
What do the clothing brand Patagonia and military nonprofit Team Rubicon have in common?
Their customers and supporters are positioned as the hero in their storytelling. Whether you’re selling a product, services, or social impact, your marketing narrative should evoke feelings of importance for each recipient.
Below are key insights on how to gain serious ROI through omnichannel engagement from Matt Scott, co-founder, and CEO of CauseMic, a digital cause marketing firm.
For Scott, clothing brand Patagonia typifies the hero approach to storytelling, thanks to their laser focus on their mission: saving the planet. As Scott explains, they recognize that individual customers have a role to play when choosing where to spend their money, and for Patagonia’s customers, that means buying products that are built to last generations, cutting down on excess and over-consumption.
“I think that's a really interesting approach to marketing because what they've done is they've said, ‘We have this north star. We have this problem that we're trying to solve. We are going about it as a business and we are going to place the customer as the hero of that story. So, it's not Patagonia solving this problem, it's each and every one of us, as individual consumers, who actually can take action to make a meaningful difference,’” he said.
Military nonprofit Team Rubicon is another prime example, Scott said. They repurpose the skills and experience of military veterans to respond to natural disasters. Scott and CauseMic worked with the organization to scale from $250,000 to $40 million a year in annual revenue, and more importantly, grow their volunteer base from just seven individuals to a worldwide cadre of more than 100,000.
“We did that by positioning the volunteer as the hero of [Team Rubicon’s] story,” he said. “It wasn't Team Rubicon solving this problem of veteran reintegration or disaster response. It was individual volunteers, and they could see themselves in those who were represented in the storytelling. It created a tribe, a sense of belonging, a community.”
Being able to put your customer, volunteer, or advocate at the heart of your story, Scott explains, starts with understanding them deeply.
- Know your audience. What connects them to your cause or product? How do they want to communicate and how can you honor their communication preferences? Lastly, how are they engaging with your content? They may state their preferences as being one thing, but their behavior may tell a different story, Scott said.
Taking it further, Scott explains a case study with the Oregon Humane Society. To really amplify the impact of the organization’s annual fundraising event, CauseMic started with existing data and the insights it could provide. Their process went as follows:
- Dig into the existing data to begin to understand your audience better. What has worked in the past to drive engagement, and what hasn’t?
- Conduct interviews and surveys to dig even deeper into the organization’s audience, and begin to form hypotheses around what motivates potential participants (or, in the case of a for-profit, customers).
- Validate your findings and hypotheses with follow-up surveys and interviews. Use the information you previously gathered about preferred communication preferences to reach your audience where they want to engage!
- From the information gathered, create key profile types, or personas, of those people who are most likely to engage.
- Create a content and communications plan tailored to each key persona, focusing on what motivates them, with plenty of opportunities for individuals to engage, promote, and visualize themselves as a key part of the event or story.
“I think there's a lot of people talking about the technical ways to increase deliverability and readership and engagement, but we're really focused here on what kind of content,” Scott said. “What was really cool about our content with these three different personas was that they all had their own voice and tone.”
To optimize what you’re doing on content and comms, Scott said, test different approaches and see what resonates best. Lastly, forget about perfection or massive overhauls; iteration and small but consistent improvements are the keys to growth, he said.
“People want to measure everything and they want to wait until it's perfect,” he said. “But I think if you can look at the existing data and find any trends and say, ‘We don't have to redo the whole thing, but it would be nice to validate that our assumptions are correct in this way, and if they are correct, these are the specific 3 steps we plan to take in the next 90 days to turn this into conversion.’”