Like her music or not. You can’t deny that Taylor Swift’s brand is pretty killer. My name is Jess and I create new videos every single week for business owners to help you save time and look good online. And I want to dive into Taylor Swift’s personal brand and what we as online business owners can learn from her for our own brands.
As someone who has been to a Taylor Swift concert and follows her online, the first thing that stands out to me about her personal brand is how much thought she puts into the experience of her brand. I mean, let’s just start with the ticket sales. A year or two ago she changed it up where you had to buy tickets for her concerts through ticket master. That was the only way to buy them. You had to be verified and all this stuff and it was just so that people couldn’t steal tickets and try and sell them for more money and all that jazz.
She wanted it to be a good buying experience, but she doesn’t just care about the experience at her concert. She cares about the experience that her fans have with her online and in-person. So she spends her own time interacting and engaging with fans online because she has engaged with her fans so regularly. It has turned that tribe of people from just being followers to being like super fans, which has helped her fame.
The other big brand experience she creates online is with her music. She doesn’t just hop on Instagram one day and like, hey, there’s a new song coming out tomorrow. Get excited. She builds up a lot of anticipation and gets people excited, drops, hints and teasers goes the full nine yards so that it is more of an experience with her fans and people are truly excited and help her hit number one with her songs.
Now speaking of these launches and new music, that leads me to the second thing that’s really great about Taylor Swift’s brand, and that is storytelling.
Taylor could easily drop some new music, create those music videos and move on, but again, she wants to create more of experience and she wants to tell stories and not just through her lyrics. For the last few music videos, she has released the video and then a little bit later has released behind the scenes onset footage. So that her fans can see what it’s like to be onset, what all when integrating a music video, she’s bringing them along for that experience and helping tell a bigger story. This is also great content marketing!
The storytelling component I think is the most important for us as business owners because people want to relate to us. When we just teach people something, yes, they learn, but they don’t get to connect with us. They don’t have a reason to want to stay in touch with us and yeah, maybe we don’t have music videos to release behind the scenes footage of, but we can show behind the scenes of our launches. We can share stories of things that we’re experiencing and learning and bring our audience along with us.
One of the things that I tell my clients over and over again is that people want to work with people, not logos, not brands. We want to work with other people, so let people into that by telling a greater story and make sure it’s a really great experience once they are in with you. That’s a sure-fire way to grow your business.