Online Reputation Management For Dummies

Understanding Your Brand Evangelists

In order to attract brand evangelists, it helps to understand why they care about you in the first place. What motivates your brand evangelists? Simple. They’re after meaning. Something about your brand or your message resonates with them, and they want to learn more. They want a relationship with you because they see something special in you or your brand.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow created his (famous) Hierarchy of Needs to explain the motivations of human development. I created a similar hierarchy to explain the motivations of your brand evangelists. The hierarchy goes as follows (see Figure 14-1):

Figure 14-1: My Hierarchy of Needs for brand evangelists.

Knowledge: In Maslow’s hierarchy, our most basic requirements are for physiological basics like air, food, and shelter. For brand evangelists, this is more about informational basics, or knowledge.

When you provide quality information that is specially tailored to your audience, you are giving your brand ambassadors something unique, powerful, and meaningful for their audiences.

Be generous. Give your brand ambassadors the tools they need to become experts. This doesn’t mean you have to give away free consulting or proprietary information, but showing people what’s important and telling ...