Great brands have something in common – they have an inescapable gravity that brings customers to them. Top brands pull their customers into orbit.

Take Google, Nike or Apple.  These three companies rarely reach out and chat to you, you go to them. Why? Because they have active ‘orbit strategies’.

An orbit strategy is defined by Mark Bonchek as creating “a gravitational field that attracts customers into orbit around their brand.”  This is pull marketing. To succeed, you need to use engagement platforms that “engage customers outside the purchase process and deliver value beyond the products being sold.”

Some great engagement platforms include Google’s search engine, Apple’s ITunes and the Nike+ running community. As Bonchek points out, “Google, Apple and Nike don’t charge people for using these platforms. But they keep their customers in frequent orbit around the brand, and make it easy for customers to purchase a product, whether an ad, song, or shoe.”

Rise offers marketers a new type of engagement platform that they can offer their customers, a leaderboard. A leaderboard pulls people in because they want to see where they rank against their peers, and it retains them because they keep coming back to see how they are doing. A good leaderboard is the perfect tool to maintain your customers in a weekly or monthly orbit around your brand.

You can think of Rise as creating your own Nike+ for your brand but instead of being about running, it creates and tracks a community around the metrics that are important to you.

We can see Zoopla doing this with its leaderboard of estate agents in the UK based on social influence – the Zoopa Property Power 100 (ZPP100). Estate agencies are Zoopla’s customers who pay to have properties featured on the site. By creating the ZPP100, Zoopla gets estate agents to check in with the Zoopla brand every Monday morning, just to see their score – they are now ‘in orbit’. The agents are engaged in Zoopla and Zoopla gains authority in the community and creates gravity for their brand. Most importantly, it keeps customers engaged in Zoopla as a digital marketing platform beyond its main product offering of online property listings.

And it’s not just Zoopla who are using leaderboards for their orbit strategy. See Veritas’ recently released Health and Safety Top 500 on Rise, SustMeme’s Climate Change & Energy leaderboard or Gardening Express’s Passion for Gardening 100. All boards reach the community and bring key influencers and customers into the orbit of these brands, each week, using Twitter as the key channel.

In these leaderboards, the metrics being tracked happen to be the same – the social media influence score of each player. Many influencer leaderboards start this way – by using a general measure of social influence (Klout or Kred) and over time, develop metrics that are more specific to their sector. The Gamification Gurus leaderboard, for example, started as 100% based on Klout score but over time new metrics have been added (such as tweets using the word #gamification) that means Klout now makes up only 2% of the final score for each player.

Get started creating a gravity engagement platform for your brand today with a leaderboard. You can either use our self service tools (try a Power Leaderboard)  or ask us and we will create and manage a leaderboard for you.

Isn’t it time your brand started generating some gravity of its own?