Creating a brand voice is an early step in any content marketing strategy, but without authenticity, you’re wasting your time.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump couldn’t be more different. Yet, a vital part of the appeal for both is their “authenticity.” That is their secret sauce, what helps to draw the crowds. Each of these guys is beholden to no one.
Trump, with his bulging checkbook, is funding his own ship and doesn’t have to worry about what will happen when he offends. He just opens his mouth and lets it all fly.
Then there’s Sanders, who is relying on an army of small donors, again beholden to no one. He speaks from his Vermont crunchy, liberal heart.
To potential voters, what these candidates say comes across as authentic instead of bought, filtered opinion meant to maximize appeal.
Same in business. Consumers have a nose for the inauthentic. Authenticity — let’s check the dictionary — means to be genuine, not fake and certainly not some second-rate knockoff of someone else. Nobody believes in the fairy tale of perfection anymore. Consumers know the blemishes are there just beneath the cosmetics and they want to know that you’re secure enough to show them these.
They want something real from you, not the safe, carefully coiffed image. For that you need to dig down to where your business passion lays, where truth of what makes your business special prevails.
Begin at the beginning, getting to the nub of who you really are and what drives your business. Become comfortable with that rather than glomming on to what you think the consumer wants.
Getting real means doing away with the influencers you may be paying to fool people into thinking they genuinely use and revere your product. Patently inauthentic! It means no more hiring celebs to tweet about how the sun rises and sets on your product. Don’t dress your web page up in the clothing of a journalistic article and try to pass it off as such. Can you say impostor?
Say it like you mean it, from the heart. Be the business customers love to tell others about, warts and all. Let the authenticity of your own message proudly shine through, as Trump and Sanders would, and bring in the crowds.
