Top 5 🖐 keys to unlock the strategy of “heart” marketing ❤️
Man received a genetically modified pig heart on New Year’s Eve.
The Food and Drug Administration on New Year’s Eve gave emergency 🚨 authorisation for David Bennett, 57, to receive a genetically modified pig heart, the University of Maryland Medical Center said. Bennett, who had been deemed ineligible for a conventional heart transplant, had been hospitalised 🏥 for six weeks with a life-threatening arrhythmia and was connected to a heart-lung bypass machine. This might possibly open a new path for those facing an overburdened donor system, according to the University of Maryland.
While a myriad of marketing strategies exist that can support drive sales and increase 📈 customer loyalty, it is arguable that none are as effective as storytelling. Storytelling is one of the most efficient ways of tugging at the heartstrings of your prevailing audience, while also remaining the most effective ✅ in tapping into the emotions of potential audiences. Traditional appeals to logic, and rationality remains crucial in selling a product or service. However, recent studies are revealing that the key 🔑 to establishing unwavering customer loyalty, creating brand ambassadors who advertise your product for you and driving consequential traffic to your website is best achieved by marketing with heart.
On the other hand, many marketers remain focused on developing a general ‘brand’ identity - wherein their logo, slogan, and ad content are both driven by and reflect 🪞 the brand as they wish it to be perceived. Conversely, new insights show that all umbrella ☂ aspects of what constitutes a brand should be driven by a story. Though, implementing this appropriately brings with it more risk than merely pushing the facts and figures. Hence, this begs the question - is it true that marketers should lead with the heart over the head?
Studies show that stories 📖 are up to 22 times more memorable than facts or figures alone and that the neural activity of human beings’ upsurges by five times while listening 👂 to or reading a story compared to any other form of content. In contrast, your brand is not simply about the aesthetic of your business but is the sum of interactions that any one person has with your company. This comprises, but is not limited to your community management practises, ad copy and imagery, brand assets, and ad narrative.
Nonetheless, the best brands are not focused as much on creating general marketing campaigns as they are fixated on ‘brand storytelling’. By writing ✍️ stories that touch on passion points that people share and linking those passions to your product or service, these brands can transcend the simple application of facts and figures, which only encourage passive listening, and leverage storytelling to generate active engagement.
In this sense, brands can build 🧱 tribes around the stories they tell that can spark entire movements - the capacity to mobilise your audience is the key to sustaining ongoing customer loyalty and is one of the most powerful assets a brand can have.
Here are the top 5 🖐 keys to unlock the strategy of “heart” marketing:
1️⃣ Put yourself out there
One of the key aspects of heart marketing is to connect 🔗 with your audience on a human level and to really show them what your brand is all about. This can be achieved by giving them an inside look (or behind the scenes peak) at how your business or service operates, candidly, and without the façade and glamour ✨ traditionally linked to advertising.
By letting people in and showing that you have nothing to hide and that you are proud of the way in which you operate, not only do you tell your brand’s story, but you break the ice 🧊 for the customer and create a sense of trust that establishes the foundation for customer loyalty.
2️⃣ Focus on customer care
Community management is one of the most important aspects of marketing today. Your audience 👥 needs to know that they are cared for, that their opinion and feedback matters, and most importantly, that they are listened to and acknowledged. However, community management in itself is not the key - but rather, personalising the community management experience as best you can.
Customers are likely to expect a cookie 🍪 cutter response to a particular question they may ask - so why not surprise them by going the extra mile? Generate a video 📹 response or social media post for even the most basic questions, send the user a coupon or voucher should something go wrong. By zeroing in on a personalised approach to customer care and community management, you show that your brand has a big heart; this will not go unnoticed by audiences who are continuously jaded and disenfranchised by autonomous and sterile brands and business practises.
3️⃣ Capitalise on cultural opportunities
Every single day, something happens in the cultural world 🌎 that creates ripples across the digital landscape. So why not capitalise on a topic, theme, or incident while it is hot? Leveraging cultural nuances helps keep your brand relevant and shows that you can put your guard down every once in a while and have some fun 🥳.
4️⃣ Leverage data in creative ways
As a digital marketer, you have loads of data at your fingertips. This data should not simply be used for reporting to your customers on campaign progress, but can be utilised in increasingly creative 🎨 ways. This is provided you do not infringe on pre-established privacy policies and stay out of the ’creepy’ territory - going too far utilising data for marketing campaigns can prove problematic if you end up scaring 😱 off your audience.
Spotify 🎧 provides an example of this process: they released a billboard that read: “Dear person who played “Sorry” 42 times on Valentine’s Day, what did you do?”. Similarly, they put out ad content that displayed ‘silly’ playlist names that people have created in the past. By leveraging the real data at their fingertips, brands and marketers alike can provide authentic advertisements that have the added benefit of writing themselves.
5️⃣ Respond to critics and protect IP, but stay classy
As a rule of thumb 👍, your brand should always strive to be the classiest brand in your field. People have a hard time relating to stuck-up, overly proud brands that forego their human touch and humility for status, ownership, and the monopolisation of ideas 💡. Conversely, it is important to safeguard all of your brand’s assets and to stand up for your brand should any turmoil arise.
In this sense, it is critical to establish creative ways to simultaneously protect 🛡 your brand while remaining classy. For example, customers sent in complaints proclaiming that the chocolate treats from the Reese’s chocolate Christmas Tree 🎄 campaign did not look like trees whatsoever. Instead of ignoring the users or apologising with their tail between their legs, Reese's’ chose to launch a ‘faux beauty’ campaign, whereby they stated that “they love all trees, no matter their shapes and sizes” and so on. This was a classy way to address customer complaints that simultaneously protected the brand.
Leveraging these keys to “heart” marketing can prove effective in telling your brand’s story and alluring your audience into the marketing process so that they become active, rather than passive customers of your content. This type of customer engagement successfully provides a foundation of trust, respect, and relevance that can transform one-off customers into lifelong loyal ambassadors. Slide into our direct messages to learn more 🤩😎!
References:
Dorman, B. 2018, October 12. 5 Tips for Effective ‘Heart Marketing’.
Madani, D. 2022, January 11. Surgeons perform 1st successful transplant of pig heart to human patient. TODAY.
