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What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
Rachel Elsts Downey (00:00):
Rachel Downey In b2b Attention is Currency Trust. That's how you keep it. Gretchen Meyer gets this instinctively as the associate director of growth at Gravity Global. She helps brand cut through the noise by aligning their revenue strategy with storytelling. Her work blends sales ops savvy with some brand intelligence turning strategy decks a a boring content, and to scroll stopping moments. So I called and asked her, how does trust get you attention? Here's what she had to say. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message.
Gretchen Freemyer (00:51):
Hey Rachel, thanks so much for asking about how trust attracts attention. I think one thing to think about within just the world that we live in today, it is an attention currency culture. And so a lot of people think that means big flashy brands, big flashy colors, doing something big in the marketplace. And I think that can all be true. But for me, building trust to attract attention actually means resonating more with that target audience. At Gravity, we kind of look at three levers of creating trust, and for us, that's fame, admiration, and belief. For us, fame, you almost want to think about that like awareness. Awareness is how aware are people of you and your presence in the marketplace? Who's seeking out your brand, who's searching your brand? Think about things like SEO, and then when we think about admiration, these are going to be people following your brand.
(01:44):
Could be things like influencers, it could be more of that chatter online. And then belief is going to be more of that acting. So these are going to be your reviews and your ratings online and things like that. And so all of those, we think about those as levers for creating trust. And I think attention and trust, there's brands that create attention, but then they don't have the trust. That's their moment in time, that's their billboard that you're passing on the highway, but it doesn't move you to do anything about it. When we think about fame, admiration, and belief, trust is inherent to actually getting to the end of that formula, which is belief for us. A lot of that centers around human design thinking. And so what I mean by that is whenever we're doing campaign strategy or a rebrand for a client, we're thinking about the audience first and foremost, and everything starts there.
(02:39):
Who are they? What do they care about? What behaviors are they showing today? What behaviors might they show in the future? So looking at research and intelligence based on what's happening in the market. And I think from there, it's really stemming from what do they care about? Because if we can identify what care about and what matters to them, and it's not the technical speak of they're interested in this product or this service, but what is the problem that we're trying to solve for them? To me, really powerful branding and really powerful trust that creates attention comes from identifying what it is that your audience actually cares about. When you're doing that, it's again, audience first. Then it's breaking it down even further of, okay, now that I know what the audience cares about, how do I create something? Whether that's creative, whether that's messaging, whether that's website, whether that's SEO, how do I create something that speaks to that problem that we're trying to solve?
(03:43):
And I think where a lot of brands get it wrong is they focus on features. They focus on attributes. They might focus on technical expertise, and I think for us, we're really focused on that experience. What do we want people to feel? What do we want people to experience when they work with your brand? And trust is a big part of that. Something that we say all the time is, we don't want to be a vendor. We want to be a partner. To do that, you have to create trust. For us, even within the sales process, it really looks like naming the fear honestly of, Hey, you probably worked with some agencies before and been burnt by them. And it's the same thing when we work with our clients as well. There's always fear when you're picking a new product, picking a new professional service, whatever it is.
(04:30):
For me, I think about naming the fear, naming the stakes that if something goes wrong, but also showcasing, Hey, we understand your problem on a level that other people are not going to, and here's how. Because unless you do that process, irrelevant case study, irrelevant. If you miss that key point of here's how we understand you and here's how we're showcasing that we understand you, and that could look like we did our homework. We did some research. Here's what we see your ideal customer is concerned about, or whatever that may be. To kind of wrap it all up, it's like fame, admiration, belief. Those are all levers to create trust, but at the heart of that, it's really making sure that you understand your audience, what they care about, naming their fear and naming the problem that you solve for them.
Rachel Elsts Downey (05:28):
Thanks for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast. You can find it@shareyourgenius.com.