2020 Midwest Digital Marketing Conference | Shane Tepper
The End of Marketing Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI
Speaker: Carlos Gill
This was a very enlightening lecture because it provides an answer to a question that I had personally struggled with for a long time. Why is there low engagement on social media, and how do I make people care? Carlos Gill makes it a point on several occasions to mention times when he had brought up ideas to CEOs about better engaging with customers and how important the human psychology behind it is. He was of course shut down in many of those instances, however, his predictions seemed to be right on target for today’s market and we can now see examples of those tactics from a few select “brave” brands that have seensucces from this less conservative type of brand action.
“People are brands. People buy from people. People want to be engaged, not sold to”
This was a very interesting quote because when you see it, it’s one of those “Duh” moments, but ironically it isn’t so obvious to most companies. Carlos goes on to say that people need to be the face of your brand, not logos. And more importantly, you need to use those faces to build a community. But why is community so important? Well when you have a small army of brand advocates, you essentially create a very cost efficient way to spread your name, not through bought media, but organically and through word-of-mouth. When you have real people stirring up conversations around your brand, you actually create more opportunities to become a part of the conversation. This community conversation is so incredibly important because now, instead of pushing out content that everyone is deliberately trying to avoid, you are inviting people into a conversation and thus becoming less of a pest, and more relatable to the average consumer.
However the question arises, “I’m putting content out there for people to talk about, but few do, so how can I be part of that conversation?” Well Carlos has a fantastic answer to this as well. “Community is King, Content is Queen”. But what does this mean? Well it means that while content is of course an essential part of social media marketing, it is also just another contribution of noise in the ocean that is social media. There is already so much content out there, that it’s almost blinding. So the main priority should be better engagement with followers, not pushing out so much content that it waters down the message you are essentially trying to send. He advises that the best way to engage followers and reduce your unnecessary digital noise would be to choose wisely about the content you are posting. I have seen this without even fully recognizing what I was looking at, however, when a brand makes all of their content about new sales and promos, I generally block it out, yet, when they genuinely ask about what their customers think, the comments fill up, for better or worse. But even if the comments are negative, it still opens opportunities for the brands to engage and not appear to be ignoring the issues at hand.
Another particularly controversial point that Carlos brings up is that marketing in social media is like being in the Wild West, and the only way to survive is to become a “Savage”. To do this he suggests “Don’t act like a brand. Do things everyday users do. Engage in conversation that’s unrelated to your brand, yet relevant to your audience”. Leverage Facebook to comment and reply to poor reviews left on competitors pages, comment on competitor Facebook ads, target competitor page fans. These kinds of tactics may seem a bit undermined, but the truth is that people will see it, and it will raise eyebrows. From my own observations, it seems that people love to talk about, and engage with drama. This drama is just another way to humanize your brand, not to mention that the competition is paying for the media spots and now you can just take advantage of that. Overall it appears that the best way to humanize your brand is to go about social media like your customers would, and have fun with it!
