Knowing Your Audience as a Product Marketer - Taylor’s Version
Taylor Swift needs no introduction. With a massive audience and unparalleled expertise in audience engagement, she stands as a beacon for marketers across industries for how to command attention. But as product marketers, what can we specifically learn from Taylor's playbook? Hint: she’s got a few plays that can guide us on how to understand our audience and customers.
The importance of knowing your audience
In product marketing, understanding your audience is paramount. It's way more than demographics; it's about knowing their desires, tapping into their emotions, understanding their behaviors, and identifying how your product can benefit them. Taylor Swift's success story is deeply intertwined with her profound understanding of her audience's preferences, behaviors, and how to tap into their emotions. Her engagement strategies serve as a testament to the power of knowing her audience inside out and speaking to their hearts and minds. Let’s dive into a few lessons we can pull from Taylor’s playbook.
Taylor Swift: The Queen of Audience Engagement
One of Taylor Swift's recent standout moments in audience engagement was her strategic use of the 2024 Grammys to announce her next album. The 64th Grammy Awards averaged 16.9 million viewers and had an estimated 62.6 billion potential social media impressions - talk about a key event to capture attention.
While Taylor recently admitted the album announcement wasn’t “planned”, we can all agree she displayed some tact marketing techniques, leveraging the massive event to create buzz amongst her captive audience - a.k.a. “Swifties.” From dropping cryptic hints in her outfit to shutting down her website, Swift showcased the importance of capitalizing on an already engaged audience, setting the stage for a noteworthy album release announcement.
While we as product marketers may not be able to use the Grammys to have a mic drop moment, we can identify and leverage key events relevant to our customers where we can get them talking. This can be an event we host, or like Taylor, one we’re attending. Regardless, we want to make an impact. Try to tie in a product announcement to a speaking opportunity at an event or conference, influencer collaboration, webinar, online forum, or through guerrilla marketing tactics.
Seeding the audience - a page from Taylor’s playbook
Dropping hints about what’s coming next for Taylor Swift has built massive online buzz amongst her fans, even capturing the attention of non-fans. Swifties are known for obsessing over cryptic messages in Taylor’s fashion, album cover design, lyrics, and even relationships. Taylor knows this about her audience, and she often adds fuel to those fires, usually setting the internet ablaze.
Most recently, at the 2024 Grammys, Taylor used TV, social media, and her website for real-time engagement with her audience. Just hours before the Grammys, she changed her profile pictures to black and white photos, shut down her website showing just a jumble of letters Swifites unscrambled to say “red herring,” and dressed in black and white with a clock necklace set to midnight for the awards. This sparked intense online chatter about what all these plays could mean for her next album.
We discovered the black and white was a nod to the cover of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, which she posted a picture of to Instagram shortly after announcing the album drop when she took the stage for winning Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights (seeds aligning).
Just as Taylor drops hints to build anticipation - as product marketers, we can use content marketing, social media, and email campaigns to tease upcoming features or products. The key is to know where your audience spends their time. For example, if you’re preparing to release a new cybersecurity tool, start a campaign that addresses the rising concerns about data breaches, without revealing your solution. Share blog posts, infographics, and social media content that highlight statistics about data breaches and their impact on businesses. This not only educates your audience but also sets the stage for your product as a much-needed solution.
By strategically seeding the audience with teasers and hints, we can build anticipation and excitement around product launches.
Deciphering Taylor’s clues - a lesson in Interactive Marketing
The Grammy Awards is just one example of why Taylor Swift's interactive campaigns are legendary. From singing two new songs each night of The Eras Tour in 2023 to consistently dropping easter eggs, she creates an immersive experience that fosters fan participation.
Product marketers can adopt similar strategies by creating marketing campaigns that involve using interactive content such as quizzes, assessments, or freemium products that allow the audience to engage with your product’s value proposition. Social media or online widgets are great tools for real-time engagement, making our audience feel part of the launch process.
To put this into practice, let’s say your SaaS product offers a unique analytics platform. You can create an interactive online assessment tool that potential customers can use to gauge their current analytics maturity level. By inputting information about their current practices, they receive personalized reports that not only highlight gaps but also show how your product can fill those gaps. This method engages potential customers and shows them the value your product offers; a win-win.
By involving our audience in the storytelling process, we can deepen the connection with our customers and drive engagement - a goal of every great go-to-market campaign.
Get started building personas and understanding motivations
By understanding and engaging our audience in a manner that mirrors Taylor Swift’s approach, product marketers can create buzz around their products that leads to deeper customer connections and, ultimately, better market penetration. Remember, the effectiveness of your marketing efforts hinges on your ability to resonate with and understand your audience, just as Taylor does with hers. Whether it’s through strategic event marketing, anticipatory content, or interactive engagement, the principles of knowing and captivating your audience are essential, from pop music to B2B SaaS.
Take a cue from Taylor’s playbook and start building meaningful connections today. Your first step is building detailed buyer personas and understanding the jobs-to-be-done framework. Then tailor the messaging and campaign actions to resonate with your audience's motivations, and you’ll have the foundations to a solid go-to-market campaign.
