about swapping out hypothetical situations. You can get them to care about your business and your products on a deeper level by appealing to their shared experiences.
7. A Dedicated CRM Can Help You Keep in Touch with Your Clients
Customer relationship management, or CRM, is an approach to doing business that focuses on the needs of the company's clientele. Increasing revenue and attracting new consumers requires a thorough familiarity with your current clientele.
With the help of customer relationship management software, you can keep track of your client's preferences about the products you offer, as well as their buying habits, geographic region, and even their age and gender. In order to better understand their preferences, requirements, and purchasing tendencies, you can use customer relationship management software to do so.
The following are some of the ways in which your company can profit from implementing a customer relationship management system:
- Discover hidden information about your clientele
- Better categorize your clientele
- Try to guess what they want and need
- The rate at which customers return can be improved
- Improved speed of client interaction
8. Prioritize Customer Experience
The quality of the customer's experience is crucial to the success of any strategy aimed at retaining existing customers.
Having loyal customers, keeping existing ones, and getting word-of-mouth advertising are three of the most beneficial outcomes of establishing connections with customers. These strategies have an immediate and obvious effect on your company's bottom line. Loyal clients are worth more to your business since they are more likely to buy from you again and tell others about your company.
When clients are content, they tend to stick with a company. Learn about your customers' experiences as they move through the various stages of your product's lifecycle.
9. Get Involved in Your Community
Connecting with the community can bring in money, typically with less effort than standard advertising efforts, through collaboration with adjacent firms, membership in a local business association, and exchanging talents.
10. Engage in Social Media Customer Service
Providing outstanding service is more important than ever because of customers' changing shopping habits. Customers who have had exceptional experiences with a business are more inclined to buy from that business again.
If you give customers several ways to contact you, you can better handle their inquiries whenever they come up. Add features like real-time messaging, phone support, automated email responses, and human agents to your social media monitoring setup.
Takeaway!
Effective marketing relies heavily on appealing to consumers' feelings. The industry landscape would appear very different if consumers made rational purchasing judgments. The most successful businesses are those that successfully connect with their customers on an emotional level.
Emotional marketing can be effective, but only if done properly. Brands need to empathize with their target market, provide solutions to their problems, tell stories in which their target market has an active role, demonstrate that they share their target market's values, and establish themselves as industry leaders to earn their audience's confidence. Lastly, everyone interacting with consumers needs to know how to build rapport with them and why it's important. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to provide the staff who interact with consumers regularly with the proper training and resources, as well as to get their support. You can contact our experts; we will help you develop a data-driven strategy so that you can align your content marketing to your customers' requirements. And make a bond with customers on an emotional level that can help you thrive in this fierce landscape. Contact us now!
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How to Find The Best Keywords With ‘Ahrefs’ and ‘SEMrush’
<!-- <img class="aligncenter wp-image-10769 size-large" src="/uploads/2018/05/joao-silas-74207-unsplash-1-1200x800.jpg" alt="Book With Pen" width="1140" height="760"> --> Who doesn’t like free traffic from Google? I do and I am pretty sure you fancy a lot of traffic coming to your website from Google as well. And a thorough keyword research is probably the best way to get it. Obviously, if all your website content is wrapped around keywords that boast a high search volume, you are bound to receive some extra traffic. Moreover, merging the power of digital marketing with your keyword optimized content will have you reaching new heights of exposure and traffic coming to your website, which is never a bad thing for your business, right? Think you don’t have the required knowledge or time to conduct a proper keyword research? You’re wrong! It could have been the case 10 years back but in this tech-savvy world of today, doing keyword research is a piece of cake. How? By using the best keyword research tools out there. As you would have guessed it from the title, we will be diving deep to research the best keywords in both Ahrefs and SEMrush - which are undoubtedly the best keyword research tools out there.. But first, we need some keywords before we begin with our actual research. How to find the right keywords? Finding the right keywords to rank is crucial as the ranking of your blog/webpage will be based on the keywords targeted through the content wrapped around it. Accordingly, there are many ways to ascertain the aptest. keywords for your business. Let’s look at some of them - 1. Know who you serve If you are doing keyword research for a client or doing it for your own product, knowing who and what a website serves to its visitors is a crucial step in finding some relevant seed keywords. You can have a look at the title tags and H1 tags of any webpage to get a gist of the keywords to be chosen. For example, if you are a digital marketing agency, digital marketing or online marketing or marketing should be the keyword your homepage must be built around on... 2. See through your user’s eyes It’s important to get into your user’s shoes and think about their intent when searching for your services online. Say, a searcher wants to buy ‘shoes’. His searches would be something like this - ‘nike shoes’, ‘casual shoes’, ‘best formal shoes’ or something similar. So, if you sell shoes, it makes sense to add these search strings to your keyword list. 3. Use a tool You might need around 30-40 apt keywords for your research. And using a tool like Keyword Planner can come in handy when searching for keywords with high search volumes. But using Keyword Planner requires a Google Adwords account which can be a trouble if you don’t have one. Don’t worry though, there are other tools that deliver this functionality as well. And probably the most used keyword finder, after Keyword Planner, is Keyword Tool This tool literally bombards you with all the relevant keywords there are in accordance with your query. Suppose, you want to write a blog post for currently the most trending keyword in the UK - GDPR. Let’s see what keywords the tool throws at us - The search resulted in 538 unique keywords for the query. You’ll need the paid version to get the metrics as well but we won’t be needing them as all the data will be exported to Ahrefs. Now, combining the keyword results from the above-mentioned methods, export them to an excel sheet and delete some that you deem irrelevant. Getting down to the research Copy and paste the keywords to Ahrefs or SEMrush to begin your quest of choosing the best keyword. Both of these tools are great. Both are quite similar in pricing as both the tools offer a basic subscription of $99 and provide almost the same level of functionality (limited in free accounts) but all the difference lies in how they present data to users and that can sometimes make all the difference. I personally like Ahrefs more because of the sheer simplicity of the platform when it comes to keyword research and they also present their data in a more intuitive way (which you’ll see through screenshots as you’ll further read this blog). Which is probably the reason why we use it for our SEO purposes as well. But the only downside of using Ahrefs is that they don’t provide a free account. In the remaining part of this blog, I will be telling you how to research keywords both on Ahrefs and SEMrush so it completely depends on you which tool you want to use and spend your precious marketing budget on. But before we begin, it’s important to know about some of the metrics that we will be basing our keyword research on to find the most profitable keywords, which are: Keyword difficulty Ranked from 0 to 100, it is an estimate of how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 of search results. Volume Denotes how often a target keyword is searched by users per month in a given country SERP Features This metric shows us the different SERP features present on the search results such as Ads, top stories, related questions, AMP carousels etc. Clicks This metric reflects the total number of clicks in a month on a particular keyword Cost per click It is an estimated cost-per-click value of a keyword. Clicks per search Shows how many search results people click on for a particular keyword. Return Rate Tells us how often search for a targeted keyword again. Now that you know all the metrics to look for in your perfect keyword, we will start off with Ahrefs first: Researching Keywords on Ahrefs Go to the ‘Keywords Explorer’ tab and paste your sheet containing all the remaining keywords on the search tab.You’ll be limited to a hundred keywords here. So, make sure you paste the best of the bunch. After all the keywords are processed, you’ll see a screen which looks something like this: This is the overview page. It gives an idea of the total search volume and clicks of your chosen keywords. But this is not where the gold is. To get a better idea of which keywords to choose, we will click on the metrics tab to get a better idea of how each of the keyword is performing on the SERPs. On the metrics tab, you get detailed information of all the searched keywords. Of all the metrics, you need to primarily focus on Keyword difficulty, volume, and clicks. The perfect keywords to capitalize on would be the ones which are easier to rank and receive a decent amount of search volume and clicks, I like to call them the ‘money keywords’, In this case, those money keywords will be ‘GDPR compliance checklist’, ‘GDPR checklist’ and ‘GDPR for dummies’.So, if you were to write a blog about GDPR, ranking for these 3 keywords would be enough to get to the first page of Google as there’s not much competition.But there will still be some publisher ranking on the top spot for all these keywords and having a look at what they have done to reach to the top can give you an idea of what you need to do better to outrank them. Ahrefs provides for this as well. When you’ll further click on a keyword, it will give you an overview of the keyword with all its metrics and it’s SERP overview.Say, we need to have a look at the competition on the SERP for the keyword ‘GDPR compliance checklist’, to do that, when you’ll click on the keyword, you’ll see something like this: Scroll down and you’ll see a fully detailed SERP overview for the keyword: Having an idea of what content already is out there gives you an opportunity to put on your creative hats and provide the kind of value to searchers that isn’t available yet, which I think can give you a certain edge.So, the best keywords we found on Ahrefs are - ‘GDPR compliance checklist’, ‘GDPR checklist’ and ‘GDPR for dummies’Let’s see what SEMrush brings to the table... Researching Keywords on SEMrush (free account) Ahrefs and SEMrush are on the same level when it comes to functionality but to unleash the full potential of SEMrush you’ll have to spend some bucks on its subscription (just like Ahrefs). But the good part is that SEMrush lets you play with their tool ‘a little’ to get a gist of how it functions. If you are unsure whether to spend your marketing budget on the platform or not, I seriously recommend you to test their platform before making the final decision. You’ll be limited to 10 searches per day in your free account which I think is just enough to get a feel for the software. Note: Both the platforms are different in how they search for keywords. While Ahrefs can search for multiple keywords (100 max) in one go, SEMrush can search for a single seed keyword at a time and kills the need to use the keyword tool we mentioned earlier.Just go to their website and search for a seed keyword you want to rank for. In our case, we will go with the term we chose for Ahrefs - GDPR. After you click ‘Start Now’, you’ll be redirected to it’s ‘Keyword Overview’ tab in ‘Keyword Analytics’. The ‘Overview’ tab in SEMrush is just like that of Ahrefs, displaying the total search volume, number of results and the search trend of the keyword overtime. But we searched for a seed keyword and not keywords which we will be actually wrapping our content around. For finding keywords that have some untapped potential, you’ll have to click on ‘Phrase Match’ and ‘Related Keywords’ tab to get more results.Here’s what came up when I clicked on ‘Phrase Match’... And on ‘Related Keywords’... You’ll be limited to 10 results while using a free account. You could’ve played with their filters and stumbled upon the most relevant of keywords for free but SEMrush now requires that you pay to add filters as well… sigh! So, you’ll have to choose the best keywords from those 10 results based on the same metrics we chose in Ahrefs. Go for the keywords that have high search volume and low keyword difficulty.With a free account, unfortunately, that’s all that you can do with SEMrush when it comes to keyword research.Now, we move on to the better things…. Researching Keywords on SEMrush (paid account) With a paid account, you’ll be able to see all the results there are in the searches we did above on the free account.Other than that, you’ll get access to it’s ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ (beta).... sounds interesting, doesn’t it? But what exactly is it? Simply put, it is a new feature that saves researchers using the platform a lot of time as it shows the best keyword results there are that go well with the seed keyword and lets them add them straight to a ‘Keyword Analyzer tool’ that evaluates and analyzes all the selected keywords, kind of like how Ahrefs does things in the first place, but SEMrush does it in a more personalized way. Let me show you…Just go to the ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ tab and search for the seed keyword you want to rank for. Which in our case is… yep, you guessed that right… GDPR. Once you search for your seed keyword, it will automatically create a list and show you all the keywords there are that relate to the seed keyword in any way. Bear with SEMrush for their blank metrics as this feature is still in beta.The next step that comes in our keyword research using this new feature is to select the best keywords and adding them to ‘Keyword Analyzer’. To do that, just click the green plus sign beside a keyword to add it to the Keyword Analyzer list for further research. Once you’ve selected the keywords you like, click on the green ‘Go To Keyword Analyzer’ button on the top right. And you’ll be redirected to the Keyword Analyzer tool which will place all the selected keywords together with all its metrics. You can further decide the final keywords to choose from here. In this case, I chose ‘GDPR Compliance’ and ‘GDPR Summary’ as the chosen keywords as they have a lower keyword difficulty than others so it will be easier to rank for these keywords. And with this, we are done with finding the perfect keywords in SEMrush as well. After using both the platforms, we have finally stumbled upon 5 keywords full of opportunities. If I was to select a title for my blog on GDPR, using all the keywords, it would look something like this - ‘GDPR for dummies: Your GDPR compliance checklist is here!’ and the blog would summarize the whole GDPR thing to make use of the ‘GDPR Summary’ keyword as well.Like I said before, with all these advanced tools at our disposal, keyword research is not what most of the business owners and marketers think of it.Doing keyword research with the help of Ahrefs or SEMrush will hardly take you 20 minutes and you’ll be on your way to creating highly keyword focused content that will bring in traffic for a lifetime.. a lot of it!Hopefully, with the help of this guide, you’ll find using these tools a lot, lot easier! ...
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How to Successfully Market Products on Amazon & Think like a Buyer
A number of platforms abound when you’re trying to find an e-commerce platform to sell your products, and one of them is Amazon. It’s one of the most visited websites for online shopping, with 63% of buyers starting their journey from Amazon, as per MarketCharts research. So if you have chosen Amazon as your e-commerce platform for marketing your products, you have made a sound decision. But the success of your product sales entirely depends on how you market your products in this competitive eCommerce platform. Selling products on Amazon is not all about writing compelling copies and posting high-quality pictures, there is a lot more that goes into the process. It’s more about buyers’ mindset, your price list, competitors, and the list goes on. There are a few tactics and methodologies you can use to increase the sales of your products. Let’s delve deeper into some of those methods. Customers Are Topmost Priority for the Amazon In any business, keeping your customers/clients happy is the key. In Amazon, each time any of your customers come across a problem or a query, it needs to be solved at a fast turn-around time by the seller's end. Amazon will share all questions asked by the customers with you. You’ll have to respond to the customers on time, or else it can have a negative impact on your marketplace seller account merits. To ensure customer satisfaction, it is important to stay on top of your seller's central account and monitor it frequently. In case you are a marketplace seller, you should make sure that the items are delivered within the estimated time frame. Apart from that, be sure to enter the tracking information. In case any kind of delay takes place, you’ll end up losing your online store credit, which might also increase the chances of losing your account. In order to ensure customer fulfillment and satisfactory customer service, you can opt for either of these three options - Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Fulfillment by Merchant Amazon Prime (Seller Fulfilled Prime) Product Details Optimization If you’re just starting out, and are running out of budget to spend on ads, you can try out organic strategies to increase your sales. Making online shopping easier for customers, Amazon allows users to continually narrow down their search by different product attributes. With this function, a customer can easily find what they're looking for through different categories- whether it's Women's shoes > Loafers and Slip-Ons > Sperry's > Top-Sider > Tan > Size or something more specific like " An LG TV Cord Cable 1 feet." Either way, a customer will be able to find exactly what s/he has been looking for by keeping on narrowing down the list. In order to provide customers with the relevant products, Amazon uses all the nitty-gritty details that you have mentioned in your product’s listing Thus, to drive incremental sales, it’s critical that you cover every detail about your product accurately. By doing this, customers will have a better understanding of what they are buying, which will instill more confidence and encourage them to buy anything from your store. The information includes product titles, product descriptions, product identifiers, and the list goes on. Skimming on any of this information can affect your chances of standing out from Amazon’s search engine result page. Writing Effective Product Descriptions is the Key Now that you’re well-versed in the nitty-gritty of product details, it’s time to delve deeper into one of its aspects, which is product descriptions. Business owners that want to sell on Amazon need to have a strong grasp of the A9 algorithm. Amazon’s A9 algorithm determines the ranking position of products in search results, with an emphasis on sales conversions. In other words, the A9 algorithm is set forth by Amazon to promote listings that are more likely to result in sales. Incorporating relevant and high-volume keywords into the product description is a must in order to give your products a push on Amazon's search results pages. The A9 algorithm looks for these keywords when determining relevance to search queries, so they are essential for good visibility on the site. From a customer's point of view, accurate and easy-to-read product description helps them make informed decisions. Writing a product description with the right set of keywords will provide potential buyers with compelling reasons to purchase your products. At the same time, it’ll allow the Amazon A9 algorithm to better rank your products. Create a hook with your product visuals Product image is the first thing a customer is going to see, which is why it’s advisable to leave no stone unturned to ensure every image is enticing enough. While looking for the products, customers want to see high-quality images of the products, which gives them a fair understanding of the product. To make your product listings stand out from the crowd, there should be diversity in the images. High-quality images not only build the factor of trust and credibility among customers but it’s also prioritized by Amazon’s ranking algorithm. But there are certain factors you have to keep in mind while singling out the images for your products. You need to adhere to certain guidelines set forth by Amazon before you single out images for your products. Keep Products Prices Competitive Plenty of customers hop on Amazon to get the most competitive prices. Therefore, keeping your prices lower gives you the edge over your rivals belonging to the same niche. Before you set a price for the products, be sure to perform thorough research on your competitors’ price listings and then set a reasonable price tag on your products. Not to mention, you need to set a profit margin as well. To generate profits, you need to have a keen understanding of how pricing affects your margins. Ensure that your prices are set at a level that will allow you to make a profit while still being competitive. In order to survive in today's competitive market, you need to do more than just offer general average pricing. An automated pricing tool like Amazon's can help you evaluate pricing drops and spikes so you can make sure you're always staying ahead of the curve. Sky-rocket Your Sales Using Paid Ads Amazon allows sellers to promote their products through paid ad campaigns in three modes sponsored product ads, sponsored brand ads, and sponsored display ads. Amazon's three PPC programs are designed to help brands increase their visibility on the site. Sponsored products are designed to help individual product listings stand out on shopping results pages and product detail pages. Sponsored brands allow companies to showcase their brand portfolios, including their logos, custom headlines, and a selection of products, on the shopping results page. Now the final advertising mode, which is Sponsored display, it’s a self-service advertising solution that helps businesses display ads on and off Amazon. Keep Your Focal Point at Buy Box Buy Box appears on Amazon's product detail page. It’s the point from where customers finally commence their product purchase journey. What makes it difficult for sellers to own the buy box is that Amazon uses an algorithm, which is not known by many eCommerce players, to determine whose products should be shown in the buy box. While we cannot tell you what exactly it takes to optimize the box, there are certain factors you should definitely take into account. It includes the product's price, your rating, product fulfillment, shipping time, and more. So these were a few things you needed to know about marketing your products the right way. However, in the midst of the process, don’t forget to think from a customer’s perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in the process, which can lead you to overlook important things. As a business owner, it's important to keep your attention focused on one activity at a time, and to always keep your customers' best interests in mind. That said, let’s wrap up the blog right here with the above-mentioned strategies. In case this sounds way too much, feel free to enlist the support of our eCommerce experts. At Saffronedge, we are a wide team of eCommerce experts holding a plethora of experience and skills that help you attain your business goals. Why Should You Choose us? At Saffron Edge, we don't just focus on helping you take your traffic or revenue stats to new heights. We want to help you sustain long-term growth by focusing on strategies that will enable you to keep your users engaged. We have a wide range of experience working with different types of eCommerce businesses, so whether you're an established company or just starting out, we can help you develop a digital growth strategy that works for you. So feel free to get in touch with us today and kick-start your journey to build a workable and sustainable e-commerce strategy that will leave you awestruck with the result. ...
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Social Media Marketing for Brands: The Impact of Instagram
Instagram is impactful where it matters most today – visually. The modern consumer has an ever-thinning attention span, now only 8 seconds. While once marketers felt comfortable publishing a page full of words in their ads, they must now employ mere phrases. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words This may be an old adage but is more applicable today than ever. The modern human brain is bombarded with information. When they wake up, they check emails and messages. As they get ready, every household item, including their cereal and bread, is covered in marketing collateral that seeks to make a lasting impact. As they drive to work, billboards seek their attention. The radio is laced with ads. Even the cars in the traffic jam may be stamped with brand logos. They have already witnessed more information than the people two generations ago might have in an entire day – and they haven’t even started the day with a morning coffee yet! If the old ways of marketing are useless in 2022, then what works? Instant/ Moment Marketing The mantra of modern marketing is to catch the user in the moment. If your copy promises an impact in the future, you may have already lost the reader. If your visual does not stand out in the very second the user is scrolling their feed, you may have missed their eyes. The eyes of the modern human have learned to eliminate distractions to keep their sanity intact. They must meet something truly different from the status quo to stop for a second, and witness. How Instagram’s Philosophy Aligns With Marketing for the Modern Human? What was the idea behind Instagram? It wished to emulate polaroid cameras in how instant and magical they felt. The core of Instagram’s philosophy is catching one’s “instant” moments throughout the day and presenting them to friends. This aligns perfectly with the mantra of modern marketing. Catching the target audience instantly with your brand’s communication is key to marketing success. How Much Impact Can Instagram Create in Your Marketing? Another quirk of the 2022 consumer is that they prefer to browse the web on mobile phones. In fact, there are more mobile web users today than desktop web users. Instagram is the second-most downloaded mobile app. The brand-building that can be done via Instagram is invaluable. The average user also logs into Instagram frequently. These frequent bursts of usage, which are spread throughout the day, accumulate to about half an hour of usage. How do these frequent bursts of Instagram usage help with marketing? They create a consistent level of brand visibility when intertwined with factors such as: Intriguing visuals, Catchy copy, Relatability, sometimes with the use of Instagram influencers, etc. Instagram users are expected to grow at a steady rate, projected to be 1.44 billion in 2025. Consistent promotion in this user base is bound to land. Now, let’s investigate two immensely successful brands that make good use of Instagram for marketing. This will help us understand just why brands are willing to spend billions to market on Instagram. Case Studies of Two Successful Brands on Instagram Here are two different yet equally masterful strategies for Instagram marketing. Nike’s Brilliant Use of Brand Deals Featuring Cristiano Ronaldo Nike signed Ronaldo for “a lifetime” in a Brand deal worth 1 Billion USD. Here’s why. Cristiano Ronaldo is the most followed individual on Instagram, with 455 million followers. At the time of writing, his followers are also expected to grow at a rate of 420k per day. However, the numbers only reveal half of the story. Ronaldo Sells a Connection The reason behind the billion-dollar deal between Nike and Cristiano Ronaldo was the quality of connection that Ronaldo has with his followers. Football, aka association football and soccer, has 3.5 Billion fans globally and every single one of them is familiar with Cristiano Ronaldo. A huge share of them is actively invested in what Ronaldo wears, how he trains, and what he does throughout the day. Why do 455 Million People Even Follow Cristiano Ronaldo? Why does someone even follow an athlete on Instagram? Is it to see “cool” pictures of them? Only partially. The primary factor that dictates why someone follows an athlete on Instagram is that it provides a sneak peek into the athlete’s life. The average follower is usually only allowed to see a certain aspect of the athlete’s life. They may watch them get off the team bus as they enter the stadium. They watch them play, either live or on TV. They witness occasional interviews. And then they may watch them depart the stadium. They may even be treated with training clips on TV. However, Instagram is the place where athletes can share something more about their lives. Instagram lets them have an autonomy that television studios do not let them have. The captions may reveal more about their real thoughts than an interview on TV. They may share a selfie with their family. They may share a clip of them playing football with their dog and children, as Lionel Messi often does. They may share a picture of them on vacation. Because the athlete shares instances of their life on this platform, there now becomes a special reason for followers to connect on Instagram. Brand deals capitalize on this very connection. Athletes and influencers also create perceived quality, i.e., an impression of excellence, about a product or service. The best influencers do so as if they were sharing a part of their lives. “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” – Tom Fishburne, Founder of Marketoonist How Marvel Makes Terrific Use of Social Reaction Chains on Instagram "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, plus a social media overreaction." - unknown There is a reason that 4 out of the top 10 highest-grossing movies are produced by Marvel. Marvel has been able to utilize marketing in the digital sphere exceptionally well. Marvel has learned the art of sensationalizing digital news. Tom Holland, who plays Spiderman in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is the prime example of this tactic. Very often in interviews, Tom Holland “slips up” and lets out information that fans think was confidential. For example, he hinted that Andrew Garfield, an actor who had also previously played the role of spiderman, was involved in Spiderman: No Way Home alongwith Tom Holland. Marvel fans burned in speculation and started sharing their opinions and theories on social media. So, Marvel did not just leverage their own social media handle for creating a buzz, they made use of the millions of Social media handles of their fans to create it for them. The noise rose to such degrees that the movie's success was fated. Spiderman: No Way Home grossed 1.37 Billion USD worldwide. Social media marketing is fuelled by people sharing content. Instagram’s algorithm highly values engagement in the form of: The number of shares a post has Whether the post is “saved” by a user or not The number of comments and likes the post has Marvel’s strategy performed exceptionally well in all these areas. Now, there is a common thread that connects Nike’s and Marvel’s Instagram marketing strategies. Instagram Helps Drive Brand Equity The best brands use Instagram to create a drastic increase in brand equity. What is Brand Equity? Brand equity is the social value associated with a brand. The more well-recognized a brand is, the higher its equity will be. Also, the better the reception of the communication from the brand is, the higher the brand equity. Some brands have such a high level of brand equity that an entire product or service might become synonymous with them. For example, many people refer to web searching as “googling something”. Instagram marketing is brilliant for raising brand equity in younger audiences. The 4 Levels of Brand Equity A consumer asks 4 questions about a brand. Let’s look at each of them and compare them with the aforementioned brand deal between Nike and Cristiano Ronaldo #1 Brand Identity - Who Are You? This level refers to how a consumer may immediately recognize a brand. For example, the iconic Nike swoosh is enough to get the brand name across. #2 Brand Image - What Are You? The brand image is the perception of the brand in the public eye. Influencer marketing is an effective way of improving brand image. Cristiano Ronaldo simply holding a new boot benefits Nike’s brand image. #3 Feelings About the Brand - What About You? To create greater brand equity, the brand needs to arouse specific feelings in its target audience. As an example, most fast food chains have red logos, because the color red is known to arouse appetite. Ironically, red is also associated in the brain with “fresh food” – think about apples. In Nike’s case, they hinge on feelings similar to an adrenaline rush. #4 Resonance - What About You and Me? The greatest level of brand equity is resonance, where a customer feels connected to the brand and feels them as an extension of their personality. As an example, Starbucks customers share such an affinity with the brand that it has them go there repeatedly. Half a billion people are actively invested in the boot that Ronaldo wears. Nike reaps the benefit of this active emotional investment. And this is the reason they were willing to pay a billion USD in 2016. Instagram, specifically, is the best digital place to drive brand equity since the platform is highly conducive to marketing in-the-moment and is logged into frequently, especially by young consumers. ...
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