How to Develop Customer Evangelists
When you have evangelists for your product or service, you have the best possible kind of customer. Your evangelists are passionate, loyal, and thrilled to recommend you. They are communicators — when it matters. They are your public defenders when times are difficult. Evangelists are also forgiving. They assume your mistakes are honest. They believe you have their best interests at heart. Best of all, evangelists are hyper-repeat customers.
If you agree with the above then you’ll probably agree with the following. No matter what business you are in – large or small, product or service, public or private – you should be doing everything humanly possible to develop these kinds of customers.
With a critical mass of evangelists, you can succeed in unimaginable ways. Companies like Apple andAmazon are proof of this. Netflix also enjoys evangelists (Remember how evangelists are forgiving? If they weren’t, Netflix would be out of business). So, if you want to develop the kind of evangelists that stick by your side through thick and thin, here are three critical steps.
Customer Insights
First, you must develop deep insights about your buyers. This is the single most important activity you can undertake to create powerful marketing. Start by conducting qualitative interviews with your customers, prospective customers, and even your competitions’ customers. You want to know what they think, what they want, and how they use your product or service.
This activity is so critical because your most effective messaging comes from your market. If you do this right, your will gather language that you know resonates strongly with your customers because it comes from your customers.
Sure, Steve Jobs famously said it’s not the customers’ job to know what they want. He could say that because he had an unparalleled instinct about what customers want. Everybody else — us included — needs to be talking to customers, asking them strategic questions to uncover the most effective messaging.
Amazon enjoys uncommon access to customers’ feedback via its consumer reviews. And Netflix certainly has received its share of customer feedback over the last year. To the company’s credit, it has actually listened when it abandoned its terrible idea of spinning off Qwikster. However, the company could have avoided every one of its mistakes over the past year by simply talking to its customers. That Netflix was surprised by the consumer outcry that followed its actions is nothing short of negligence. There is no excuse for not knowing exactly how customers will react to something you are about to do. To find out, all you have to do is ask.
Emotional Marketing Language
Once you have customer insights, you use them to develop simple, emotional, lifestyle-oriented marketing language. No matter what you do, you are in the life-improvement business. If your work is in the business-to-business space, your language must focus on how you improve the condition of your clients. Not technical specifications. Not features. Just simple, salient statements.
For example, you do not make Airplay wireless speakers, rather, you bring beautiful music into people’s homes and hearts without wires.
You are not a social media marketer. You make your clients’ dreams come true by dramatically increasing their sales.
You are not in the cloud business. You protect the precious, priceless memories of people’s lives.
This may sound like basic marketing 101, but take a look around. Is any technology company besides Apple and Amazon talking like this? Even public relations agencies and social media outlets, which are in the business of helping clients connect with customers in effective ways, tend to tout their process and technique.
Here’s the bottom line: most customers don’t care about the steps you take to improve their life. All they want know is how you’ll improve it. So, tell them!
Proper Platforms
Finally, you must communicate this effective messaging on the proper platforms. Here is a list of good ones and forgotten ones:
- 1. A long list of your customers. Names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses.
- 2. A long list of your competitions’ customers. If you have good lists you can communicate directly with that market.
- 3. Powerful relationships with earned media resources: bloggers, writers, editors, producers, etc.
- 4. Social media.
- 5. Your product package. It’s generally an overlooked opportunity to communicate to potential customers how you can improve their lives.
- 6. Your product manual is generally useless. Product manuals should be filled with success stories: how various features and uses of your product or service has improved the lives of real people.
There are many more, but the above list is a good place to start. Once you develop evangelists, you must work hard to simply maintain them. In fact, you must continue to innovate your products and your marketing just to maintain your position of success. Need proof? Research in Motion used to have evangelists. So did Best Buy.
If you stop aggressively doing the things that made you successful, the world will pass you by in three seconds. It’s not difficult to create evangelists — you simply have to do the work that most businesses do not do: gather qualitative insights from your market; use simple, emotional language; and communicate it from the right platforms. Do that, and your competition will be an easy crowd to stand out among.
via How to Develop Customer Evangelists
TJ Goulet has been a leader in sales and marketing for almost 20 years. His background includes both entrepreneurial endeavors and nationally recognized achievement with a Fortune 500 Company. He entered the local search and coupon industry in 2005, when he launched his first directory and coupon portal. TJ's expertise is in utilizing current technologies and marketing platforms to increase sales productivity across a broad range of products and services.
Snapshot: Social Media Marketing Industry Report | Social Media Marketing
Snapshot: Social Media Marketing Industry Report
For a lot of companies worldwide, moving their marketing to the social Web has got to be the most important decision they’ve made. Indeed it is, with all the benefits of leveraging on social media marketing tactics offering to make their businesses thrive online and get ahead of the competition. Because of this, more and more companies are getting onboard the online marketing train, learning the ropes, and finding the best ways to use the social Web’s real-time capabilities to achieve their goals.
An infographic published by VA Simple Services titled 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report: Key Findings, lists down a rundown of important facts. For starters, it says that spending more time on social media platforms helps brands understand the medium and, therefore, can easily provide insights which are essential in planning social media campaigns, and ensuring they are effectively targeting accomplishing their objectives.
And with the social Web’s real-time capabilities and varied features, it should not be much of a surprise that the brand’s business exposure online is the biggest benefit businesses are reaping from their social media uses. Here, Facebook tops the list of most used social media sites, unsurprisingly followed by Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and YouTube.
Snapshot: Social Media Marketing Industry Report | Social Media Marketing.
TJ Goulet has been a leader in sales and marketing for almost 20 years. His background includes both entrepreneurial endeavors and nationally recognized achievement with a Fortune 500 Company. He entered the local search and coupon industry in 2005, when he launched his first directory and coupon portal. TJ's expertise is in utilizing current technologies and marketing platforms to increase sales productivity across a broad range of products and services.
Snapshot: Social Media Marketing Industry Report
Snapshot: Social Media Marketing Industry Report
An infographic published by VA Simple Services titled 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report: Key Findings, lists down a rundown of important facts. For starters, it says that spending more time on social media platforms helps brands understand the medium and, therefore, can easily provide insights which are essential in planning social media campaigns, and ensuring they are effectively targeting accomplishing their objectives.
And with the social Web’s real-time capabilities and varied features, it should not be much of a surprise that the brand’s business exposure online is the biggest benefit businesses are reaping from their social media uses. Here, Facebook tops the list of most used social media sites, unsurprisingly followed by Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and YouTube.
TJ Goulet has been a leader in sales and marketing for almost 20 years. His background includes both entrepreneurial endeavors and nationally recognized achievement with a Fortune 500 Company. He entered the local search and coupon industry in 2005, when he launched his first directory and coupon portal. TJ's expertise is in utilizing current technologies and marketing platforms to increase sales productivity across a broad range of products and services.
Social Demographics: Who’s Using Today’s Biggest Networks [INFOGRAPHIC]
More than 66% of adults are connected to one or more social media platforms, but who exactly are these people?
The infographic below, created by Online MBA, breaks down the demographics, including education level, income, age and gender of social media users, along with other miscellaneous facts.
Some sites’ users are more demographically alike than others. One thing is the same for most social sites — college students, or those who have completed some college, represent the majority on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg and Reddit. Among Facebook users, 57% have completed some college, and 24% have earned a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Although, people 45 and older make up 46% of Facebook users.
Social media sites are also seeing a gender split — women use social media more than men. More women are on Facebook and Twitter. About 57% of Facebook and 59% of Twitter users are women.
Women gravitate toward Pinterest and young, techie men hang out on Google+. Pinterest has the heaviest gender imbalance — 82% of users are women, who pin crafts, gift ideas, hobbies, interior design and fashion. On the other spectrum, Google+ is dominated by men (71%) and early adopters, engineers and developers. About 50% of Google+ users are 24 or younger.
LinkedIn reports an even ratio of men and women — 49% over age 45 — who use the site to connect with other business professionals.
Most people use social media to stay in touch with friends and family, and more are doing so while on the go. About 200 million Facebook users check their Timelines from their mobile devices every day.
Check out the infographic below to see all the statistics.
Infographic courtesy of Online MBA.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RapidEye.
Social Demographics: Who’s Using Today’s Biggest Networks [INFOGRAPHIC].
A “Digital Ocean” Model for Keeping Your Content on Course
A “Digital Ocean” Model for Keeping Your Content on Course
More B2C and B2B marketers are shifting their focus toward increased digital in their tactical mix. Understanding the digital locations of their target audiences is becoming a standard step in the creation of a digital plan, but many are overlooking the intentions of their online audiences, and aren’t adapting their content and tactics accordingly.
This blog introduces the concept of the digital ocean and the need to locate and market to both fishers (those actively researching products/services) and swimmers (those who are just “hanging out” online, rather than actively seeking out your information).
Most likely, we are all beyond the trial-and-error phase of digital and have realized that an intelligent, synchronized, and aligned plan is needed to maximize our digital investment. We know that every content plan needs to start with a prime objective. For example, in the B2C world, it may be to collect marketable contacts (via a coupon or offer); for B2B, it may be to generate leads with a primary call-to-action of a signup for an online trial.
So the next challenge is how to stay on course with your targeted audience. This is where the analogy of the “digital ocean” can be helpful.
Think of the ocean as representing all the possible online channels and locations (e.g., search, websites, blogs, social communities, ads, articles, email, text, etc.) where your audience can be reached. Now, consider whether you are trying to reach targets who are actively looking for a product, service, or offer like yours (fishers), or those who aren’t actively looking but may respond to a discussion, or an ad, or a blog if it’s related to their interests (swimmers), or both.
Drop your anchor, and choose your bait
Take a look at the graphic below:
The digital ocean — a B2B example.
If your audience is ready to go fishing, your job is to know where to go to catch them, and how to lure them toward you.
Ask yourself what digital mechanisms and places they would rely on to identify, research, and evaluate their choices. What is the likely journey they would take on the way to selecting your product, service, or offering?
Then, you need to create the appropriate fishing bait — comprising content, search results, and outbound campaigns — to attain consideration. The content and tactics you use here should focus on drawing attention and demonstrating your expertise, such as case studies, white papers, and product demos (you can see some additional content suggestions in the graphic).
However, the tactics used to attract swimmers can be very different — they need to be more educational and less promotional. Social media plays a bigger role here, as that is where your target audience “hangs out” and engages with people and content on their interests. With swimmers, creating or engaging in conversations is a natural fit as a content tactic, as it lets you add value and insight without being overly promotional. Advertising on social and industry sites using pinpoint profiling and targeting is usually possible and worthwhile.
Search keywords can also differ depending on whether your audience is fishing or swimming. Fishers tend to connect with more action- and competition-oriented search terms that are aimed at a product or service type (e.g., the cheapest airline ticket to London, the best performing mutual fund, etc.), where swimmers are usually more interested in education and discovering information that is related to their topic of interest (e.g., mortgage industry best practices, groups that discuss diabetes).
The digital ocean — a B2B example.
To work on this concept yourself, try printing and filling in the worksheet above to help you identify locations and search terms based on the intent of your target audience. (While this worksheet was designed for B2B, the concepts still apply to B2C content marketing.)
Research for your worksheet
You may already have conducted research on the digital locations and behavior of your target markets, which should make this task easier. You could regard this task as creating a persona with split personalities, one when seeking products/services and the other when interacting online without a purchase intention. If you do not have any data from prior research, there are a number of ways to approach this depending on your budget and timeframe. I have worked with companies who have brought in an agency to conduct a complete target market analysis, where other companies have leveraged a social listening service. You could survey your existing customers, or send this worksheet out to a selection of your own employees who spend time interacting in your digital ocean.
Once you have completed the worksheet, make sure that your content marketing efforts are focused on the search keywords and tactics that are most likely to drive engagement and response. Make sure your SEO practices mirror the intention of the audience, so that your content matches their requirements and desires. If you are marketing towards both swimmers and fishers, ensure your content, keywords, and tags include both names of and uses for your products/services. For example, a manufacturer who sells chemicals or plastics needs to include keywords for product names/categories such as “dibenzylamino ethyl acetate” or “performance polymers,” as well as more solution/fishing oriented keywords such as “top performing wiper blades” or “liquid polymer case studies.” Put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer to determine both the journey you would take toward a business relationship, and the keywords/content of value along the way.
I often see excellent content fail to reach its goals because it doesn’t align with the audience’s timing and intentions. So at the very least, the digital ocean worksheet activity can help you conduct a gut check on your digital- and content marketing-mapping efforts.
Image courtesy of Rosemary McCartney
A “Digital Ocean” Model for Keeping Your Content on Course.
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