Why Your Marketing Should Be A Stage For Featuring Others

From Rohit Bhargava:

This weekend Hyundai ran what would normally be a forgettable ad featuring a girl singing about buying a Hyundai for the holidays. What was interesting about the ad, though, is that they drive watchers to YouTube where they feature an entire channel and challenge for anyone to get featured in an upcoming ad. Right now there are hundreds of aspiring artists using YouTube to get discovered. Any number of them would be delighted to appear in an ad like this…and many of them have built considerable audiences of thousands and often even hundreds of thousands of fans online. In using their marketing budget to create a big stage, Hyundai is already getting more engagement than they usually would.

Even if you’re not spending millions on TV spots during football, most marketing is filled with opportunities like this and usually they are missed. The big question we are used to asking is how you can use marketing to get more visibility, more customers and or make more money. What if, instead, you thought of your marketing budget and resources as a platform to showcase others? Here are a few great ways you might do this:

1. Showcase your best customers

Many large brands including SAP and American Express do a lot to try and focus their marketing spotlight on their customers. The message behind doing this is clear—your customers are doing great things and you are proud to be a part of the reason why. Not only that, but it can be a great way to retain your best customers because you have demonstrated a belief in them and their future that creates a powerful bond.

2. Find up and coming talent

The point I made earlier about featuring YouTube stars instead of random actors is an important one. If you do the kind of marketing where you need some form of talent (either actors or singers or illustrators), consider looking online for the people who are creating their own audiences. Tapping them for ads is not only a great strategy to get very talented people, but they are much more likely to use your ad as part of their online portfolio and direct their fans to go and check out the advertising. It is a free way to get more exposure for your advertising beyond wherever you pay for it to appear.

3. Make your employees the heroes

This is the one suggestion that probably causes the most amount of heartburn for small business owners. After all, turning a spotlight on your employees can be tough because you never know if they might turn around and leave your company at some point—potentially making the amount you spend on creating collateral featuring their story a waste of money. To manage this risk while still getting the real benefit from featuring your people, you can create a template sort of marketing where their stories could easily be changed. Also, choose which employees to feature wisely, and try to find the ones who are most loyal instead of the ones with the biggest egos or the ones you happen to be trying the hardest to keep.

Rohit Bhargava leads Digital Strategy at Ogilvy, one of the world’s largest marketing agencies, and is the author of the best selling marketing book Personality Not Included, a guide on using personality to create a more human small business. His new book called Likeonomics: How To Be More Believable In The Affinity Economy will be published by Wiley in early 2012.

Source: http://www.openforum.com/articles/why-your-marketing-should-be-a-stage-for-featuring-others

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