Over the last 2 years, we have seen the explosion of #Hinching and the growth of one of the biggest influencers on Instagram. Whether you love cleaning or not, you cannot deny that Britain has gone Hinching mad.
Working in digital marketing we are always trying to keep our fingers on the pulse and look out for the next big thing. Who would have thought 2 years ago that Sophie Hinchcliffe a new mother from a small town in Essex would bring joy back to the monotony of housework and make us fall in love with Zoflora disinfectant and spho2nges.
Where it all began
In March 2018, when Mrs Hinch added her first photo to her home Instagram account, she probably never imagined where it might lead. From there she continued to share her home, her cleaning rituals and her personal life through Instagram and most recently through her published books. She now boasts a massive 3.3 million followers and growing.
Her influence spreads well beyond her cleaning posts. It seems that many house-proud Britons have taken to the shops to buy Mrs Hinch’s approved cleaning products. There have been numerous reports of supermarkets across the UK running out of Zoflora, the Pink Stuff and Minkys. In February, eBay reported that searches for these cleaning products were up by 210% within a week.
More disturbingly there are reports of a black market developing where one might acquire sold out cleaning products. These products usually found in discount stores and supermarkets for a few pounds are being sold for 3-5x their price online.
So, what lessons can we learn from Mrs Hinch?
As businesses there are a number of things we can learn from Mrs Hinch. Below we explain the reason why the Mrs Hinch way is the best way to approach social media and how this can help you to better connect with your audience.
Lesson One – Solve the Problem your Customers Have
I remember moving into my first ever home and being super excited to finally be able to go shopping for my own stuff. To finally buy what I wanted at last, without the disapproval of my mother (who clearly had her own way of doing things). I felt excited about the prospect of cleaning and looking after my own home. To do my own washing and wash my own dishes. Sad but true!
Unfortunately, like so many things, that enthusiasm soon wore off and housework soon felt like a chore.
Mrs Hinch takes the whole idea of cleaning and gives it a refreshing twist. Instead of seeing it as a huge undertaking she makes the whole process seem more fun and a lot more manageable. With her trusty to do list and crystal pen, she scans through her cupboard (which she calls “Narnia”) selecting her favourite products by job and by scent. She documents her progress and celebrates her victories by ticking off the items on her list. Recently she brought out a whole activity journal and mixed things up by using highlighter pens to break down the tasks into key areas she would like to focus on.
Mrs Hinch always makes a point of not overdoing it and breaking things down into manageable chunks of time. It always reminds me of that scene in Mary Poppins when the children are asked to tidy up the nursery and they moan and groan, until Mary Poppins helps them to see it doesn’t have to be boring and in fact, a simple chore can be both fun and rewarding.
This type of reward-based behaviour is important for humans and really does make a difference to how we view a challenge or problem.
As businesses we have all been created to solve a problem that people have. When thinking about your marketing you must first consider the problem that your product or service solves. Be that thirst, hunger, time, productivity or entertainment. How can your products or services be better represented to help solve that problem? How can we use Mrs Hinch’s example and apply that to our own brands? How can you make something seem more pleasurable, more rewarding or more fun?
Lesson two – Be Human
You may be mistaken in thinking that, in order to humanise your brand, you have to spend hours in front of a camera. Mrs Hinch (until recently) rarely showed her real face on camera (hi Gretel) and in fact her profile is filled with lots of lovely shots of very grey kitchen counters, shiny bathrooms and immaculate front room floors.
Although Mrs Hinch did not spend a lot of time in front of the camera, she was still able to humanise her brand. Sophie was able to do this through sharing original and authentic content and not trying too hard to be anyone else. She was authentically herself. No marketing or sales patter. Just honest and personal postings.
Over the next few months you will hear us talking a lot more about humanising the brand. While large multinational corporates have been able to hide behind the vail of anonymity and generic marketing terms, times are changing. It is time to humanise the way you communicate with your audience.
The amount of businesses we see that try so hard to be relevant and engage with their audience and fall flat because they are taking the human touch out of it and simply regurgitating a bunch of stuff, they learnt at the latest Hubspot course. This is usually pre-written, approved and scheduled up for automatic posting. Sure, there is a place and a time for it, but it doesn’t have to come across so robotic and disingenuous. Take a leaf out of Mrs Hinch’s book and authentically align your brand voice with your audience.
Lesson Three – Be Relatable
Whether you are a single mother living in a rented home, a young stay at home carer, a full-time doctor, or a multi-millionaire, we all want to feel like we belong. We want to have an affinity with something, to feel part of a tribe or community. One of the things Mrs Hinch does well is to be completely relatable and to help her followers feel like a tribe (#HinchArmy).
No matter your background, everyone can relate to Mrs Hinch. She is newly married, ex hairdresser and new mother to a beautiful baby Ronnie. She has made some decisions in the past that have affected her health, she has a rare blood condition, she suffers terribly from anxiety, yet she retains a wonderful and close bond with her family and a close group of friends. She loves to see the good in things, she is crazy about Beyoncé, but who isn’t? She tries to be positive and uplifting in everything she does and posts and genuinely loves to stay at home. She loves to clean and look after things and is equally proud of her home cooking attempts.
She is so relatable because her life isn’t perfect and she knows that. She lets other people know that staying at home, sticking on a wax melt and curling up on the sofa is a perfectly acceptable way to spend your Friday night. She is trying to do the best she can with what she has available to her and being super grateful for it. Not only is she relatable, but she is inspirational.
Working with different brands day in and day out, one of the biggest challenges they face is being relatable and yet professional. While it is good for your customers to relate to you, there is an unwritten rule about getting too close. While Mrs Hinch is relatable, she is also able to keep her fans at a safe distance. Using social media, controlled and managed events and book signings and competitions, she is able to reach out to her audience and help many more people than she would trying to contact people one to one.
Think about how you as a business can use resources such as social media, webinars, seminars and events to connect with your audience and meet them on their level. How can your brand voice be more friendly, inviting and inclusive? How can you use your products, services and experiences to be more relatable?
Lesson 4 – Be Authentic & Genuine
While it is important for your brand to be relatable, you cannot be disingenuous or unauthentic. Unlike many of the other social influencers, Mrs Hinch has stayed true to herself and true to her followers. She never endorses a product which she has not tested and doesn’t love. She will never give a review on something and say it is great just because she has been paid to say it. She will give her honest and balanced feedback on a product. When she loves something, she will let everyone know (often several times). She isn’t interested in pushing the most luxury or expensive brands, and often promotes cheaper and local brands without ever getting paid to do so.
The way she approaches her brand is to be completely authentic and genuine. She has a good balance of promotion, care, cleaning, and personal postings. This means that her content is always fresh, but can also be used again at a later date.
Mrs Hinch is always sure to be thankful for the support and the love that she receives online and she makes time to thank her followers and acknowledge that she wouldn’t be where she is without them.
What can your business do to say thank you? How could you become more authentic and endearing to your audience? Are you falling into the marketing trap of sounding or being someone or something you are not? Owning your situation, owning your brand voice and proudly being yourself will be the thing that makes you unique and sets you apart from your competitors.
Lesson 5 – Recognise and Accept that you are Not infallible
As seasoned professionals, we all know that running businesses and marketing your products and services is not plain sailing. There will always be people who make it their life’s mission to rain on your parade. In the new digital age, these people do not need to be customers to get a bee in their bonnet about something you said or did.
Equally, we are not infallible and sometimes businesses genuinely make mistakes.
One of the best qualities that Mrs Hinch brings, is her ability to recognise she isn’t perfect, and she doesn’t always get it right. Remember the bum oil incident? While this might have sent many businesses into meltdown, calling emergency board meetings and flying in their very expensive marketing consultant to advise on damage recovery. Mrs Hinch did the thing all businesses should do when they make a mistake; own up to it.
Where possible, find the fun in it. Admission of guilt and showing you aren’t perfect doesn’t have to end in catastrophe. Handled the right way, it may actually improve brand loyalty and help you to manage your customer’s expectations.
Finding the positive or fun in a bad or embarrassing situation can be helpful. But the most important thing is to recognise you’re not always right and do what you can to acknowledge the mistake and rectify it. The worse thing you can do as a business in the digital age is try to ignore it and roll the dice by hoping it will go away on its own.
Lesson 6 – Be Inspirational
So the final marketing lesson from Mrs Hinch is to be inspirational. Whether you sell toilet brushes or expensive cars. Whether you sell marketing services or are a nail technician. One of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy is to be inspirational.
You cannot become a market leader without being inspirational.
There are several ways in which Mrs Hinch achieves this. The first is she was an early market mover. She was one of the first people to identify a need for more general home chores and home accounts on Instagram. By being an early mover, she was able to capitalise on that niche and make her own way. Within two years she has managed to grow her account to 3.3 million followers, publish three number 1 bestsellers and have a beautiful baby, all while juggling her blood disorder and her anxiety. No one can deny this woman is seriously motivational and inspirational. She has taken on new challenges and made a whole new life for herself and her family.
Not only is she a marvel in herself, but she also supports others. She champions local and small online businesses giving them a platform that they would have never otherwise had. She promotes fellow Hinchers and other cleaning accounts. She doesn’t see them as competitors, but people her followers can grow and learn from.
Throughout the years we have worked with numerous businesses who were reluctant to even whisper their competitor’s name. If your brand is strong and you continuously look to improve and grow, there should be no fear about promoting or speaking about your competitors.
They should be a source of motivation and aspiration. Mrs Hinch does not have to worry about promoting her competitors because (whether she knows it or not), she knows who she is, what she brings to the table that is different and is confident in her brand.
We find the businesses who are worried about their competitors tend to be the ones who have stagnated. The ones who got to the top of the food chain and have now got complacent. They see everyone as the enemy. Sitting on top of the castle waiting for attack with cannons and arrows while a bunch of younger and more motivated business owners slowly convince the townspeople that it is better in their town and they can all live in their castle together happily ever after.
Along with relevant promotions, Mrs Hinch also gets involved in a number of charity projects and posts around subjects such as online bullying, mental health and recycling. None of these elements have anything to do with the service she provides, but all make up who she is as a person and her brand. She promoted causes she is passionate about. Not only does this make her more relatable and human, it also gives her brand a wider scope of activities to get involved in. Endearing people to her and also raising her profile and that of the causes she is passionate about. Did we know anything about Terracycle before Mrs Hinch?
Conclusion
As businesses it is important to be constantly striving to improve, adapt and move with the times.
By not seeing social media as just another way to flush money down the drain, think of it as the virtual version of your brand. We are always speaking about buyer personas, what about a seller persona?
The aim of social media is not to sell, it is to display your brand. Display it in such a way that it feels like a living breathing embodiment of everything your company does and stands for. By ignoring the chaos and the noisy marketplace and focusing on one or two influences who do it right we can learn a lot.
Mrs Hinch has shown that by being true to yourself and not getting bogged down in the sales message, people and businesses can thrive through collaboration, mutual respect and support.
The world of marketing and sales has changed and its time we all started to acknowledge that. If you are finding yourself floundering or otherwise struggling to adequately generate your brand’s voice, you are not alone.
Contact us today to arrange a free initial consultation. We’d be happy to help steer you in the right direction!
Image Source – @MrsHinchHome
