Digital marketers have been guided by six powerful principles of influence that have been at the foundation of offline sales and marketing for a century or more.
Reciprocity, linking, authority, social proof, consistency, and scarcity are influence elements that your content marketing should consistently reflect.
Those six elements were defined and backed up by social psychology experiments in the book Influence: Science and Practice by Dr. Robert Cialdini. In 2016, Cialdini announced a seventh principle of persuasion (or the psychology of compliance), and he maintains that it’s the most powerful of all.
He calls that principle Unity, and — as it happens — it’s one we’ve written about many times at Copyblogger before it even had a name. In fact, Copyblogger founder Brian Clark says it’s the true secret to our outsized success.
What’s Unity?
In the context of persuasion, the experience of a shared identity is what Cialdini calls Unity.
The experience of Unity is not about simple similarities (although those can work too, but to a lesser degree, via the liking principle). It’s about shared identities.
What’s a the root of shared identities? Shared values. Values are those lovely abstract words that attach themselves to entire constellations of beliefs.
- Faith.
- Family.
- Integrity.
- Justice.
- Peace.
There’s a nice pile of research showing that when you do simple exercises that connect you to your values (like taking a few minutes to write a paragraph about each of them), you tend to have an easier time taking effective action toward your goals.
But connecting with your values also has the lovely benefit of reminding you just why you’re in the game in the first place. What you care about. What you believe. What you cherish.
And for content creators, those points of focus start to make themselves felt in your content.
Marketers who are connected to their values tend to create content that resonates with those values. And that’s the kind of content that triggers the Unity principle Cialdini talks about.
Values are the “big ideas” that make up our identities. Values are beliefs that form our attitudes, the more specific ideas and opinions that spring from those values.
Let’s look at a couple examples.
Beliefs that are clearly relevant to your business
Some types of values are directly relevant to your business and how you approach it.
For example, at Copyblogger Media we believe that building your whole business on someone else’s virtual property is unacceptably risky.
That informs how we do business. When we created the Rainmaker Platform, for example, it couldn’t be built on some proprietary framework that would be hard to migrate away from. We’d just feel sleazy and unethical if we tried to lock people into something like that.
This belief informs our marketing, our products, our conversations inside and outside the company, and the content we put into the world.
The connection to values? It may not be World Peace, but it’s pretty closely tied to values like Autonomy and Freedom.
Beliefs that are less visibly relevant to your business
We also have some organizational values that are a little less clearly tied to our product mix. This is important as well.
For example, all five of our founders have school-age kids. Many of our employees have school-age kids, and other close ties to family members. Many also have tight relationships with beloved friends, folks we might call “bonus family.”
Practices like working remotely, a highly flexible vacation policy, and focusing on outcomes rather than time clocks are deeply resonant with the value of Family.
You don’t see that one show up as much in the product mix, but I think it makes itself felt in the culture of the company and the folks you interact with on our team.
It’s a very different culture than what you see in a stereotypical startup like the ones satirized on Silicon Valley. At some companies, sleeping at your desk, living on delivery pizza, and mainlining Red Bull are badges of honor.
That’s not our culture; it would be completely counter to our values. We work hard, but we also believe that the highest quality work comes from people who have balanced lives.
Creating “Us”
“The relationships that lead people to favor another most effectively are not those that allow them to say, ‘Oh, that person is like us.’ They are the ones that allow people to say, ‘Oh, that person is of us.’” – Robert Cialdini
One reason to cultivate the Unity principle is that it creates an incredible environment for persuasion. This is sometimes interpreted as meaning you’re not selling, but that’s not correct.
When you’re in Unity with your audience, selling looks different. It’s more about education, giving all of the information needed to make a good decision, and being honest when a particular product or service isn’t the right fit for some segments of your audience.
It’s also about careful listening to learn what kinds of products and services would be most valued by the community.
But priming for persuasion isn’t the only reason to seek Unity. It allows you to do that while also being uniquely you.
The real reason to seek and build Unity
The real reason is that it’s about a billion times more enjoyable to build your business around people whose values resonate with yours — people you find to be “good people” and who think the same of you.
- You’ll have more energy to create great work
- You’ll help more people, in more meaningful ways
- You’ll attract astonishingly wonderful people to work with you
- You’ll be more resilient when the rotten days happen (and there are always some rotten days)
- You’ll be far less vulnerable to economic disruptions (if you keep listening carefully to what your audience wants and needs from you)
When you build a business that’s rooted in things that really matter, you create a much better experience for your audience and customers. You also enjoy your life a lot more.
Hmm, I think that might mean that one of our core company values is Fun. Rings true to me.