Boost Your Marketing Swag


Swag (noun): Used as an expression of cool, style or arrogance.

Today, the slang word is used regularly both in conversation and online. Anyone who is anyone has swag. In fact, Justin Bieber even has a swagger coach that teaches him various “swaggerific” things to do. (source). As marketers, we can’t all travel the world with our very own personal swag coach, but we do have the unique ability to communicate with people all over the world, which gives us some major swag, if you ask me.

The level of care marketing organizations take to communicate with their audiences is crucial. You don’t want to seem irrelevant or uncool to your consumers, so do it right with these simple solutions and make your marketing swagger soar.

Personalize the experience and the message
In the digital marketing space, personalizing a consumer’s experience with your marketing content has become easier, and frankly, required. Customers are bombarded with emails, social media notifications and ads all day, everyday. Personalizing your content and giving the customer the information that they want or need is critical to gaining trust and loyalty.

Personalization can take on number of forms from the use of an individual’s name in a subject line to content recommendations based on a person’s previous choices. Think of the “Top picks for ____” section in your Netflix account. Customers will be much more willing to engage with you regularly if the information they are receiving is pertinent and caters to them.

Make your content easy to skim
Let’s be honest. In this day and age, lack of time and limited attention spans are challenges for marketers to get their message across. Craft the vehicle that is driving the recipient to consume (e.g. an email) so that the most important information is easy to spot. Limit the calls-to-action and focus on the key take-aways. Assume the recipient has only five seconds to make a decision as to whether or not to continue the experience. In the case of emails, use bullet points, bold fonts, subheadings and supporting imagery to separate the key points from the extra fluff. In essence, make your message digestible in a short amount of time.

A great example of this is The Skimm. The Skimm is a daily email newsletter that gets sent to my inbox everyday at 6am, and I am obsessed with it. It provides me with brief rundown of the most important news, from politics to entertainment, in a consumable and entertaining way. It saves me time, and it’s my method for keeping on top of the news quickly. The authors use witty lines, sarcasm and plain language to provide quick summaries of top news stories. After the 5-ish minutes it takes me to read through it, I feel not only informed, but also entertained.

If you’re providing your customers information that they want in a manner that allows them to digest it quickly and with ease, they will keep coming back for more.

Have fun, and your consumers will too
Just because your message is serious, doesn’t mean your delivery has to be. In my experience, content that can be digested in an entertaining manner increases the chances that a customer will engage with you. One of my favorite things our marketing department has done is create a quiz to determine an individual’s marketing swagger score. (Fun fact: I have ultimate marketing swagger).

The quiz consists of eight questions about you and your relationship with marketing. It was used to promote Relationship One’s presence and booth location at this year’s Modern Marketing Experience in Las Vegas. More importantly, completion of the quiz provides you with your marketing swagger score and potential bragging rights. Note, our ‘What’s Your Marketing Swagger Score?’ quiz is still open, but the t-shirt offer at the end is expired as the quiz was created for a specific event.

There are a lot of tips, tricks and trends out there for how to be a better marketer. At the end of the day, what is most important to remember, in my opinion, is that your buyers are human beings. If you communicate with them in the same ways you would like to be communicated with and keep these tips in mind, your marketing swag is sure to skyrocket.