Branding Reason

Starting Conversations with Your Fans

You may have heard that one of the keys to success in social media is interacting and starting conversations with your fans. What you may not have heard is how to do this. What most brands want to do is throw promotions, news articles, and sales pitches at their fans. Think of this as the online equivalent of direct mail, only worse. Most people don’t want to be unwillingly solicited to, which is why only 3-1% of all direct mail advertisements result in a response (DMA). Social advertisements, in the form of wall posts and tweets, have a very similar effect, except these are much easier to opt-out off. Irritate an audience member one too many times and they can unfan or hide your posts in as little as two clicks! But there’s an easy way to avoid to this accident. Click below to read more.

How you speak to your fans must be natural, conversational and engaging. You can still market products and promote sales, but you must do it in a way that inspires action. To do this, you need to identify your brand’s online voice. We believe there is a four step process to identifying your branded voice. Here we will discuss step one and you can look for steps two through four in subsequent posts.

The first step to is identify what it is your business does and how you do it differently or better than everyone else. In branding, we call this your positioning statement. A positioning statement defines the core of what your business does, who it does it for, and how. This might seem elementary, or you may say you’ve already done this, but you would be surprised how many business’ answers are less than underwhelming. “We make tools, for men, that are high quality” is not a positioning statement; it’s a product idea at best. A positioning statement must think bigger, deeper, and if you can make it emotional then kudos. 

Let’s look at Disneyland as an example. We like to reference Disney, not only because they are masters at managing their brand, but because everyone has or has had a relationship with them at some point in their life. Think about Disneyland and you might say they are in the business of creating amusement parks or attractions.  That would be wrong.  Disneyland is in the business of creating positive, or may I say magical, family experiences. They do it through rides, shows, food and characters, but their overall goal is to create an experience or escape for the whole family, that will bring them closer for one day and leave lasting memories. That’s a positioning statement. 

What is your brand in the business of?