Just as the WWE captivates audiences with its dynamic storytelling, larger-than-life characters, and meticulously planned events like Wrestlemania and Summerslam, effective marketing campaigns engage prospects through compelling narratives, tailored to brand personas, to guide them from early learning stages through lead conversion. Both arenas require a deep understanding of their audience, precise choreography to deliver maximum impact, and an ability to adapt and innovate in a constantly changing environment. By leveraging these similarities, marketers can harness the energy and creativity of the WWE to build brands that resonate deeply with target personas and drive enduring loyalty.
It All Starts with an ICP…or Two
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is that company or individual that is a perfect fit for your solution. It is the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes that make the customer most likely to benefit from the offering and contribute to the business’s success. This is much the same as with sports entertainment where you can relate each character or faction to a unique product offering. While your business might not have the luxury of a fully stacked roster of a hundred different solutions, the same dynamics apply where you want to reach the broadest audience possible, while being able to speak to the groups of fans at a level that they can identify with.
While that sounds simple enough on paper, at times an ICP is not a single entity. In some instances the ICP is constituted of multiple individuals at a company whose roles may only be indirectly related. Let us examine what that team might look like.
ABM Marketing – The Buying Team
When we run into an ICP where there is team-based involvement in the purchase process, this is often referred to as Account Based Marketing (ABM). A buying team consists of multiple stakeholders who collaborate and can influence the purchasing decision. The team typically includes:
- Initiator: The first qualified lead of the account. Has a pain point to solve for and does the initial research of the purchasing decision.
- User: Often includes the Initiator. They will use the solution regularly and their feedback is crucial as they will have a direct connection with the decision maker.
- Influencer: Someone who will provide input and recommendations based on their expertise and who may or may not be a direct user of the product. This is typically a high-level executive equal to the Decision Maker from another business function.
- Decision Maker: The individual with the authority to sign off on the final purchasing decision. Will often seek council from the influencer
- Buyer: Typically a CFO or someone with a strong financial interest in the purchasing decision and will provide approval of signature with the Decision Maker.
In the team based buying approach, each member of the team may not participate in every step of the process. However, it is important to understand where they enter and exit the process along the journey. This will allow you as a marketer to understand when and where to trigger your advertising and lifecycle nurture campaigns to effectively win over each member of the buying stage when they are most engaged in the process. This is much the same as the family team buying environment in the sports entertainment sector whereby the initiator or users may be young fans, while the decision maker or buyers may be more closely aligned to their parents or guardians.
Individual or Small Group ICPs
Sometimes your solution will not meet criteria to involve a buying team, where the impact and number of users may only benefit a small group or an individual. Unlike in the team buying scenario when everyone has their own role and you may be able to separate out messaging based on its technical or financial nature, in this scenario technical and financial messaging may be more likely to cross use case messaging as the individuals may hold multiple responsibilities. In comparison to the family team buying environment with sports entertainment, the individual or small group could be a completely different audience such as teengers or young adults who may be able to make their own purchasing decisions after the initiation into the buying process.
Heels and Faces – What are they are why should we care
In the world of sports entertainment, heels and faces play a prominent role in how the brand or the product is personified. The heel is the villian or antagonist of the storyline. They can be controversial or provacative to ellicit passionate responses whether from supporters or detractors of their brand. On the other hand, the face is the hero, a likeable persona that garners empathy and follows a core set of values often to their own detriment.
Much like heels and faces, our own brands and solutions have personalities. These attributes position your brand or solution against competitors such as on a product positioning map. Building this out will help you to understand the perception of your product in relation to your competitors today. However, moving your brand is not something that happens overnight nor is it simple for the most talented of sports entertainers. It takes the right content, messaging, tone, and most importantly, timing to reach the desired position.
The Finisher
Arguably the most important impactful and memorable part of any wrestling match is the finisher. This is the climactic point at which the most devastating of moves signals the end of the match whether that’s a stone cold stunner, rock bottom, or tombstone piledriver. In marketing this your selling point or your call-to-action, or simply the end of your story, your blog post, or the end of your event when you release something so spectacular that it leaves your audience talking and yearning for more.
As marketers, while we all strive for perfection, not even a finisher is perfect every time and more often than not we just roll with the punches. We look for opportunities to take what curveballs might be thrown our way, and we turn them into the next big story, press release, that next viral moment that hopefully lands that finisher.
And with that we are left to contemplate how different storytelling in wrestling is from marketing. Based on what we learned, it’s not that different. So let’s key up the entrance music, cue the pyrotechnics, and hit our finisher to delight the crowd! It’s time to play the game!