By David Tomas, on 27 November 2023
In the past year, your digital marketing strategy has likely evolved and adapted to new market trends, and you’ve likely noticed a shift in the brand-consumer relationship.
Now more than ever, audiences are seeking proximity and transparency from brands. Meanwhile, brands are exploring new channels and formats to connect with their audiences. In light of this evolving landscape, People-Led Marketing promises to be a methodology that aids brands in growing and connecting with their community. Read onto learn more!
The 4 Pillars of the People-Led Marketing Methodology
People-Led Marketing operates around four fundamental pillars: content, data, technology, and media. Below, we’ll explain what each of these points consists of and how you can activate and improve them.
1. Content
The goal in this phase of the People-Led Marketing (PLM) methodology is to create and disseminate a high volume of quality content in various formats. The high volume of branded content is key in order for consumers to find it and eventually share it or even create their own.
What Type of Content Should Be Generated?
- How-to content
- Blog articles
- User generated content
- Influencer marketing
- Momentum
- Reviews or testimonials
- Contests or challenges
- Product creation
- Employee advocacy
Who Should Generate This Content?
PLM includes anonymous users who want to generate content related to a brand, as well as influencers, celebrities, industry leaders, or brand employees. It boils down to real people sharing real experiences.
What Does This Content Allow You to Do?
As a brand, generating content allows you to capture the attention and interest of users. The more content you generate, the more you help users connect with your brand and the more possibilities they have to get to know you better. This is where data comes into play.
2. Data
To enhance and leverage your created content effectively, it's crucial to build up and engage with your database. Collecting, analyzing, and measuring the outcomes of your efforts not only facilitates improvement but also ensures that you deliver the optimal experience to consumers.
Try to build the most up-to-date and dynamic database within your industry. Give priority to collecting and consolidating first-party data, which stands as the most valuable and trustworthy information for a company. This data is willingly shared by users themselves with the brand.
By incorporating these practices, you'll gain an unprecedented competitive advantage. Moreover, your marketing and sales initiatives will enrich artificial intelligence algorithms, resulting in a greater return. However, it's crucial to consider three tools (listed below) that can assist you in better managing your data.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management will allow you to centralize and manage all leads and customer information. It will facilitate collaboration between marketing and sales teams, improve the relationship throughout the customer lifecycle, and provide a more realistic picture of the results obtained. Currently, one of the best CRMs on the market is HubSpot.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
If you handle a large amount of data and you want to make the most of it, it's be a good idea to have a customer data platform. This is a kind of unified database that tags and centralizes customer data from all channels, unifying it, and then enriching it with attributes to generate audiences and 360º profiles.
This technology moves a large amount of data and has a certain scale in terms of deployment and costs, so consider whether this option fits your business needs.
Single Customer View
A streamlined and comprehensive understanding of customer data is essential for the optimal functioning of People-Led Marketing. This is achieved through what we term a Single Customer View (SCV) – a centralized and organized representation of all pertinent information about an individual customer.
The SCV typically encompasses nominal customer details, such as name, date of birth, and contact information, along with behavioral insights like past transactions and touch points.
The Single Customer View is closely tied to preceding points. By using your CRM, you can seamlessly and automatically integrate data into your MCS. Subsequently, this unified customer view seamlessly integrates into your Custom Data Platform, a technology that encapsulates nearly all aspects of customer information.
3. Technology
To nurture and automate data across your company's systems and scale the described actions efficiently, investing in technological resources is essential.
In this era of technological and digital advancement, brands aiming for relevance and improved marketing should focus on building a robust and extensive technological stack. This not only facilitates scaling but also provides control over the technological infrastructure, streamlining tasks such as updates, changes, and process enhancements.
By incorporating advanced integrations and automation, you can precisely target your audience and deliver tailored messages through optimal channels. This approach enables quicker and more efficient access to customer information, ensuring the single customer view discussed earlier.
Success in this endeavor requires a solid technical understanding to execute integrations, manage automated processes, and address developments tailored to specific business models.
4. Media
Media in People-Led Marketing encompasses both organic channels and paid platforms. Success in this methodology relies on effective content dissemination. Use organic channels to identify high-performing content—those with optimal metrics like user interaction, conversion rates, retention, and lead/sale conversion. Promote these top-performing organic pieces through your paid strategy.
Paid social channels amplify content reach and hasten audience expansion. Ensure that your ads are compelling, feature people, and present your brand transparently. Choose the right platform based on your desired segmentation and target audience.
Supplement your strategy with SEM campaigns to boost the visibility of relevant and frequently searched content in Google or Bing results.
Benefits of the People-Led Marketing Methodology
People-Led Marketing aims to foster brand development and growth, offering numerous benefits such as:
- Improving your key KPIs: The creation and dissemination of quality content boosts your reach and appeals to the interests of your consumers in a natural way, making it easier to increase engagement, visits, and brand searches. In addition, the number of completed transactions (sales, registrations, subscriptions, etc.) also increases thanks to the implementation of PLM.
- Boosting your performance strategy: You can complement People-Led Marketing with your existing performance strategy. In fact, by focusing the public's attention on the brand and generating virality with the content, your performance strategy will benefit, especially if you bet on direct conversion.
- Increasing authenticity and trust between brand and consumer: Relying on content created by users generates visibility brand recognition, and strengthens the relationship between the brand and the consumer.
- Obtaining data and working with it: Implementing a PLM strategy will allow you to obtain more big data, which, if well analyzed, will help you improve your marketing and offer consumers the best possible experience.
- Cost savings and automation with AI: Investing in co-created content between brands and consumers yields substantial cost savings, as there is no need for financial investment in either user-generated content creation or its dissemination through social networks. Furthermore, with the aid of AI, many aspects of the methodology can be automated, expediting the process of creating content.
