Brand Loyalty Expansion: Subliminal Marketing

Have you ever heard of people accusing commercials of mind-control or subliminal messaging?

While the mind-control accusation is quiet far-fetched, there are a few simple messaging techniques to impact how consumers perceive your brand.

Branding is essential for expanding your online commerce. The ability to not only reach new users and engage them, but to incentivize your brand-loyal advocates to share your brand and content with friends is vital for expanding new customer acquisition.

Video content is the most engaging and is referenced by 96% of consumers within their purchase decision to weigh benefits and alternative options.

Brand endorsements may not produce purchases on the spot, but they will impact how consumers view and associate with your brand.

By associating your brand with similar interests and topics of conversation, you will impact the way consumer view your brand and relate to it.

Commercials use celebrity endorsements and popular mainstream music to connect with consumers, whether they realize it or not.

For example, Ram Trucks were the least purchased truck model before 2017, but all of Ram’s partnerships meant they were not only seen everywhere, but associated with consumer interests, desires, and characteristics.

Their Yellowstone partnership was perhaps the most effective to start, especially as they continued to feature country artists in commercials and event sponsorships.

Their product and brand placement was so effective that between 2017 and 2022, they were the highest purchased brand - from dead last to first place in a year.

Now that’s powerful branding.

Online commerce brands can use music and content that is relevant to topics, interests, and behaviors to align with their target market.

The power of incentivized offers can potentially carry a brand to household name-level popularity.

Pairing strong brand associations with personalized incentives to engage and share content could, alone, skyrocket brand recall and positive perception.

Incentivizing your active, loyal customers to engage and share brand content could expand your customer base by over 50% - while strengthening your brand’s association to whatever relevant content your shared posts are about.

This is why it’s essential to revolve all of your content around relevant topics and interests. The entertainment and value of your content will make or break your organic brand reconciliation.

Relevance and associations aren’t the most important brand traits.

As noted by the majority of consumers, trust, quality, and customer support are even more important.

Developing trust in your brand requires developing your brand image to include reliability. This can be done by sharing customer testimonials, openly meeting customer support needs, and sharing customer reviews.

Just like other brand traits, you can improve how reliable your brand appears by posting relevant content that illustrates reliability. Most brands include the year they were established to convey authority and expertise.

According to consumers, 53% rank brand reliability as an 8 or more on a scale of 1 - 10. Brand trust is primarily illustrated over time and customer service, but can be defined by relevant content as well.

For brands that are newer, the content, personalities, and traits associated with your brand and content are just as important.

Video content is essential for relating to consumers the quickest, which can impact reliability and market authority by posting tutorials, product features and benefits, product comparisons, and product alternatives with differences.

Online commerce brands should also post videos that include customer testimonials and reviews as a show of social proof.

Organic video content is most effective and engaging with a duration less than 2 minutes long.

Video content for ad campaigns have proven to be most effective with videos that are 15 - 30 seconds long, while organic video content is most effective between 30 seconds and 2 minutes long - but no longer.

Associating your brand with relevant topics, interests, behaviors, and other relevant content can greatly impact how consumers perceive, recall, and most importantly, relate to your brand.

Video content can be used most effectively to increase engagement by associating or focusing interest on relevant interests or topics.

Brand associations are essential to grow brand recall and recognition as they draw visual relationships between consumers and a brand.

For the next 60 days, try finding the top 10 interests among your customers and post relevant content that either mentions those interests, includes them somehow, or relates them to your products.