How much of YOU should show up in your marketing?
Have you noticed the recent shift to ‘being vulnerable’ on social media and in marketing across the board? Before you bare your soul on YouTube or any other platform as part of your marketing strategy, consider this.
While vulnerability has merit for its ability to connect, it can backfire by coming across as a blubbering mess of emotion if it is not balanced with trust.
A delicate mix of vulnerability and trust, along with credibility and entertainment, develops a complete character in people’s minds. Providing a well-rounded presentation of yourself goes a long way to develop a lasting relationship with your audience rather than settling for a one-off, emotion-induced sale.
You can make sure that your copy provides a balance of credibility, entertainment, trust and vulnerability by using a Character Diamond to chart the aspects of yourself you choose to share with the world as part of representing your brand.
When charting a Character Diamond, vulnerability is balanced with trust on a very delicate emotional axis while the intellectual axis balances credibility with entertainment. We’ve touched on the imbalance of vulnerability and trust above.
For some insight into balancing credibility with entertainment, let’s imagine a brilliant scientist finds the cure for cancer and decides to independently market her newfound cure instead of selling it to big pharma. (I like her already.)
It’s pretty safe to assume the scientist would overdeliver on the geeky science, perfectly defining the molecular structure and the mechanics of how the drug dismantles cancerous cells. She’d list all the prestigious schools she’d graduated from and describe the scientific principles that were the backbone of the discovery.
When it comes to credibility, this gal would be a #boss, but a lady in a lab coat talking about cells would be far more warmly received if she also entertained our minds and hearts with visions of a cancer-free world in which our afflicted loved ones live to love another day.
Can you see how just a few images, a video clip or even a single story that lets us (the audience) see the difference her discovery has made in her patient’s lives and the lives of their families would pull us into her world, have us ready to support her cause and hit the BUY NOW button?
That is the magic of balancing credibility with entertainment.
“Given even the tiniest bit of a story to feel into, our brains will superimpose ourselves into the circumstances of the characters and we become invested.”
Joy Houston
In order to fully “get” a brand, the audience needs clarity of where it stands in all four areas. That’s why it is useful to chart a Character Diamond for all the voices that represent your brand. To make it easy for you, I created a Character Diamond template.
We made you a video tutorial to make it easy!
Before you bare it ALL in your marketing, lets answer this question. How much of YOU should show up in your marketing?
We all need to come up with our own answer, but here are my guidelines for what I’m willing to share in our copy in case it helps you make your decision.
What are your parameters for deciding how much of you shows up in your marketing?
Share your parameters with the community in the private Heal At Scale Facebook group to help the rest of us learn from your wisdom. For more details on putting your Character Diamond into use right way, check out the post “HELP! My Copy Does Not Represent My Brand.”
