Today at 1pm Central on Twitter we’ll be discussing how to find the identity of your fans at #RockstarChat. It’s vitally important to understand who your fans are, because that helps shape the type of relationship you can have with them.
For example, Maker’s Mark literally calls their fans their Brand Ambassadors. That helps shape the nature of their relationship. Maker’s Mark treats their BAs as pseudo-salespeople for the brand, people who consider it their job to promote Maker’s Mark to other customers and bars. So the brand focuses heavily on giving BAs promotional materials to help them better sell the brand to others.
With Fiskars and its The Fiskateers program, the focus is more on the Fiskateers themselves, and their love of scrapbooking and crafting. Fiskars showcases the fans and the projects they create, with the understanding that doing so spreads a love of scrapbooking, and by extension, that leads to promotion of the products used to create those crafting projects. Such as Fiskars’ iconic orange-handle scissors.
So if you are wanting to craft a formal program to facilitate an ongoing relationship with your fans, you need to consider two key questions:
1 – Who are these fans?
2 – What’s the nature of our desired relationship?
For example, let’s say your company makes a line of cooking products, and that you want to improve your marketing efforts in the Pacific Northwest. From your market research you know that the majority of your customers are stay-at-home-moms. Since your fans are SAHMs and the goal is to improve your marketing efforts, the nature of your desired relationship with your fans could be to leverage them as a feedback channel to learn more about what customers think of both your products and in-store marketing in the Pacific Northwest.
You could start by first identifying your fans in each state, let’s start with Oregon. And you could then identify all the stores in the state of Oregon that carry your products, then based on the location of your fans in Oregon, ask certain fans to talk to customers in the stores in their regional area. This would allow you to better learn what customers in Oregon not only think about your products, but how your company is marketing those products. Then you can take this feedback and leverage it to improve your marketing efforts.
That’s just an example, we’ll deep dive into this topic today during #RockstarChat on Twitter. Please do join us, and to make it easier on you, you can follow the chat right here! See you at 1pn Central!
