CREATING MEANING WITH MARKETING STRATEGY
As part of creating a theme, you need to get back to the what and the who. This helps when developing customer personas. Dove, a leading beauty and personal care company, has done an excellent job of answering these questions solely through their advertising and marketing content
Where other fashion and beauty brands use models and celebrity faces to advertise, Dove remembered their customer — the average person.
In 2004, they launched their Real Beauty campaign, using tasteful semi-nude advertisements of women of all sizes and ages. The basic idea of the campaign was simple: Beauty is bigger than the limited options presented by trendy fashions.
By highlighting the sizes and shapes of real customers, Dove was able to reinvent their brand, creating an emotional connection with women all around the world. This strategy helped them come up with a theme that has continued to resonate with consumers for a decade. Dove made the statement that there is beauty to be found in all women that resounded with consumers, even if it didn’t change the popular notion of beauty.
Their research into related keywords helped them bolster their SEO by organically including keywords that were related but not immediately obvious. For example, along with the concept of inner beauty, Dove gained access to keywords related to health and wellness.
Broad topics offer a wealth of themes, both big and small. Dove’s theme of beauty offers a variety of different topics and smaller themes. Even with a focus on inner beauty, there are dozens of themes available to explore, from hair care to cosmetics. By choosing a topic that touches everyone, Dove created a basis for content curation that allows them to serve their customer base using different avenues.
Yes, every piece of content must tie in to the overarching theme, but they have given themselves a great deal of leeway by keeping the theme broad. It works rather like keyword phrases and long-tail keywords. The keyword/ theme is inner beauty. Some of the long-tail keywords might be beauty on the outside or the inner beauty of that comes from body care.
Turn the same scrutiny on your own marketing strategy. If you sell accounting services to individuals, look at the themes that affect their lives immediately. Some examples might be retirement planning, financial responsibility, or ways to save for big life events. If you sell food, think about themes that promote family and friends, like Friday nights out or everyday easy dinners.