Social distancing has meant feeling out of the loop for a lot of us, but you’d have to be REALLY out of the loop to not know that Taylor Swift dropped the ultimate quarantine album, folklore.
As a consummate Swiftie, I was a day one folklore listener and “cardigan” video watcher, as well as an intense reviewer of every single online article I could find explaining the meaning behind the lyrics.
After listening and reading and listening and reading, I started thinking about what I was doing. I was dedicating a tremendous amount of my free time to absorbing Taylor’s music. And that’s when I realized, not for the first time, that Taylor Swift is the consummate marketer and an excellent marketing role model.
What Makes Taylor Swift A Marketing Role Model?
First of all, Taylor’s a marketing role model because she’s building on a great product – her music. For most every business, if you start with a subpar product, your marketing can only do so much for you.
However, there are plenty of musicians who are performers and lyricists. Peak Britney Spears had tremendous command and stage presence. MF Doom displayed tremendous writing chops with his complex hip hop rhyme schemes, but cared little about fame or being on stage (even paying others to perform behind his masks)
Taylor Swift brings those things together – the writing and the experience – to create a blockbuster product, then puts herself into the marketing and promotion process in a way that goes beyond concert performances or Saturday Night Live bookings.
How does she bring all this together to be a marketing role model?
She’s an incomparable storyteller.
As a writer, I love weaving stories and putting words together in just the right ways. And I love Taylor Swift because she tells stories that make you feel – that remind you what it’s like to be young and vulnerable, or how fun it is to be 22 and enjoying life with your best friends, or to be aching over the possibility that your mother might not get well after a long illness.
Words matter. And Taylor gets that.
Different schools of writing encourage that marketers and storytellers make their customer/reader the hero – give them a problem to solve and a goal to reach.
Taylor does this by appealing directly to her key audiences. While anyone can listen to, nod along, dance along with a Taylor Swift song, for her key audiences, her songs mean more.
Taylor creates storylines people can identify with – the feeling of being bullied (“Mean”), of getting petty after a breakup (“I Forgot That You Existed”), of looking back with delight on the course of a happy relationship (“invisible string”) or feeling vulnerable in a new one (“Delicate”).
By bringing people into her stories and allowing them to identify with her characters or with her own stories, she allows them to feel immersed in her music, and to be captivated by her offerings.
And for marketers, story-driven content works. According to research by the Harvard Business Review, brands using emotional connections to sell products have been able to increase their active customer counts by 15 percent and increase same store sales by 50 percent.
If you’re a marketer trying to follow in Taylor’s footsteps, consider how you’re creating connections with your consumers and the story you’re telling them.
Testimonials – bringing in the stories of your consumers and their satisfying experience – can be one valuable way to build an additional layer of connection and resonance with your ideal customers. They can see how other people just like them use, love and value the products and services you provide.
She evolves, but stays on brand.
We’ve seen many different iterations of Taylor Swift, from country ingenue to revenge seeker to wistful and wise folklorist.
Although she transitions between public personas and music style, there’s not much doubt in my mind that we’re seeing different facets of a woman growing into maturity. Although she changes, you can see hear and see the original Taylor at the core.
Even her most outside-the-norm album, Reputation, didn’t show us a new Taylor, even though she assured us the old Taylor was dead. It showed us another side of the same girl who has always told us she wanted to be loved, that she cared about others’ opinions and that she struggled with the pain that came along with fame.
Many top brands do this too. You may notice that companies with strong branding make small incremental changes to modernize their logos. They know they have a good thing going, and they’re not going to disrupt the visibility and awareness they have with their consumers.
Take this Starbucks logo for example. It’s retained the same core imagery since it was originally designed in 1971, with the two-tailed mermaid siren front and center. However, the image has been modernized, streamlined and freshened over time – transitioning from a busier brown emblem to today’s sleek green logo symbolizing prosperity and growth.
She’s deeply committed to experience.
The first Taylor Swift album I really adored was Speak Now. I listened to it on repeat for months. It was the first CD I’d actually purchased – well, probably in years.
While I loved the music, I loved it even more because of the liner notes. In them, Taylor included secret messages that were clues regarding her songs’ meanings and, in some cases, who she was singing about.
She does this with all her albums, giving fans a chance to really immerse themselves in her world and story, to feel like she’s giving a secret message directly to them.
Taylor sends Christmas presents, including hand-embroidered samplers, to her fans and hosts secret sessions to let them get an early listen to her music. Oh, and she pays medical bills and college tuition.
I’m sorry – do artists and humans, not to mention marketing role models, even get any better than this? I had a recurring fantasy about sending Taylor my daughter’s birth announcement, just hoping she’d find it in her copious quantities of fan mail and send me a note or something back.
When it comes to experience-building for her fans, Taylor Swift is truly unparalleled. Her brand, as previously mentioned, relies on tapping deeply into the feelings and emotions of her target listeners.
The experiences – the special moments she creates – are irreplaceable and unduplicable.
Taylor excels at something user experience professionals live for – giving “little moments of delight.” She engages, captures her fans’ minds and is always providing additional ways to pull them into her story. The meticulous attention to detail and story weaving keeps her listeners ready to listen to the latest song, buy the latest album, decode the latest Instagram post and dive deeper into the mythology.
User/buyer/customer experience is critical to building long-term relationships, whether you’re a musician, a marketer or a small business owner. 73% of consumers say good experiences are key in influencing brand loyalty.
She repurposes content.
Taylor released about eight different versions of folklore. There were different versions with different cover art themes. In addition, there were special physical copy versions with a bonus track. Online, she released a ‘cabin in candlelight’ version of her lead single cardigan.
On her social media, she posts her own suggested playlists of songs that belong together by mood. There are also lyric videos for each of the songs, which, of course, drive additional views on her media channels. In a time period when social distancing concerns have severely curtailed music video production, she’s still driving views and listens by managing a variety of channels and repackaging releases.
For anyone engaging in digital marketing, learning to repurpose content does two things.
#1 – It saves time.
When you put time and effort into creating a good piece of content, you don’t want readers to glance, then forget it. Instead, good marketers think about ways they can use one piece of content in a variety of different places.
A well-researched blog post, for example, can provide content ideas and resources to create a dozen different pieces for multiple social media platforms:
- Syndicated on LinkedIn Publishing or Medium
- Broken into smaller pieces for individual social posts
- Turned into an infographic
- Recorded in a YouTube video
- Used to create a checklist downloadable
- Highlighted in an email message
- Used for social advertising
For more ideas on how to repurpose content, take a look at this blog post, or download this quick guide to content amplification.
#2 – It reinforces key messages.
The main goal of covering the same topic across multiple platforms isn’t just to save time; it’s to create a reinforcing ecosystem of content. When a potential customer becomes aware of your products/offerings, they want to learn more about you.
If they have no additional content to review on your site, if you push them directly from awareness to making a sales decision, you’re likely to lose them. They’re still going to want to research and they’ll be more likely to go with a brand that’s taken time to answer their questions and guide them through the remainder of the buying process.
Taylor Swift is an incomparable marketing role model because she’s gained a deep knowledge of her audiences, and because she makes thoughtful choices to stay connected with them and make them feel like they’re a part of the story, included instead of an outsider looking in.
Her commitment to experience is the tipping factor that takes her from good to great in marketing and connecting with her listeners, and that same commitment to experience can drive success for businesses and individuals regardless of industry.
If you want to be a better marketer, take some tips from Taylor, then take a look at these tips from us. And, if you want to listen to my Taylor Swift-laden playlist for when I need to get motivated or just “shake it off,” you can check it out here.
What other marketing role model(s) do you most admire, either in the traditional marketing field or out of it? Comment here and we might analyze what makes them so good at what they do.
