The Bite-Sized Edition of the Brand Affinity Marketing Playbook

If you’re keeping tabs on what we’ve been up to lately here at Wistia, then chances are the words brand affinity should sound pretty familiar to you by now. But, on the off-chance you’ve been able to maintain that New Year’s resolution of yours to spend less time online and need to get caught up to speed, here’s how we define the term:

• Brand affinity is the most enduring and valuable level of a relationship between a business and consumer based on the mutual belief that they share common values.

In 2020 and beyond, we think it’s more important than ever for brands to focus on building brand affinity, not just awareness, in order to be successful in the long term. Some of the biggest brands across B2B and B2C are already doing this by creating binge-worthy content like podcasts and video series. So, how can small or medium-sized businesses like yours get in on the action? Luckily, our co-founders Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz discussed how brand affinity can be earned at our live-streamed event Change the Channel and introduced our four-step Brand Affinity Marketing Playbook that’ll help you start executing this strategy today!

In this post, we’ll give you a high-level overview of the key topics we cover throughout the Brand Affinity Marketing Playbook so you can get a sense of what you’ll learn. We’ll get into why current brand-building strategies aren’t as effective as they once were, why binge-worthy content is the key to getting people to spend more time with your brand, and much more. Let’s get started, shall we?

Why current brand-building strategies aren’t working

The problem many marketers don’t see when it comes to digital advertising is that ads alone don’t make people like you. As marketers, we need to collectively face the hard truth that it’s impossible to make potential customers fall in love with us at first sight.

Interrupting people with messages and short videos they didn’t ask to see is not behavior conducive to making them like us more — in fact, it makes them like us less. Sure, running an awareness campaign might ensure that people recognize or know of your brand, but brand awareness does not inherently lead to the creation of brand advocates.

“The problem many marketers don’t see when it comes to digital advertising is that ads alone don’t make people like you.”

These days, most customer-facing teams like product, sales, and support are often left to carry a lot of weight on their shoulders when it comes to building affinity for their brands with customers and prospects. These teams are foundational in building brand affinity, but they’re not scalable in terms of time. To paint a picture, on the sales side, we’re usually trying to decrease the time it takes to close deals. On the support side, although we love chatting with everyone and understanding their problems, we are also trying to be as efficient as possible.

That’s why we believe investing in a Brand Affinity Marketing strategy is the best way for businesses across an array of industries to create true fans of their brands, and ultimately scale that affinity that other teams across the business work so hard to build.

Finding a niche audience

The first step to any effective Brand Affinity Affinity Marketing strategy is to identify your business’s niche audience. What does your brand stand for beyond your products and services? What values do you care about promoting to the world? When it comes to practicing a successful Brand Affinity Marketing strategy, identifying and understanding your business’s values on a core level is key to determining which audience is best for your binge-worthy content.

To determine the right niche audiences for your video series or podcast, you need to define who you’re speaking to, what you’re saying, and why they should care. It’s also important to note that the audience you choose for your binge-worthy show should extend beyond those who are in your potential customer base. In other words, you should aim to create buzz amongst a niche group of people that care about more than just your products or services. yea

Creating binge-worthy content

Once you have your positioning statement in order, the next step is to come up with the creative execution of your show. Now, as we mentioned before, it’s possible to execute this strategy with podcasts, short videos, books, blog content, and the like. Think through the type of show you want to make — interview-style, a gear review, docu-series? The world’s your oyster. Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on the production of your series if the content isn’t grounded in a solid idea from the start, so make sure you get this part right!

When it comes to creating this type of content, you can trust that the right people will stick around to engage with your content because it resonates with them on an identity-based level. Some of these people might not be customers or even know about your brand before watching or listening to your show, which is the beauty of it all in the first place! With binge-worthy content, you can cast a wider (yet more niche) net and tap into new audiences while garnering more fans for your brand.

Marketing like a media company

The next step in the Brand Affinity Marketing strategy is to distribute and promote your content like a media company would. Companies like Netflix and Disney are already in the business of aggregating, creating, and distributing content to the masses that helps them build audiences, so you’re going to want to take a page out of their book.

Your content doesn’t need to be available in full on social media in order for it to be discovered. In fact, the best approach to promoting your show on social media is to replicate the approach taken by broadcasters and media companies. Promoting trailers and snippets from your shows works well for driving folks back to your show’s home-base on your own site. Doing so ensures that users can find your content through search and recommendations, but that if they’re intrigued and engaged enough by your offering, they’ll move from a social channel to an owned channel.

“The best approach to promoting your show on social media is to replicate the approach taken by broadcasters and media companies.”

Measuring resonance over reach

The fourth and final step in any Brand Affinity Marketing strategy is measuring the impact your binge-worthy content has had on your business. The more of your series people watch, chances are, the more connected they feel to your brand and your values. And the more connected they feel to your brand, the more likely they are to spread the word about your business, in turn creating the opportunity to build more brand affinity.

In order to be successful with your Brand Affinity Marketing strategy, you have to change the way you think about ROI to account for advocacy, rather than just awareness or conversion. To that end, there are three core metrics you should use to measure the success of your shows over time: Brand Search Impressions, Time Watched, and Subscribers. Based on these metrics, you can get a better sense of how your audience is behaving and engaging with your content over time.

Get started with Brand Affinity Marketing today

People’s affinity for your brand relies on their relationship with you. Just like relationships between two people, relationships take time to build and become stronger. They don’t usually happen overnight, which is why investing in finding ways to increase the amount of time people spend with your business is the key to growing relationships.

With a long-term Brand Affinity Marketing strategy in place, businesses are able to create stronger, more personal connections with their niche audience — and their niche audience’s friends. In the end, chances are these loyal fans will be happy to talk about and recommend your business — and your content — with the people they already know and trust. And thus, the positive word of mouth cycle continues ad infinitum.

Now, this was just an overview of what the playbook has in store for you. So, what are you waiting for? Jump into the Brand Affinity Marketing Playbook today.