As we submerge our minds into the exciting opportunities the present and future offer, it’s crucial to clarify and identify what your business (big or small, new or established) is all about.
Efficiency and transparency or care and empathy? Modification or classics?
We all know the basics: consumer profile, attractive design, intentional content, etc. But have you ever noticed how some brands shine one year but fade away moving forward, while others consistently stay on top of our news feeds, search engines, and minds?
Adapting to new times, updated technology, and innovative solutions while prioritizing customer experience keeps successful brands relevant today. In other words, proper branding.
Proper branding is the most important part of a successful business – digital or physical.
Branding is the process of creating a unique identity for your business on the web and in the minds of your target audience. It involves consistency in all aspects – color scheme, tone of voice, consumer interactions, ad fonts, etc.
Business branding helps with consumer loyalty through a sustainable emotional connection, and of course, branding is what makes your business stand out against competitors in your space.
Branding is the balance between attractive design, technology, and humanity. It creates and maintains your business’s reputation.
We have a lot to say on this topic, so we split this Vavoza Insider Plus issue into a three-part branding series.
In this series, we will discuss what we believe are the top-most important aspects of business branding in 2024-2025 (Hint: It’s not the color scheme and fonts).
In today’s edition, we will emphasize authenticity (with a few twists).
The Power Of Authenticity
What does it mean to be authentic in marketing, and how does it tie into branding?
Though authenticity cannot be directly measured like other performance indicators, such as likes and views, it happens to be among the most valuable metrics.
Unlike other metrics, you do not get to analyze and measure your authenticity – your audience is the collective analyst.
However, you are able to reflect on and optimize your authenticity, and that is exactly what we are here to help you with.
Optimizing Your Authenticity
To be authentic means to be real, personable, and original. Authenticity is the prerequisite for building rapport with your leads and then converting them into loyal customers.
Why? Because authenticity breeds trust, and needless to say, when your leads trust you, they are significantly more likely to buy your products and services.
Connecting and engaging with your audience and taking their feedback into consideration directly influences their purchasing decisions.
We highly recommend going the extra mile to connect, engage, and receive feedback from your audience. As a brand, this is one of the most powerful and meaningful things you can do to optimize your authenticity.
So, how can you ensure your brand is authentic in the eyes of your prospects? Here are some actionable tips and tactics you can implement to optimize your authenticity today:
1) Attract The Right Audience
There is no one approach that is right for everyone. For instance, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour was incredibly successful, but even Taylor couldn’t get everyone to like her music (or even her personality).
We all have different tastes and preferences, and we resonate with different brands and messages.
As a marketer, you have two options: You can either try to “appear” more authentic, or you can actually be genuine and attract an audience that will resonate with your brand’s message.
We believe that the best way to market today is to show your true colors, even if it repels some people. This way, you will attract the type of audience that will actually resonate with your message.
2) Practice What You Preach
As an agency, we’ve worked with many different characters in the coaching industry over the years. Some were as authentic and real as it gets, while others were practicing the complete opposite of what they were preaching to their audience.
Ironically, we’ve seen the most greedy, undeveloped, and unauthentic behavior from personal development coaches who teach others how to develop their personality to achieve their goals!
They broke our trust, and as a result, we will never conduct business with those individuals again, nor can we, with a good conscience, recommend them to anyone in the market.
3) Engage, Connect, and Serve
- Email Marketing: Share useful content with your email subscribers without a hidden agenda. Genuinely serve your audience. And don’t forget to add humor and personality to your emails – be personable.
- Social Media: Continually post on social media and engage with all commenters. When you genuinely try to connect with the people who engage with your posts, you will realize how interesting most people are, and you’ll start seeing your audience as real people rather than numbers on the screen.
This tactic alone can help you understand your audience significantly better, which is something any expert marketer strives towards.
Keep in mind that most people will not engage with your posts, but they will see them. Just because someone isn’t engaging doesn’t mean they are not being impacted by your content. - Paid Ads: Have you ever considered running remarketing ads to your leads and followers just to connect with them? Advertising is not always about bringing people into your funnel; it’s also about keeping them warm and cozy in your funnel!
We recommend running CPV (cost-per-view) video ads to reach your warm audience quickly and efficiently.
You can also run Non-Skippable 15-second video ads, 6-second Bumper ads, and Display ads to constantly remind your audience of your existence and keep them engaged. All of this can be done with Google Ads.
4) Share Real-Life Stories
It’s important for your business to have a human side to it – storytelling can help you with that!
Whether you are a solopreneur or a team, help people get to know you for who you are and what your business stands for by sharing real-life stories from first-hand experience.
Your story resonating with your audience goes much further than increasing profits. It will bring you long-term customers who will invest in you and your brand’s vision!
Be authentic and honest when communicating your story to your audience. This will distinguish you from marketers who only focus on what’s in people’s wallets and how much of it they can extract.
While finances are important, focusing on providing value and solutions and genuinely serving your audience will take you much farther in business (financially, too).
Cultivating with Authenticity
Disclaimer: This strategy is NOT for everyone. If you choose to implement it, make sure to weigh your pros and cons accordingly. Also, please only implement this strategy if you have ethical intentions. Do NOT use this information to cause financial or emotional harm to anyone.
In this section, we will share how you can deliberately use authenticity to your advantage to grab attention, engage and connect with your audience, convert more leads and customers, and impact your target market.
The Polarization Strategy
One of the most effective ways to grab attention, drive engagement, and build a cult-like brand following is to breed and nurture an “us vs. them” mentality, also known as polarizing.
The goal is to appeal very strongly to a segment of the population that shares your brand’s values.
Polarization evokes a very intense and deep emotional response. The upside is that strong emotions are good for engagement and conversions. The people who agree with your brand’s authentic but controversial values will build an emotional bond with your brand and support your mission, be it consciously or subconsciously.
Unfortunately, the inevitable side effect of strongly appealing to one group of people means that another group will be extremely repelled or repulsed by your brand.
This is precisely why you must weigh the pros and cons and decide whether to pursue this powerful strategy (it can be dangerous).
So, why would anyone want to implement the polarization strategy? There really should only be one reason: because you genuinely believe in your message, purpose, and mission, and want to positively impact your target audience.
Also, there is no need to go to extremes. Being too controversial can hurt your brand’s reputation and mission.
Exercise controlled polarization where you get controversial enough to evoke emotional responses, but not enough to hurt your business. The best way to keep polarization under control is to keep your message niche-focused rather than broad.
Here’s how it’s done:
- Research: Understand what triggers emotional responses in your target audience. What are they passionate about? What causes and ideas do they support, and what do they oppose?
This step is crucial because your polarizing messages must attract your target audience and evoke an emotional response. - Experiment: Test different messaging. Pay attention to metrics such as positive engagement from your target audience and negative engagement from the audience you are choosing to repel (remember, appealing to one audience inevitably repels another).
- Double Down: Once you determine the messaging that triggers emotional responses from the appropriate audiences, double down by creating different variations of content with the same core message.
Then, “spray” the market with your polarizing messages by putting out a high volume of content on the subject matter.
Here’s a practical example:
We asked a local wedding photographer to share a big point of friction in the wedding photography industry.
It appears that many wedding photographers refuse to follow brides’ posing requests and instructions because they think they know what’s best for their clients. They refuse to do as they are told because they believe it may somehow hurt their reputation.
Such a photographer-first approach frustrates many brides (it’s an emotional trigger).
So, hypothetically speaking, if we were to advise a wedding photographer on how to polarize their market, we would tell them to take an aggressive client-first stance.
We would tell them to constantly create content expressing their discontent with how other photographers treat brides, calling out all the frustrating things they do.
Such a client-first approach would appeal strongly to soon-to-be brides but trigger negative responses from other wedding photographers.
Would it be worth it? Well, that depends on how much stress and negativity a wedding photographer would be willing or able to handle. One thing is for sure – you can’t go wrong with taking a client-first approach.
At the end of the day, the photographer in our hypothetical scenario would be impacting their market in a positive way, so we believe that implementing such a polarizing approach would be ethical and appropriate.
Humans vs. Robots
Speaking of polarizing, here’s something that not everyone agrees on. As more marketers rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to communicate with their leads and customers, consumers are deprived of real, authentic conversations.
And guess what? As a result, your originality, combined with your brand’s powerful message, has the potential to resonate with consumers on a deeper level today than ever before!
In recent years, we’ve had countless conversations about this topic with entrepreneurs, marketers, and ordinary people. Would you like to know something ironic?
The only people who seem to think it’s okay to use AI to communicate with other people happen to be marketers who use AI.
It’s ironic because marketers should be the first to understand the importance of building genuine connections with consumers, yet they are the ones who propagate and promote the use of AI in communication.
To add to the irony, these same marketers don’t like it when they are forced to talk to a robot when trying to get customer support on other companies’ websites.
To be fair, AI has many useful applications, and we highly recommend all our clients and members use it to boost efficiency and productivity.
However, we strongly believe that using AI to communicate with leads and customers is a big and costly mistake – we believe it is unauthentic, and your audience can sense it.
Our most successful clients do not use AI to connect with their audience; they rely heavily on human-to-human connections.
- They host live webinars and events, write their own email copy, and genuinely enjoy connecting with their audience. As a result, these brands have cult-like followings and extraordinarily loyal customers (and repeat customers).
What we are saying here is not an inspirational speech but rather practical advice: we highly advise you to stay away from using AI chatbots and AI-generated messages to communicate with your prospects, leads, and customers (but use AI for all its other useful applications).
When everyone else is riding the AI chatbot wave, we encourage you to be real and give people what they want deep down inside – a human connection.
This will put you head and shoulders above everyone else who is flooding the market with unoriginal, AI-generated content.
P.S. If you’re looking for a polarizing topic in the internet marketing space – we just threw you a bone – consider taking a bold stance against using AI for XYZ (choose a specific AI application). However, only do this if you genuinely believe in what you preach.
Closing Remarks
The branding phenomenon has so many avenues and doors that it is impossible to cover all its aspects within one letter.
Our intention is to cover the most trending and relevant aspects of business branding in 2024-2025, which all tend to go hand in hand.
In today’s edition of our three-part branding series, we emphasized the power of authenticity and shared a few powerful ideas that you can implement immediately.
We truly believe that once you understand the depth and power of authenticity in branding and marketing, your business and life will never be the same.
We have more insight about current branding practices to share with you. So, continue to the second edition of this series now.
