how brands can build cult followings in 2025

the biggest marketing Arbitrage next year is going to be organic social but the brands that are going to win aren't just going to build followings they're going to build cult followings which is exactly what you're going to learn in this video Because by the end of this you're going to be able to create a Content strategy focused on creating super fans which is going to change how you approach social for context I'm L Garcia I'm the founder of marketing exam and I've been in the social world since 2017 with an agency now building marketing examine

and growing some of your favorite brands in the Health Fitness and Wellness Stace all right so enough of all that so the first component which is extremely important is narrative building because before creating a Content strategy you have to understand what is the overarching narrative that you are trying to amplify when we think about extreme examples to start we think about Nike just do it that is the overarching narrative that all of their content amplifies whether it's a campaign with Serena Williams down to a campaign with a customer it all amplifies that overarching narrative that's

an extreme example now let's look at smaller Brands you look at a brand like represent their overarching narrative is on a mission when you look at a company like midday squares their overarching mission is better for you chocolate bpn with go one more the reason this is important is you have to be create filters and feelings for all of your content and make sure that every piece of content amplifies a narrative and makes that narrative bigger in a consumer's mind because narrative building is all about Association and values and making sure that people are associating

their values with your narrative so to find this narrative you have to ask yourself two questions because within the intersection of those two questions is your narrative the first one is what do you stand for or represent within three words you have to be able to Define this you have to be able to answer this without answering this you're never going to understand what it is that your content is going to amplify the second question is what feeling does someone walk away from after consuming your content we work with a very well-known brand in the

health and fitness space and we had to run through this exercise and by the end of it we understood the exact feeling that everybody should walk away from after consuming their content by knowing that we were then able to look back at the overarching narrative Define it and then understand how every piece of content then amplifies it all right so the second component is your mission this is more important than you think you're probably thinking this is corny you're probably thinking this is redundant you've read this in every single marketing book or every single Business

book it is often overlooked but it is so important and here's why and that first starts with giving you an example and I always like using bigger Brands very well-known Brands as examples it helps make it crystal clear and then we're able to break it down into smaller Brands and so when you look at Nike Nike's mission is to bring inspiration and Innovation to every athlete and if you have a body you're an athlete but hear me out for a second what if their mission was to become the world fastest sports brand would that hit

the same we all know the answer here the answer is no the mission that I just read out loud was Puma's mission statement reading that out loud that is not a mission statement that any consumer consuming your content is going to get behind that is a mission statement that your internal employees could rally behind and it's something that you guys can build towards but it's not a mission that gets people to Rally behind and feel like they're amplifying it and helping it become a reality because a good Mission isn't about you and who you want

to be a good mission is about the person that you want to inspire motivate Ed educate and bring value to because that value will help somebody align with your value which is the key to then understanding that there needs to be an internal Mission and an external Mission your internal mission is the mission that the employees the people building The Brand are rallying behind and that could also meet and match the external Mission but the external mission is what the consumers the people buying the product the people believing in you the people consuming the content

need to be able to Rally behind that is the external Mission it's why people become Billboards for Brands because they feel so aligned with a mission that they feel when they represent that brand they're telling the rest of the world like hey this is also what I'm doing and this is why they buy over and over again and they become loyal customers but that starts on the content front because your content is how you communicate that at scale and it's not about communicating it directly it's about communicating it indirectly through the things that you talk

about and your content is how you communicate this at scale for ocean is one of my favorite examples of this their mission is to end the ocean plastic crisis now the question you need to ask yourself is does their content communicate that mission and not dur IR L but indirectly by what they're doing how they're doing it the content pillars that they have so now if you look at their content pillars and you look at the content ideas and formats that they're putting out there you'll notice and observe that every piece of content communicates how

they're trying to clean the ocean how something that they did impacted a city or impacted a region of the ocean which then again goes back to amplifying and building this larger mission in somebody's mind so now if you look at their content and You observe their content pillars and their content ideas you'll notice that every piece of content it communicates that they're trying to keep the ocean clean this is key because this is how you get people to feel aligned with you because they feel aligned to your values all right the third component is establishing

the enemy the reality is armies don't exist without an enemy and this has been around forever even if you look at sports it's why rivalries exist because when a rivalry exists you want to do everything possible to be able to defeat the enemy which is the opposing team an example within the business world is Mac versus PC Apple's campaign was tailored around creating PC as this enemy that people from this side the Apple side completely hate it and it continues to this day it's not as an extreme but think about blue vers green right you

know everybody that has an iPhone their text come in blue everybody that has an Android or in a different kind of phone comes in green right this is all part of this enemy framework so then it's your job to understand who the enemy is put them within your content and then make sure that you're getting your people your army to Rally behind you and go after this enemy so what are examples of Brands leveraging enemies within their content marketing so one of my favorite examples is midday squares a lot of their content stems and builds

off of this enemy that is bigger chocolate companies you think about Hershey's you think about the the chocolate brands that put terrible ingredients within chocolate looking at midday Square's mission of better for you chocolate they've now positioned themselves as this as the David facing the Goliath and the Goliath is this enemy who has terrible ingredients for you another great example is mois wash moisey wash is a laundry detergent their enemy is tied it is these large detergent companies that put terrible ingredients in your laundry detergent that are banded in other cities in the US for

mois wash they're able to position themselves against this enemy and then offer the solution to why this Corporation this product is the enemy overall looking at for ocean the enemy is plastic looking at underbrush gum the enemy is these big gum brands looking at Joo fuel the enemy is the undisciplined version of yourself and so what do you take away from this the more your enemy prevents your mission from becoming a reality the more people will buy into your mission so the more you can educate people through your content the better this is the reason

it's so important to establish content pillars then match those content pillars to a purpose but if you're going to establish an enemy there's really four things you can position yourself against the first one is in action if you look at the company night cap the action that they're creating an enemy against is drink spiking the second is a product or an item if we look at for ocean then the enemy here is plastic the third is a corporation or business again looking at midday squares then the enemy is large chocolate brands the fourth enemy is

a version of yourself if you look at Joo fuel the enemy is this undisciplined version of yourself that you're trying to build into then the fourth component that's characters one of the common denominators in cult-like Brands is the amplification of characters again looking at extreme examples you have Steve Jobs and Apple currently you have Tesla and Elon Musk when we talk about Nike back in the day you have Michael Jordan and after re-watching the movie Air there was a line that stuck out to me that proves this where one of n Nike's employees Bob staser

where he says a shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it that person then being Michael Jordan and going on to shatter just about every record that Nike had but the same goes for business products are just products until someone uses it until somebody endorses it until there's a story behind the product Amplified by some character and this is why characters are important because characters are why we become obsessed with shows and movies but when it comes to business we act like people should be separated from the products and they shouldn't coexist when

in reality that's completely false because when we create a Content strategy we want to factor in different characters this could be the founder employees ambassadors influencers athletes the whole nine we can introduce these individuals as characters with in different social shows and content ideas that we're creating but similar to a movie or a show different characters have different Siz roles and based on your goals your strategy the deliverables Etc you can think about how much you want to amplify and create narratives around a specific character this is why we want to look at different quarters

or months through the lens of seasons and then create social shows based on these characters but we'll get to that in a bit but characters play a large role in a lot of different brands content strategy again looking at one of my favorite examples midday squares all of the employees are different characters amplifying the entire story for them then you look at a smaller brand like poor boy coffee and the founder is the Single Character within their content you look at jym shark a large billion dollar brand and they just introduced a new character or

reintroduced a new character into their content strategy which is cbum but then you look at another brand like bpn and they have multiple characters they have Nick bear the largest character within their ecosystem then down to smaller characters who play a big role in taking that overarching narrative that we talked about taking the mission and creating their own social shows creating their own series around these individuals to make sure that they're amplifying it but again these are characters of the brand then you have Mt to New York where again very similar the founder is the

main character but then we could even switch it here you look at a company like build space the customers are the characters all of their social content is actually formulated around the customers and they're giving their customers the stage to shine then you look at the payment processor Square yes square and their content strategy is all stemmed around similarly their customers and their users where they amplify all of those individuals through their content strategy understanding that they're able to understand who are the overarching characters that then we're going to be building behind and creating around

and by understanding that we're then able to look at those characters as individuals that we're going to create content pillars and social shows around which is component number five pillars and purpose pillars are the content types and formats that you're repeating on a daily weekly and monthly basis and they're really the core of any good content strategy so when we're looking at a Content funnel right top of funnel middle funnel bottom of the funnel content we need to then understand and establish what are the content pillars for each different part of the funnel and again

these pillars can change based on the season or show or the characters involved but the most important aspect that is overlooked is attaching a pillar to a purpose so I'll give a little bit of insight into even my content strategy and break it down pillar by pillar so when you look at my playbooks on IG or my good content versus bad content the purpose of that pillar is three things it's awareness growth and expertise I am trying to cast a wider net I'm trying to grow my account while also trying to share my expertise within

the space when we talk about my campaign and creation pillar meaning me talking about how I would do something if I was in somebody else's shoes or I worked for a different brand the whole purpose there is to share my expertise and capture leads but if we look at the third content pillar we're looking at like Day in the Life content the whole goal of any Vlog content is to build Affinity is to get people behind the scenes and to become part of what we're doing when you look at a company like midday squares one

of their content players is very similarly Vlogs and Company updates the whole goal of this is to build Affinity when you look at poor boy coffee and you look at their content pillar where they share all of the numbers the purpose of it is to be transparent and build trust and so the the overarching theme is to not just establish content pillars the goal is to establish a Content pillar then match every single pillar that you're creating back to a purpose that you understand hey when I create this piece of content this is what I'm

trying to get out of it that can be virality and awareness and trying to get as many eyeballs as possible but it could also be to try to create super fans that's the point of a Content funnel think there are going to be pillars that are are created and made to specifically just go viral but then there's going to be content pillars that you have that are focused on selling product getting people to get on an email list trying to drive some kind of action or build a Super Fan they can coexist and this is

why it's key that when you are establishing your content pillars and understanding the purposes behind each you first want to understand what your actual goal is during this season is it growth is it Affinity whatever it is there you then want to be focused on the percentages and the volumes of content that you're creating for each part of the funnel if your goal is growth growing the account expanding your ecosystem expanding your net you should not be creating bottom of the funnel content and establishing content pillars at the bottom of the funnel instead you should

be focused on completely top of funnel because the purpose then aligns with the overarching goal which is key now the sixth and final component in how you scale this entire operation and everything I just mentioned is social Series this is an idea of thinking of your Social accounts as a TV channel with the possibility of having endless shows and the thing that we want to understand here is you want to be able to look at the content pillars the purposes and then create the social series around them why a social series there's really three components

the first one is it's simple it's scalable and it's repeatable that is the key component to being able to scale a Content strategy with one a small team or even a big team but let's go even further back let's continue peeling the onion why do we love TV shows the reason we love TV shows is because it creates an expectation in our mind we always know what to expect from a specific show that expectation then forms an habit I know what to expect from the show therefore I will watch the show every Tuesday every Thursday

whenever it comes out this is why people love whether it's Friends new girl keeping up with the Kardashian Survivor Fear Factor doesn't matter the show we know what to expect from that show and therefore we want to watch it because that expect has been cemented into our head it's no different when it comes to content you want to create these social shows so that you're cementing the expectation in someone's head so that when they see their content on your feed that you are stopping the scroll based on that habit that you have formed in their

head then this is how you put it all together you take a Content pillar you attach a purpose to it and then you attach that purpose to a social series then every social series could have its own character or characters then based on your overarching narrative you're going to create filters so that each series is aligned with your mission and your values the first step is Nar narrative building it all starts with your overarching narrative the second aspect is your mission you have to lay the groundwork this is the base this is the base of

everything every piece of content every part of your strategy needs to amplify your mission so that you can get people behind it which layers into the third aspect which is you have to establish an enemy you want to build an army you have to have an enemy and that enemy is only going to get people to Rally behind you and what you're doing even more the fourth aspect is introduce characters this is why we love shows this is why we love movies the stronger connection somebody has to a character the stronger connection they're going to

have to you your business your mission your values the fifth component is to create a Content funnel and then establish content pillars within each part of the funnel and then match a pillar to the purpose before creating the sixth component which is social Series this is how you scale the entire operation all right guys if you like this I'd appreciate it if you like subscribe the whole nine I'll keep dropping these