SMX Session: Leveraging Brand-Lovers

In the Branding & Search session today at SMX West, panelists gave the audience many, many items to consider regarding their own brand or their client’s brand.

Let’s start by discussing the people that the brand is ultimately trying to influence.

Edwin Wong, Director of Customer Insights Organization – Yahoo!, touched on this by explaining that people love brands that love what they love. A mouthful right?

He labeled these folks, “Passionistas”.

Let’s use me as an example. I love food and cooking, so I love the Food Network because they share my passion. The theory holds true so far.

More interesting, is that Passionistas search 184% more than others. (No surprise here, but I’m in the search industry so we’ll move past me as the example on this one. :))

In addition, this group is often more likely to engage with your brand by:

• requesting more content, i.e. signing up for a newsletter
• trusting brand recommendations i.e. buying branded products or in our example Food Network dishtowels

Perhaps most important of all, the “Passionistas” are your brand’s best marketers. These are the folks who are going to refer friends and family to the brand.

In our example, I constantly have friends ask me where I get recipes and I tell them to check out foodnetwork.com.

Take advantage of your brand advocates and empower them to share your message.

You can get started by:

• Identifying who your “Passionistas” are
• Creating consistent messages about the shared passion
• Giving them content they identify with /trust and therefore will pass along

As stated above the panel gave the audience much to think about, so look for more info coming out of this session on the other blogs covering SMX West.