7 Things Hip-Hop Taught Me About Marketing.
Hip-Hop, and associated genres, are what I listen to most. At primary school, I fell in love with Eminem and then, at high school, I memorised the lyrics to Fort Minor’s ‘The Rising Tied’ (which, looking back, isn’t a great album) and had a hidden playlist on my iPod Nano to hide my rap and hip-hop from my rock- and metal-obsessed friends.
I’ve spent thousands of hours listening to hip-hop and rap. Every year, my Spotify Wrapped is dominated by J Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Dave, Stormzy, and a random assortment of other rappers.
I’ve also spent most of my professional career in marketing.
Most people may not realise the insights about marketing you can glean from Hip-Hop. Here are seven of the best lessons that hip-hop taught me about marketing.
Remix.
Remixes have always been an integral part of hip-hop culture; it goes back to the competitive spirit of the genre. Take the sickest beat and see who can spit the best bars on it. Or take a good beat and make it great. Or even take the parts you like from ten different tracks and combine them into a completely different track.
Remixes are created for one of a few different reasons – to appeal to a new audience, adding a new flavour to the track, for a producer to experiment and add their own flair to a track, to get more sales and so on.
So, what does this tell us about content marketing? Let me answer that with a question. Have you heard of content remixing?
It’s the process of turning one or multiple pieces of content into other and varied forms of content. For example, we may have one awesome blog article — we could remix this blog article into a video teaching people about it and then into a series of social media posts. We could turn that blog post into an infographic or a podcast episode. The limits are only what you can imagine.
Remixing content gives the original content a much longer life cycle, which gives a lot more bang for your buck. You’ve spent the time, energy and money creating the first piece, and it is a lot easier, quicker, and cheaper to create content based on the first piece.
It also expands the audience for the content. You might reach people who exclusively stay on YouTube or only listen to Podcasts, which is an audience you would have missed if you just had a blog post.
Change up the sound.
Heaps of the best rappers out there have changed their sound or even entire genres over the course of their careers. Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar might be the most famous of these, but Childish Gambino, Denzel Curry, Lil Wayne, and Future, to name just a few, have all changed their sounds. Childish Gambino goes from hip-hop on one album to psychedelic funk, soul, and R&B on the next.
Often, they’ve changed their sound while maintaining their success and, while this might have more to do with the fanbase they have already built up, they have also managed to keep an essential them-ness to their music. Even with the change of genre, you can still tell that a Kendrick track is a Kendrick track.
This helps with content marketing, because it shows that you can change your content form and style and continue getting good results. This is done through discovering why people read your content – is your ‘you-ness’ just due to what you write about or is it due to the variety of your topics covered or the witty way you convert the articles? Capture that you-ness and change up your content.
Mixtape.
Despite the danger of potentially opening a can of worms here, I’m going to try to define a mixtape and their difference to albums. Quite simply, where an album is commercially focused, a mixtape is not. That means, where albums have to make bank, a mixtape can be (and often is) put out for free. This is because the goal of a mixtape is to experiment and try out new things.
Chance the Rapper used free mixtapes to gain a huge amount of recognition, which he then leveraged into concerts and merch sales to make up for the loss he made on giving his mixtapes away for free.
For content marketing, mixtapes can show that being experimental and creative can really pay off. It also shows that inbound marketing works. Inbound marketing is a type of marketing where you make great content and people come to you instead of you going to them.
Using Chance the Rapper again as an example of inbound marketing — he released Acid Rap for free digital download, which was met with universal acclaim. In content marketing terms, he created valuable content that people wanted to consume. Then, when he performed live or sold merch, people were already fans and flocked to buy them.
Use this strategy in marketing by creating valuable content that people want or need and then,when it comes time to sell, they are already fans of your brand and more likely to purchase from you.
Features and collaborations.
A featured artist has a huge amount of power. Heaps of rappers feature one or more artists on a track. Going back to Chance the Rapper, if you take a look at a track listing on any mixtape or album of his, almost every song has a featured artist on it. Again, this is a tactic to reach new audiences and a way to tap into the star power of other artists or to give new artists a platform.
Featuring is like doing a guest post on a blog – it gets you exposure to a new audience and provides clout from the blog you have guested on. Plus, when people guest on your blog you have the opportunity to give your audience a new perspective and new content.
Authenticity.
Authenticity and truth in rap and hip-hop have always been important. Take a look at any number of diss tracks (Ether by Nas comes to mind) and you’ll see MCs taking shots about how the other didn’t live their lyrics, that they’re just posturing. Even more damning is when an MC calls out another for using a ghost-writer, as Meek Mill did of Drake.
This is also important in content marketing and SEO. Google now focuses on content that matches EAT — which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This means that, to rank well, you need to be seen by Google as an expert in your field.
It’s not enough to simply publish content —now you need to be writing content from a place of authenticity.
A few tips on getting good EAT:
Tell visitors who you are
Work with experts
Make your content useful
Link to high quality sources
Get high quality back-links.
Controversy.
Early in 2020, the news in the UK was abuzz. What was the occasion? A grime beef between Stormzy and Wiley. This put them at the top of the newsfeed while we waited for the next diss track to drop. There were twister feeds and news articles about who had won and breaking down the messages behind each line. Videos breaking down their beef gained millions of views.
Controversy works. Disclaimer, it may not be appropriate for your brand, but if it is and there is a way to do it without damaging your brand, then it can be a great way to get people talking about you.
Stand for something.
Maybe this shows my hip-hop preferences more than the rap and hip-hop scene as a whole – there are plenty of great artists and songs that don’t have any purpose beyond just being fun and catchy songs (though there is the argument that all rap is political). But, if you look at a lot of the rappers that capture the most attention, they stand for something. Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, Public Enemy, Nas, Tupac – the list goes on.
This is the same for many brands – think of Patagonia, who recently announced that all their profits were going to fight climate change. Nike took a stand against racism in sport by standing with Colin Kaepernick and they saw their profits rise by 31%.
A report by Sprout Social shows that 66% of consumers take a brand’s political statements into account when deciding whether or not to buy from them.
It’s very easy to say that you “stand for something”. Instead of just being performative with it, your brand will need to actively believe and work towards these causes or standpoints. Many brands posted about racial inequality during the Black Lives Matter protests and yet continued with their own racist practices. If you are going to stand for something, then you will need to actually do it. After a brand’s performative actions have been exposed, they lose custom (and a lot of it).
Here are a few pointers to guide you on your way:
Be authentic. Don’t be performative.
Be educational. Don’t just tell people you support a cause — teach them about the cause.
Actively show support. Do things that help your cause.
Change business practices. For example, offer volunteering days to staff or become a paperless office.
Continually show support. It’s not enough to show support on one or two days of the year.
Those are the 7 things that hip-hop taught me about marketing. What are some of the lessons you learned from unexpected sources?