What B2B Brands Can Learn From Taylor Swift’s Marketing Strategy

Taylor Swift is one of the world’s biggest musical acts. But it’s not just her music that’s captivated her fans — it’s her marketing. Here are some lessons that B2B brands can learn from her marketing strategy.

Keep your messaging simple

As Aly Love said during her 30-minute Taylor Swift “Midnights” Peloton ride, “Taylor Swift connects with most of us through simple lyrics with exceptional compositions and honesty.” And while she’s been through periods of reinvention throughout her career, her music has remained the same — catchy and relatable lyrics that say everything we’ve all been thinking.

In the B2B world, that’s not always the case. The more complicated you make your product messaging, the fewer people will understand what your company is all about. Keep it simple and emphasize your core offering. That’s what’s going to put your product on the map. Customers can more easily identify your brand and make associations. That’s why when someone says the name “Tableau,” they associate it with “analytics,” “Mailchimp” with “email marketing,” and “Sprout Social” with “social media management.” Each of these companies is known for one element that puts them front of mind for their customers.

Create content and products for real people, not fictitious personas

Often in B2B, companies focus too much on fictitious personas like “SaaS Sally” or “IT Ian” instead of saying “Ian, the IT Director at Shopify” or “Chris, the CEO of Salesforce.” These will be the people reading your content and considering purchasing your software. You want to be talking directly to them and creating something you would hope they would like to read. If you stick with fictitious personas, you might not have correct demographics, psychographics, or even socialgraphics. Swift provides a great example of writing real music for listeners by categorizing her songs based on who she’s writing them for.

Swift groups her songs into one of three categories: “Fountain Pen Songs,” “Quill Pen Songs,” and “Glitter Gel Pen Songs” (I think she needs a fourth titled “Bold Black Sharpie Songs”). Swift says she chose these categories “based on what writing tool I imagine having in my hand when I scribbled it down.”

She describes “Fountain Pen Songs” as “modern, personal stories written like poetry about those moments you remember all too well where you can see, hear, and feel everything in screaming detail.” Examples of these songs are “White Horse,” “Lover,” and “Cornelia Street.” Alternatively, “Quill Pen Songs” are songs with lyrics that make you feel old fashioned like you’re a 19th-century poet crafting your next sonnet by candlelight.” Examples of these songs are “willow,” “Red,” and “Carolina.” Lastly, “Glitter Gel Pen Songs” are songs with lyrics that make you want to “dance, sing and toss glitter around the room. They remind you not to take yourself too seriously, which we all need to hear these days.” Examples are “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” “You Belong With Me,” and “22.”

Stay true to your roots while evolving to meet customer needs

Swift’s music has evolved quite a bit since her early days. From country to folk, she’s been able to bend genres to create hits. But what she’s been able to do at every stage of her career is capture her fans. She keeps her fan base interested and continues to grow alongside them. No matter how much her image has shifted, she’s stayed true to her roots, which keeps her fans coming back.

That said, not even Taylor Swift can appeal to everyone; she appeals to a particular demographic, which makes her music successful. But because she has leaned into that demographic, she’s built a brand centered around a community that will forever advocate and support her. As they say, when you’re trying to market to everyone, you’re marketing to no one. So get as specific as possible with your product and your target customers because that’s where you’ll see the most significant payoff — the riches are in the niches, after all.

Meet your audience where they are

For Swift’s “Midnights” tracklist announcement, she chose TikTok as her primary distribution channel. Where 2009 Taylor Swift might have leveraged Facebook to reveal her tracklist, she’s adapting to the social consumption trends of her 2022 audience, which is short-form videos on TikTok. And clearly, the strategy worked. Swift garnered over 74 million views on 13 individual TikToks revealing the entire tracklist.

In B2B content distribution, you must show up on the proper channels, not all of them. Pay close attention to the social platforms your ideal customers and audience use and prioritize making content for those platforms. For example, if your audience is not on Facebook but is on LinkedIn, shift your focus to creating and sharing content for LinkedIn. Just because you have a social profile doesn’t mean you have to use it — especially if it’s not where your audience is.

Showcase your brand at every customer touchpoint

If anyone has mastered having one cohesive brand, it’s Swift. You automatically associate her name with breakup anthems, the numbers 13 and 22, and Easter eggs when you hear her name. What she does well is showcasing her brand at every customer touchpoint and with every experience. Even experiences that aren’t created by her marketing team fully embody her brand. Even senators were quoting her song lyrics during the Ticketmaster hearings.

Every touchpoint your business has is a reflection of your brand. From how your customer service team handles requests to the copy used in your email marketing, it’s essential to show a cohesive brand voice and brand values in every customer interaction. Your customers will notice, which could be the difference between doing business with your company and a competitor.

Connect with your audience

Swift is known for her hidden messages, puzzles, and Easter eggs. These puzzles began with her first album release when she embedded hidden messages in her song lyrics, specifically in the lyric booklets that come with a CD. The puzzle was simple — randomly capitalized letters throughout the song that would spell a word for each song. For “Midnights,” she shared her tracklist by randomly drawing bingo balls marked with the numbers of the tracks at midnight over 13 consecutive days.

As quoted in a Washington Post article, “Swift has taken great joy in building her own mythology as she embeds clues, hints, and puzzles into her music, social media posts, and even seemingly offhand comments during interviews. Fans have been conditioned to think that everything could have a hidden meaning, whether she’s revealing a meaningful fact about her life or announcing the date of a tour. They can work themselves into a frenzy trying to figure it out.”

Swift mentioned that she does it to turn new music into an event for her fans and entertain them in “playful, mischievous, clever ways.” Easter eggs allowed Swift to masterfully breaks down the wall between her and her fans to create a unique connection with them and build a community with each other.

As a business, you want to connect with your customers in a way that makes them feel like they are a valuable part of your business. Whether it’s highlighting user-generated content, testimonials, or just replying to their comment on social, put effort into connecting with your customers. They’ll appreciate the time you took to connect with them, which can accelerate the buyer’s journey, solidify loyalty, or get more referral business via positive word of mouth.

Turn your employees & customers into your advocates

Some artists have fans, but Taylor Swift has fanatics. Fanatics with a level of dedication beyond what we’ve ever seen. Her fans rave about her work and get others excited. They create content and interpret her universe and lyrics.

B2B businesses also have these fanatics: employees and customers. These are the people who will be your biggest fans and biggest advocates for your product. Use them. Encourage them to post on your behalf on their social media channels, write testimonials, and leave product reviews on sites like TrustRadius and G2 Crowd. Your employee and customer advocates present a unique opportunity to have people vouch for the company that’s not the company’s social media channel or blog. They help build your earned media presence and can get your company on the map as one to watch.

Repurpose your content

Swift has been re-recording her old albums now that she controls her music. She’s already re-recorded “Fearless” and “Red,” both aptly titled “Taylor’s Version.” Each album has double the tracks of the original record, with several songs “from the vault.” Her re-recorded songs have outpaced the number of streams of the original tracks, generating millions of streams and video views. And she’s been capitalizing on it. Once she saw that her song, “Wildest Dreams,” was trending on TikTok, she rushed to put out her version. Since the release, “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version)” has been used in over 70,000 TikTok videos viewed over 2 billion times. The original was only used 7,000 times.

B2B businesses can take the same approach regarding their content. However, instead of producing more content on the same topic, take the time to perform a content audit to see what top-performing pieces you can update, repurpose, and reshare. You’ll be surprised at how much you can leverage your existing content and use it to create something entirely new. In addition, your revamped content performs even better than the original.

Strategic partnerships to capture new markets and broaden the appeal

Over the years, Swift has formed strategic partnerships, which have helped her enter new markets and broaden the appeal of her music. One of note is her partnership with CapitalOne, the sponsor of this year’s highly-anticipated “The Eras Tour.” As a part of the pre-sale process, fans could register for the pre-sale through either Ticketmaster’s registration or CapitalOne if they had a CapitalOne credit card.

The partnership gives cardholders unique access opportunities for Swift’s entertainment experiences and other perks like limited edition albums. This partnership is a win-win for both CapitalOne cardholders and Swift’s fans: She broadens her fan base by capturing CapitalOne cardholders, and cardholders can have special access to Swift’s upcoming shows.

The same can be said for B2B companies. The best example is technology companies and Formula 1 teams. Every team, from McLaren to Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, is partnered with at least one technology company. The worldwide visibility of F1 puts these tech companies on the map, especially since their logos are visible on the car, the drivers’ jumpsuits, and their helmets. As a result, customers and employees of the tech companies become F1 fans and advocates of how the team uses the technology, and F1 fans get a closer look into the technology that drives their teams to victory. In both these cases, if you build the right partnerships with the right companies, you can strategically broaden your fan base.

Leverage the power of community

Swift is a master of building community. From her early days to her upcoming tour, her fans have built a community around her and her music. Take the Taylor Swift-themed pop-up bar in Chicago, for example. The event, Bad Blood, is a self-proclaimed “breakup” bar inspired by Swift herself. The bar will feature cocktails named after some of her songs (“Lavender Haze” features gin and lavender bitters); gin and coke named Taylor’s Fave (since it’s Swift’s go-to, of course); and Harry’s fave, rose punch (named after Swift’s 1D ex). Fans can also purchase tickets for karaoke for $22.

Swift’s marketing team didn’t sanction this experience, but rather her community of fans who’ve turned to her in times of heartbreak. Arguably, Swifties are one of the fiercest communities out there — ask the record 2.4 million fans who crashed Ticketmaster’s site on day one of her pre-sale back in November.

Communities take the brand forward, instilling a severe case of FOMO in customers. It’s no longer just enough to target the right personas — you need to build a community around your company and your product. The more you engage with your community, the more you’ll learn about their pain points and preferences and be able to use that to inform your product roadmap. Notion has done this exceptionally well. It has taken user feedback and used it to improve the product. Additionally, it has a robust template gallery that users can submit for other community members to use.

Don’t be the anti-hero of your marketing organization. Instead, take some inspiration from Taylor Swift to create the marketing program of your wildest dreams.