Affinity marketing leads your customers to embrace your brand. The logic is to turn each of them into your spokesperson, converting them into ambassadors for your brand within their own networks.
Marketing for real people
Affinity marketing helps you understand your customers far more realistically than the clichés of socio-professional targeting exploited by traditional marketing.
Those rigid classifications lead mass marketing to hammer a message at one identified segment (young people, the under-50 housewife, senior executives…), on the assumption that the group is homogeneous and that its behaviour is predictable from that membership alone.
Unfortunately (for the comfort of the marketing manager), that presumption of homogeneity is false. But affinity marketing comes to the rescue, built on another vision of the market.
Johanna Blakley (USC — University of Southern California) led a three-year demographic study observing, among other things, how individuals behave on social networks — or, for instance, what customers write in their reviews on Amazon.
Her work demonstrates how false the clichés of traditional categorisation are when it comes to predicting behaviour.
She highlights instead the relevance of an approach that takes better account of feelings of identity — multiple within each one of us — which are precisely the reference points of affinity marketing.
The idea of this new form of marketing is therefore to build ties with authentic representatives of your customer base, and turn them into advocates able to recommend the brand to other people. The famous brand ambassadors…
Content marketing spreads your message horizontally
A content marketing programme first addresses a sharply defined audience. But thanks to the virtues of affinity, a programme that has won over its audience goes on to build bridges to other families of consumers. It happens spontaneously, but you have every interest in encouraging the movement by relying on opinion relays: influential bloggers, targeted journalists, social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter…
Turning a customer into a fan of your brand
Understanding what a fan is lets you transform the relationship you have with your customer. A community of fans is built on strong values, distinctive codes — a whole culture that fuels a powerful sense of belonging.
(Going as far as the example in the photo opposite is not compulsory…)
Beware of clichés! The B2B world is just as concerned
A Forbes/Google study (Video in the C-Suite: Executives Embrace the Non-Text Web) sheds particularly interesting light on this subject from a professional, B2B standpoint. One of its most revealing findings concerns the attitude of senior executives towards online video and virality.
Here is what it tells us: “The social component of online video resonates with senior executives and boards of directors. More than half of these executives share videos with colleagues at least weekly and receive work-related videos as often. Younger executives appear even more inclined to watch and share videos using social networks.”
Commissioned by Google in December 2010 and conducted among 300 executives and board members of companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue, the study shows that the shift in usage and the penetration of online video are not confined to the personal sphere: video is now regarded as a work tool with as much of a place in professional life as the press or training.
Affinity marketing: awakening the modern tribes
In affinity — or tribal — marketing, the focus is a set of individuals who are not necessarily homogeneous in socio-demographic terms, but who can be seen as members of a tribe of activity: a population sharing common behaviours. For a company, tribal marketing consists in identifying these tribes and creating targeted products or promotional campaigns for them.
Your customers spread your message for you
Content marketing can be a tool for both winning and retaining customers. Well designed and well managed, your message is spontaneously passed on to other potential customers. The members of your community take charge of spreading the word. Getting them to take on that role of brand ambassador is the whole challenge of affinity marketing.
When that mission is accomplished, your company can hope for great things.
Video bonus
Below, watch a video produced by Socialnomics, staging a whole series of eye-opening statistics!
