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How to Convince Your Skeptical Boss to Invest in a Brand Ambassador Program

Whenever you attempt to sell your boss on launching a new initiative, there’s a few things you need to do to improve the boss’ chances of signing off:

1 – Help the boss understand the value

2 – Help the boss understand the cost

3 – Help the boss understand the scope of the initiative and the changes that will be required

 

Unfortunately, the idea of a ‘brand ambassador program’ can mean different things to different organizations, and it’s often difficult for your boss to know what the program is or the impact it could have on their business. When you tell the boss that such a program will cost likely tens of thousands to fully implement and it will take up to a year to see maximum results, well it’s easy to see why many bosses pass.

So in order to improve the chance that your boss signs off on launching a brand ambassador program, we need to address each of your boss’ possible objections head on.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Value of a Brand Ambassador Program

As I mentioned, a brand ambassador program can mean different things to different companies. Some companies, for example, hire infuencers or even celebrities to act as their brand ambassadors. Patagonia is a good example of a company that follows this model. When I work with clients, I typically advise them to structure their brand ambassador program so that the ambassadors they select are current customers that love the brand. These customers are already proactively engaging with other customers and promoting the brand, we are just going to build a program that gives us a framework to work with and connect with them regularly.

In general, there are four ways that brand ambassadors benefit your brand:

1 – Promotion. Brand ambassadors are constantly encouraging other customers to buy from your brand. Even if you don’t connect with them, they are already promoting your brand. These are the customers that will stop you in a store and give you an unsolicited recommendation for a product you are considering. The benefit of having a brand ambassador program is that you can work directly with these customers to help them promote your brand in the specific way that you want.

2 – Reputation Management. Your brand ambassadors are the customers that are online and offline protecting your brand. They are defending you from troll attacks, they are defending you when other customers criticize your brand. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives you a way to train these customers on how to best respond to complaints about your brand that they encounter either online or off.

3 – Customer Service and Support. Along with the previous point, brand ambassadors will proactively help other current or potential customers with issues associated with your brand and its products. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives your brand a way to provide training for these customers and to give them a way to contact the brand directly if they encounter a customer who needs more help than they can provide.

4 – Customer Feedback. Brand ambassadors are in constant, direct contact with your customers, and are constantly collecting feedback from them. This is honestly the most underutilized benefit that brand ambassadors provide for your brand. By launching a brand ambassador program, you have a more efficient way to collect, categorize and draw insights from the customer feedback that your ambassadors collect.

 

Now if you’re having to sell your boss on the idea of launching a brand ambassador program, the odds are he doesn’t fully see and/or appreciate the value that ambassadors bring to the table. For example, if you tell your boss that brand ambassadors help your brand by promoting it and the brand’s products, he probably sees the value in that promotion. But when you get further down the list to things like customer support and feedback, the value can appear a bit murkier for a boss that isn’t familiar with the idea of a brand ambassador program to begin with.

And it’s worth remembering that when you launch a brand ambassador program, it will likely need to be a gradual rollout. You will want to start with a smaller group of ambassadors, likely with limited responsibilities. I always tell clients when launching a brand ambassador program to “start small, nail the process down, then expand”.

So out of necessity, and in an attempt to make your best case for a brand ambassador program to your boss, it makes sense to start the rollout of a brand ambassador program gradually. For instance, start with the promotional aspect of a brand ambassador program first. This is where most bosses will understand and see the immediate value.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Cost of a Brand Ambassador Program

Building on the previous section, understand that if you start by first focusing on how your brand ambassadors can better promote the brand, you are also significantly lowering the cost of the program. Think of it as adopting a payment plan system for paying for a brand ambassador program instead of needing all the costs paid upfront. Start smaller, with just the promotional aspect, nail the process, then you expand.

Here’s another key: Start with a smaller group of ambassadors. This will also significantly lower costs. If you envision having a nationwide ambassador program, you could start with a single market, maybe it could be your most prosperous market, maybe it could be the one where your headquarters are. Either way, by starting with a small group focused on only one aspect of the program (promotional), then you greatly reduce the cost of the program, and make it much easier to manage.

Here’s the best part: By adopting this segmented approach, you not only reduce time and cost, you can, if managed correctly, have the brand ambassador program pay for itself as it is launched and rolled out. Increasing promotion will lead to increased sales and increased revenue. That increased revenue can then be used to fund the next stage of the program’s rollout; focused on brand reputation management. If done smartly, the only new costs associated with the program could be those involving the promotional aspect at launch.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Scope of the Initiative and the Changes Involved

By adopting a segmented or tiered launch/rollout of the brand ambassador program, we’ve significantly reduced the scope of the rollout, and the associated costs. Additionally, we are focusing only on the promotional aspect at launch, which is likely the area that even a skeptical boss will see and understand the value in. This also means that necessary changes within your organization will be kept to a minimum. If you start by first focusing on the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, this can be launched with minimal disruption or additional work from your staff. Ideally, your brand already has at least one manager for your social media efforts, and this person or team could also assist with helping your best customers promote your brand. Additionally, your brand may want to explore launching a brand ambassador program for your employees, and a promotional aspect is typically the cornerstone of such an initiative.

By starting with just the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, you’ve reduced associated costs and maximized the potential benefits.

 

One Final Note About Starting a Brand Ambassador Program

When you bring up the topic of launching a brand ambassador program to your skeptical boss, one of the thoughts he will have (whether he shares it with you or not) is “Ugh, how much is this going to cost us?” It’s worth remembering, and spelling out to your boss, that a brand ambassador programs takes what your business is already doing, and makes it better.

Your boss will likely understand and appreciate the value brand ambassadors can create by promoting your brand and its products. But make sure he understands the other ways that ambassadors can help your brand, and make your current efforts more efficient while also reducing costs.

For example, your brand likely has a set dollar amount placed on every customer service call it receives. In other words, your brand knows what the business cost is for each call it receives.  Let’s say that cost is $7.13 per call based on the call length and what your brand has to pay a customer service representative to handle the call. That means that every time one of your ambassadors helps a customer and eliminates their need to call your brand for customer service, your brand has saved $7.13. Each customer service call that is averted by the actions of your brand ambassadors is a cost-saving to your brand! You can find similar ways to calculate cost savings for reputation management (an improvement of online sentiment by one point results in an X percent increase in sales) and customer feedback as well. These cost-savings that the brand ambassadors create also help offset or even eliminate the cost of expanding the program.

So if you want to improve the chances of getting your skeptical boss to invest in a brand ambassador program, do the following:

  • Don’t try to launch everything at once, focus on a staggered rollout.
  • Start small, with a limited group and focus first on the area that your skeptical boss can clearly see the value in where your brand can quickly see results. Focusing on promotion first is a good start.
  • Once you see results from your initial efforts, grow as necessary, and use gains realized to fund the growth of the program.
  • Make sure your skeptical boss understands that your brand ambassadors will increase sales AND lower costs for your brand.

 

Still have questions about how to sell your skeptical boss on a brand ambassador program? Fill out this contact form and I’ll be happy to help you!

 

 

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Make Your Event Sponsorships Better By Making the Event Itself Better

Event sponsorships

A few years ago a conference approached me about doing a Live #Blogchat session during their event, and I agreed. I told the event that if they wanted to, they could sell a sponsorship to the Live #Blogchat to recoup some or all of the costs that they were paying me for the session. I added that if they decided to go this route that I would be happy to work with the sponsor before and during the Live #Blogchat to make sure they got their money’s worth, and made the session better.

The event said great, and I never heard from them again. I showed up at the conference and was surprised to learn from the event organizers that they had sold a sponsorship to my Live #Blogchat. I was told this minutes before the Live #Blogchat was to start, when I was introduced to the sponsor representative. A bit taken aback, I quickly huddled with the sponsor representative to ask them if they would like to be involved with the discussion as the Live #Blogchat unfolded.  “Nope, this is your event, we are just happy to be here!”

This is why the concept of event sponsorships is interesting to me, because there’s so much unlocked potential. With many event sponsorships, there’s little more involvement from the sponsor than this.  There’s typically some signage, maybe some free swag for attendees, maybe a comped booth at a trade show.

Smart sponsors know that the best way to truly make an impression on attendees is to leverage your sponsorship to make the event better for those attendees. Too many sponsors try to ‘be seen’ at the events they partner with.  Your goal isn’t to be seen, it’s to be remembered.

When you are considering working with an event on a sponsorship package, ask yourself these questions:

  • Who is attending the event?
  • Why are they there?
  • What are they hoping to accomplish?

Your sponsorship should factor in the answers to each of these questions, especially the third question. Then once you’ve answered these questions, then think about how your sponsorship can help the attendees reach their goals for the event.

For example, let’s say that the attendees at the event you want to sponsor are there to learn about digital marketing. Your sponsorship could then be tied to something that helps the attendee take home as much useful information as possible about the event.  Maybe you could do something as simple as sponsoring a notebook for each attendee to during each session.  Or maybe sponsor a free jump drive with the presentation slides from each track.  Or maybe your company could sponsor a few bloggers doing recaps of each session and then at the end of the day you could provide these recaps as handouts to attendees so they could learn about the sessions that they missed.

All of these ideas are rooted in sponsorships that are structured in a way that takes into account what the attendee is trying to accomplish, and makes it easier for them to reach their goals for the event.

Remember, the idea isn’t to be seen, it’s to be memorable. If you provide utility for the attendees, that makes you useful to them, and memorable.

Besides, with most event sponsorships, ‘being seen’ is the quickest way to be ignored.

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Research: Online and Offline Conversations Account for 19% of Sales

An exciting new study from Engagement Labs (Formerly Keller-Fay) had some very interesting takeaways for brands concerning the impact that online and offline WOM has on sales.  The study tracked the correlations between conversations (online and offline) and sales for 170 brands.  The research found 19% of sales resulted from both online and offline conversations.  Further, the study found that both sources contributed almost equally; 10% of sales resulted from offline conversations (Word of Mouth) and 9% resulted from online conversations (Social Media).

The study also looked at how a brand uses social media can impact sales: “By improving social performance by just 10 percent, the brands included in this study can realize a two percent increase in sales and large improvements in profit margins compared to business-as-usual figures. For example, the sentiment of conversations, both online and offline, were proven to be a big driver of performance. Therefore, by improving sentiment, a brand can experience a sales lift.”

The More Positive the Conversation Around Your Brand, the Higher Your Sales

So let’s unpack that previous paragraph a bit. If a brand improves the efficiency of its social media efforts by 10%, it realizes a 2% increase in sales. That alone is incredibly significant. But additionally, positive sentiment about a brand online and off leads to an increase in sales.

And what group is the biggest driver of positive sentiment about your brand online?  Your happy customers!  Your biggest fans are not only the biggest contributors of positive conversations around and about your brand, but they are also the group that is the most motivated to talk positively about your brand!

This is precisely why I am so dedicated to helping companies better connect with and empower their happy customers. Additionally, customers are more likely to listen to and trust a fellow customer than they are a marketing message that comes directly from a brand! You know this to be true from your own experiences: Which are you more likely to trust; A commercial for a brand, or an endorsement for that same brand from a customer you meet in a store? You’re going to trust the customer over the commercial, right?  Of course you are.

If you want to improve the sentiment of the conversation around your brand online, then make sure your happy customers are more active participants in that conversation.  That’s it.  If you don’t take a role in engaging your happy customers, they will be less likely to create positive content around and about your brand online.  Which will lead to fewer sales.

But we want you to have more sales. And as this study found, just a 10% increase in the efficiency of your social media efforts results in a 2% increase in sales.  For a small business with at least one employee, average annual revenue is $4.9 million.   So if a small business with one employee could improve its social media efforts by just 10%, it could realize an increase in sales of $98,000.00.

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Connecting With Your Customers Should Be a Part of Your Culture, Not Part of a Publicity Stunt

You may have seen over the last few weeks how a user on Twitter spotted an odd pattern to the few people that KFC was following on Twitter:

And KFC responded by sending him several goodies, including a rather large painting of himself along with the Colonel:

Now, on the surface, this is a cool thing for a brand to do. It got KFC a ton of positive publicity and will no doubt win Wieden & Kennedy (The agency behind this idea) a ton of awards. But whenever I see something like this from a brand, my first question is “Ok, now what comes next?”

The problem is, these ‘let’s send a customer something cool’ stunts typically end up being just that: Stunts. They aren’t part of a larger strategy or initiative.  They are typically one-offs designed to generate short-term publicity for the brand, and the agency of record.  W&K can easily point to social media engagement and claim this is a ‘win’.  Just look at the first tweet from @edgette22, it has over 700K RTs currently.  I’m sure KFC is thrilled with that, and W&K will win a ton of social media awards for this.

But at the end of the day, what needles were moved?  What long-term impact will this have for KFC?

Since this happened, I’ve had strategy discussions with two major brands (everyone here has heard of both of them and you likely use their products).  In simple terms, we discussed how these brands can better connect with their customers. We discussed what they could do to better collect feedback from customers, and better ACT on that feedback to improve existing business and marketing processes.

In both cases, we never discussed “Hey guys what if we did some Twitter stunt where we send something cool to a customer?” Because if you really want to connect with your customers, you can’t do it just once, it has to be your commitment and your culture.

Now to be fair to KFC, they could very well have many other customer engagement efforts underway. Maybe they’ve launched a customer advisory board, maybe they have a brand ambassador program, or maybe they are looking to launch such efforts.  If so, I wrote the book on both topics.

I just get a little testy when it appears that brands are only embracing their customers as a way to get a public pat on the back. Actually committing to embracing your customers is damn hard work, and much of it goes without public acclaim. Your brand has to literally love and care for its customers. You have to value them and view bringing the voice of the customer into your organization as being a cause worth fighting for.

If you only do it in public, you’re committed to the publicity.  If you also do it in private, you’re committed to the cause.

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Your Big Brand is Already Doing Influencer Marketing, Whether You Realize it or Not

airlines customer serviceLast week, I wrote about how social media isn’t hard, companies make it hard. The idea being that a lot of opportunities fall into the lap of companies every day in regards to their digital strategies, and often these opportunities aren’t capitalized on.

For example, right now there’s a mad rush by brands to get on the Influencer Marketing train. Brands want to know how they can work with influencers, and how they can get those influencers talking positively online about their brand. Big brands are paying millions of dollars to consultants and agencies to help launch Influencer Marketing campaigns.

And yet, they often miss capitalizing on free opportunities to interact with influencers that fall into their laps.

I was thinking about this as I read about my friend Ann Handley’s recent traveling nightmare with Delta airlines. The story was a breakdown in customer service that’s unfortunately all too familiar to those of us that fly frequently. But I wanted to pick this story up when Ann, after getting no help (or empathy!) from Delta reps at the ATL airport, decided to turn to Twitter and the @Delta account.

At this point, I want to back up for a minute. When a customer has a problem with a brand, they will typically try to contact the brand via offline or online channels BEFORE going to social media. I’ve been educating clients on this for 10 years, I’ve been blogging about it here for years, hell I even wrote a book about this. So when a company encounters what they might perceive as a ‘complaint’ from a customer on social media, they need to understand how the customer got there. Typically, as Ann did, they tried to contact the brand via other customer support channels, and did not get the help they needed. So they turned to social media, and at this point, they just want someone to LISTEN to them and show EMPATHY for their situation. In short they want the brand to say “I’m sorry you’re upset, help me understand what has happened so I can see what can be done to help you”. The point is, you have a customer that’s typically frustrated, who is upset with the treatment they have gotten from your brand, but if you show empathy for their situation and work with them to resolve it to the customer’s satisfaction, you have a chance to convert a ranter, into a raver.  Nothing creates an advocate faster than a brand that listens to the customer that has a problem, and who goes the extra mile to solve that problem.

Now that we’ve covered that ground, let’s turn our attention back to Ann’s situation with Delta. I’m not going to really comment on what happened with Ann at the ATL airport (because you should read the post) but suffice it to say that Delta’s customer service efforts in person at the airport were less than satisfactory as far as Ann is concerned.  So she’s upset, and a bit frustrated by the time she decides to try the hail mary of contacting Delta on Twitter for help.

And the second she did, whether Delta realized it or not, but they were engaging in Influencer Marketing. A quick click of Ann’s Twitter account tells you the following:

  • She has nearly 400k followers
  • She’s a bestselling author

In other words, she’s an influencer. And I’m not sure what the social media equivalent of a Q Score is, but Ann’s would be off the charts. Everyone loves Ann.

So Delta had a rare opportunity to interact directly with an influencer fall in its lap. According to Ann, here’s what happened: She tweeted to @Delta saying she needed help.  Approximately an hour later (see the problem?), she got a reply, and an exchange began. Ann was offered a voucher or free miles, but really wanted someone from Delta to explain to her exactly what had happened and how her situation was allowed to reach this point.  Delta told her on Twitter that they were dispatching a customer service rep to her location in the airport to talk to her.

Eighty-five mins later (see the problem?), she was still waiting for the CS rep to reach her when her name was called for standby for another flight and she left the airport. Still frustrated and upset, she squeezed into the back of her flight, and started writing what would become her blog post.

Again, brands like Delta will spend millions if not hundreds of millions on Influencer Marketing in 2017. Yet when they have a chance to connect with an actual influencer for free, they blow it.

And the great irony of this story? Ann is a professional speaker, and as a fellow speaker, I can tell you that one thing we love is new case studies to share with our audiences. So there’s at least one positive Ann can take from this last week.

The moral of the story is that there’s no sense in your brand chasing the Shiny Object of the day if you can’t nail basic customer service. Empower and train your employees to have understanding and empathy for your customers and 95% of your customer service issues will magically disappear.

And for extra credit: Understand that every customer is an Influencer to someone. Your brand is engaging in Influencer Marketing every day, whether you realize it or not.

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Adobe Summit 2017 Review: The Experience is the Message


For the second year I was lucky enough to join Adobe’s Insider Group and attend the Adobe Summit. At its core, Summit is a user conference for partners who use Adobe’s suite of products such as Experience Cloud. The main conference is a three-day event, and it’s massive. Last year’s attendance was around 10k, and this year saw a 20% increase up to 12k.

The highlight of the first two days are its morning keynotes. The first day is typically focused on key product announcements from Adobe, and this year CEO Shantanu Narayen announced the Adobe Experience Cloud suite of products. The first day also included talks with NatGeo CMO Jill Cress (my fav) and the 2nd day’s keynotes were more on the entertainment side, opening with a performance by Penn and Teller, a talk with Peyton Manning and Ryan Gosling. It also included short talks from key executives from Facebook and the NBA.

And thanks to Adobe, you can view all these keynotes for free. Just click and watch!

The main focus of the event was Adobe challenging attendees to provide better experiences for customers, and using that as a way to differentiate from the competition. Also, one of the subpoints that dovetailed with this was the rise of emerging technologies such as AI, VR and AR. How can these technologies be leveraged by marketers to provide amazing experiences for customers?

One case study session that I really enjoyed was Taylor Guitars talking about how it leverages digital to better connect with customers and give them better experiences.

The buyers journey is personal for Taylor Guitars customers #adobesummit

A post shared by Mack Collier (@mackcollier) on

One of the ‘problems’ with emerging technologies is that so many brands are swept up in a FOMO and decide to jump on the bandwagon because of hype. The smart companies are the ones that don’t set out to use a particular technology, they set out to solve business and customer problems. In doing so, they may find that using a particular emerging technology solves their problem.

Case in point: A few years ago, Taylor Guitars started tackling a problem they discovered in their retail stores. The brand was finding that customers would be interested in a guitar, then check the price tag, then go to their phone to do research on the fly. Often, these customers would decide that they needed to leave and do more research before committing to the purchase. So Taylor Guitars decided to build research functionality into its smartphone app.  Taylor accepted that if its customers were going to do in-store research, that Taylor wanted that research to go through an app that the brand had more control over.  So Taylor customers can use the app to get the research they need on the fly, and they can even text Taylor to get specific product information in seconds, while in the store.  Often, this research can give a customer the last assurance they need to complete the purchase.

The point here is, Taylor didn’t start out trying to figure out how they could start using the emerging technology of SMS and app marketing, instead they set out to solve a business problem: Too many customers weren’t completing the purchase in-store. Taylor discovered what was keeping customers from committing to the purchase, then leveraged emerging digital technologies to solve this problem for its customers.

BTW, while I was at the Adobe Summit, CMO.com interviewed me on this very topic..

So if you are using Adobe products currently at your company or agency, you should seriously consider attending Summit next year. It has amazing content that’s tailored to your exact needs, and the networking is phenomenal. Remember, you can view the keynotes for free, to give you a sense of how awesome this event is.  Additionally, check out my Instagram feed to see the pictures I took last week at Summit.

And registration is already up for 2018, it’s again at The Venetian, which is one of my favorite hotels. Just make sure you bring comfortable walking shoes!

Disclosure: I attended Summit as part of Adobe’s Insider Group. I was compensated by Adobe to attend Summit and work with the company. My content and POV is my own.

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Want More Customers? Here’s the Two Keys to Improving Your Company’s New Customer Acquisition Rate

How your company can acquire new customersNew Customer Acquisition is often the top marketing priority for the average company. And the marketing costs associated with reaching that goal are often among the largest marketing expenses that company will face. Today I want to talk about two things you can do to improve your company’s new customer acquisition rate, and greatly decrease the associated costs.

Sell the Benefits, Not the Product

You can’t sell a product unless the customer is ready to buy it. One of the biggest marketing mistakes most companies make is they try to sell their product to the customer before they are ready to buy it. When trying to acquire new customers, most companies make the mistake of making the first marketing communications they deliver be product-focused. On the surface, this makes complete sense, you can’t sell the product unless you market it, right?

The problem is, a new customer by definition is a customer that hasn’t bought from you before. Which means at minimum they aren’t familiar with your company, but often they also aren’t familiar with the product you are selling. So if you try to sell new customers on a product that they don’t understand or know why they would want, that marketing message is going to be completely ignored. You are literally trying to sell a product to new customers that they aren’t ready to buy.

So if they aren’t ready to buy your product, what do you sell them?

You sell them the benefits associated with owning your product. New customers won’t know they need or want your product, but they will be interested in the benefits that your product provides.

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. You don’t sell the product, you sell the benefits the owner gets from the product. And many of the most successful brands in the world have been adopting this approach for years:

Red Bull doesn’t sell an energy drink, it sells what happens after you drink it.

Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it sells the activities you’ll be engaged in while wearing its shoes.

Pedigree doesn’t sell dog food, it sells happy and healthy dogs.

 

New customers often won’t know they need your product, but they will know they need the benefits associated with owning it.  So that’s what you sell them. 

Consider this example: Let’s say your company sells spark plugs. If you want to acquire new customers that don’t know why they should buy your spark plugs (or even what a spark plug is), then how do you speak to them?

One option is to create product-focused marketing. You talk to new customers about what your spark plugs do. You talk about how your spark plugs create a hotter spark that leads to less carbon build-up. You talk about how your spark plugs are tipped with platinum instead of copper. You tell the new customer that you are trying to acquire how your spark plug is made from the best materials.

And the reality is, you might as well be throwing your money away. Because the new customer has no idea why less carbon build-up is important, or why a hotter spark is important. So your marketing message is completely irrelevant to them.

The way to win the new customer’s business is to instead sell them on the benefits of owning your spark plugs. You tell them that buying your spark plugs will make their car more reliable. You tell them how it will increase gas mileage by creating a more efficient burn of the fuel. You tell them how it will result in the car running smoother and with more power.

Those are the benefits that new customers are ready to buy. So you sell them what they are ready to buy. Then, after you’ve gotten their attention by communicating the benefits to them, at that point you can talk to them about the product features because at that point, they will be interested in learning more about the product itself.

Remember:

1 – Sell the BENEFITS of the product first to New Customers. That gets their attention and makes them interested in learning more.

2 – When they are ready to learn more, THEN you sell them on the product itself.

Still not getting it? Check out this post.

 

Excited? You should be, but hold on, there’s an even better way to improve the rate at which you acquire new customers…

 

Your Best Customers Are Your Best Marketing

The best salespeople for your company are your current, happy customers. Period. There’s four reasons why:

1 – Your current customers understand new customers better than you do. While you may not have an existing relationship with new customers, your current customers do. Because those new customers are often their friends and family. As such, your current customers can promote your products in a way that is relevant to their friends and family. They understand what’s important to their friends and family, and that’s why when they promote your products, they speak in terms of the benefits associated with owning the products. They use their understanding of what’s important to their friends and family and customize their promotion based on what their friends and family are looking for. And that makes their promotional efforts more effective than yours.

2 – Your current customers are passionate about your company and its products. By human nature, we want to share the things that help us and make us happy. This is especially true when we find a product we love, that makes our lives better. We want to tell others about that product because we want to see others have the same enjoyment from owning the product that we do. When you are in a store considering buying a product and a stranger comes up to you, unprompted, and says “I have that, and I love it!”, it makes an impression on you. Because you realize that they didn’t have to say anything, and did so because they truly do love the product. You’ll likely ask their opinion, which the stranger will happily provide. If you were even slightly considering purchasing the product beforehand, a ringing endorsement from a stranger would probably be enough to convince you to buy it.

3 – Your current customers lower your customer-service costs. As current customers interact with new customers, they are able to answer questions and address complaints head on. They can also speak from the perspective of an owner, and speak to their experiences associated with owning the product being discussed. This can help overcome questions and worries the new customer may have, and can improve the chances that the new customer will become a current one. And this is an obvious cost-savings to your company, as every question that your current customers answer for you, that potentially eliminates an email sent or phone call made to your customer service department.

4 – New customers trust their friends and family more than they do your company. While your current customers know and understand the new customers you want to reach, those new customers also know and trust your current customers. So when a current customer recommends your product to their friends and family, or even to strangers, it carries a lot of weight. Perhaps more importantly, if a new customer is considering your product and a friend tells them NOT to buy it and instead buy a competitor’s product, that new customer will probably listen to their friend.

 

Here’s How You Get More Customers:

1 – When targeting new customers that have no attachment to your brand or knowledge of your products, you sell the benefits associated with the product. These customers aren’t in the market for your product because they aren’t familiar with it. So you sell them on what they gain by owning it. They will understand the benefits and how they are important.

2 – Let your current customers market for you. Your current customers are more trusted by their friends and family. Additionally, your current customers have a better understanding of how to connect with their friends and family than your company does. You should work with your existing customers to give them the tools they need to tell others about your company and its products. Research has found that customers that purchased 5 times from your company also referred 5 new customers, and current customers that had purchased 10 times from your company had referred 7 new customers. Your current customers are literally bringing you new customer at almost no cost to you. This is the type of behavior that you want to encourage.

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Your Complete Guide to Becoming a Rock Star Brand

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Often when I talk to someone about or speak on Think Like a Rock Star, they will say ‘I love the concept, but we’re not Lady Gaga or Katy Perry. They are actual rock stars, we’re just a brand.  We can’t have fans like they do.’

When I started writing the book, I set out to answer that question.  Do actual rock stars simply have some natural advantage that brands do not?  Are actual rock stars able to create fans, passionate customers that literally love them in a way that most brands cannot?

What I discovered, to my delight, was that rock stars do certain things to create fans that are easily replicated by brands.  It’s not that brands can’t do the things that rock stars do to create fans, it’s that most brands aren’t willing to do the things they need to create fans.

But we’re not Taylor Swift, we sell (insert seemingly boring product that no one can see anyone being a fan of HERE)

First, let’s accept that your brand would love to have passionate customers that considered themselves to be fans of your brand.  Rock stars have raving fans that love and support them, and your brand wants that as well.

The problem lies in calling them ‘rock stars’.  Because when you do that, it’s easy to say ‘they are rock stars, we’re a brand, it’s two totally different things’.

Really?  You think Taylor Swift isn’t a brand?  Lady Gaga isn’t a brand?  Katy Perry, Pearl Jam, Blake Shelton, these are some of the biggest and most bankable brands on the planet!

The other trait that’s common to these rock stars? All of them are exceptional marketers.

So if you accept that these performers and bands are also excellent brands and marketers, then that means they are just like you in that regard.  Which means you can learn from how they market themselves and apply it to your own brand-building efforts.

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So if rock stars are really brands, why does The Zac Brown Band have more fans than my brand does?  What is he doing that I’m not? 

Six years ago I got on an airplane for the first time.  And I had the normal fears of a first flight, and was pretty worried.  My anxiety got worse as we prepared for takeoff and then as we rose and I was pushed back in my seat I just knew that I was about to fall out the bottom of the plane and I couldn’t understand WHY NO ONE ELSE WAS UPSET!  Then I looked over and saw an older woman sitting across from me, and she had taken out a magazine and was reading it without a care in the world as the airplane climbed and the ground became harder to see clearly.  At that point I realized that she knew something I didn’t.  So I immediately calmed down, assuming if she wasn’t upset, I shouldn’t be either.

I tell this story to preface the rest of the post.  Rock stars do a lot of things, especially in their marketing efforts, that seem counter-intuitive and even completely scary to most brands.  But the end result cannot be argued, rock stars have raving fans that drive real business growth for their brand.  If you want to have the same, then you need to trust that the rock stars have a valid reason for doing the ‘scary stuff’.

If you want to understand why rock stars have such passionate fans and your brand does not, then you need to understand why the average rock star markets the way she does.  You need to understand The Loyalty Graph:

LoyaltyGraph2Yep, at the end of the day the reason why rock stars have fans comes down to simple marketing.  But the key is that rock stars understand the true value of their most passionate fans, and your brand likely does not.

To the average brand, it’s great to have a fan, a passionate customer that praises the brand to others.  But most brands don’t look to actively engage those fans.  While they are happy to have fans, the average brand leaves their fans alone, with the thinking being let them keep doing what they are doing.

Rock stars literally focus their marketing efforts around their fans.  What’s worth noting about this approach is that rock stars are based their marketing efforts around connecting with less than 5% of their customer base.

This is curious, because the average brand not only all but ignores its fans, it spends millions marketing to the other 95% of its customers.  With a premium placed on marketing to New Customers, customers that have little or no affinity toward their brand.  At the same time, rock stars are all but ignoring New Customers, from a marketing perspective.  Think about that for a minute: Brands are investing the majority of their marketing dollars on connecting with a group of customers that rock stars are literally ignoring.  Again back to the airplane example, what do rock stars know that your brand doesn’t?

Rock stars understand that your fans are the best salespeople your brand has.  And if you take your branding hat off for a moment, you know this to be true as well.  Let’s say you are making a trip to Switzerland this Summer and you want to buy a simple point and shoot camera for under $300 for the trip.  Before making your purchase you’ll do the following:

1 – Get recommendations from friends and family online.

2 – Get recommendations from friends and family offline.

3 – Check online reviews (Amazon as well as photography sites)

Note that your buying decision was influenced not by marketing from any camera brands, but instead by friends, family, and other customers.  Because we trust other customers more than we trust the brands marketing to us.

That’s what rock stars understand about marketing that your brand does not.

So rock stars literally shift their marketing message and put it in the hands of the people that you are most likely to trust.  They connect with their fans and cultivate them as salespeople for their brand.  This is why they don’t have to spend 95% of their marketing budget on trying to acquire new customers.  Instead, they connect with their fans that love them, and those fans then acquire new customers for them.

The key is to put your marketing message in the hands of the people that other customers trust the most 

The reason why most brands don’t want to do this is because most brands want complete control over how its marketing messages are shared and spread.  This is exactly why television, newspaper and radio advertising has been so popular for decades.  The brand can communicate directly with many people at one time.

The problem with this approach is that as a result, any communication from the brand is viewed as being ‘marketing’, and as such, less trustworthy to the average customer.  So to make sure that your marketing message is actually heard, it needs to pass through a source that the customer trusts, such as another customer (fan).

But again, we are back to the point that most brands don’t trust their fans enough to give them control of their marketing messages.  And yet, most rock stars do.  This is because most rock stars understand who their fans are and what motivates them.

Fans want to see their favorite brand, rock star or sports team succeed.  So they will act in what they perceive to be that brand/rock star/sport team’s best interest.  But the important point to understand is that since they are fans, they trust their favorite brand or rock star.  So if that brand connects directly with them and asks them to spread their marketing message in a certain way, they will listen.

Which is exactly what rock stars do.  They are constantly connecting with their most passionate fans because they understand that by doing so, their fans will better understand who the rock star is, and the message the rock star wants them to spread.

Your brand’s fear that your fans won’t spread the message that you want is mostly unfounded.  If they don’t spread the message that you want it’s probably because you haven’t communicated to them what message you do want them to spread!  What features of your product do you want them to tell others about?  What are the selling points that you want other customers to know about?

Participating in a conversation changes that conversation

Conduct this simple experiment: For the next 5 customers that mention your brand positively on Twitter, tweet them back and say Thank You.  Then note what happens next.  The odds are that at least one and possibly all five people will respond back saying you are welcome.  One or more of them might try to extend the conversation with you.  The point is that whatever happens after you reply happened because you replied.  By simply interacting with customers that self-identified as being fans of your brand, you gave them a reason to think more positively about your brand, and a reason to create more positive word of mouth about your brand.

Here’s your primer to becoming a rock star brand:

1 – Understand the business value of your fans.  Your fans are your brand’s best salespeople.  They are the real rock stars, treat them as such.

2 – Focus on ways to increase interactions with your biggest fans.  This galvanizes them and validates why they love your brand to begin with.  Plus, it gives them a better understandng of your brand and your brand a better understanding of your fans.

3 – Communicate to your fans how they can help you.  Remember that your fans are different from your average customer.  The average customer has little to no interest in helping you spread your marketing messages but your fans are actively looking for ways to help you grow your brand.  They want to help you, work with them to make that happen.

4 – Ask your fans for feedback.  Ask them what they think about your brand, and ask them what they are hearing from other customers they talk to.  Specifically, ask them what reasons other customers are giving them for why they do not want to buy from your brand.  This is incredibly valuable feedback that you need to seek out.  Once you learn why some customers don’t want to buy from your brand, you can work to correct those issues, and drive more sales.

5 – Remember this is doable.  There’s no reason why your brand, no matter what industry you are in or products you sell, cannot have passionate fans that love you.  It’s not about the product, if it were you would never see companies that create commodity products like scissors and industrial lubricants with passionate fanbases.  It is about how you relate to and understand your customers.  This is exactly why rock stars place a premium on having constant interactions with their fans and being as close to them as possible.

6 – Build the stage for your fans. They are the real rock stars.

Pic via Flickr user LunchboxLP

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In a Hyper-Connected World, Trust Is More Important Than a Sale

ShoppingYears ago I spent a summer working as a vendor for a company that provided lawn care products to chains such as Lowe’s.  I was very lucky in that my trainer was a professional landscaper.  So instead of telling me how to sell the products, he understood his craft well enough to tell me how to solve problems for customers.  He would tell me which chemical was best for ridding a lawn of a certain insect, and then tell me which products (ours as well as competitors) had that chemical.

Then he taught me something even more important: He taught me that it was ok to tell customers that their best option was a product that we did not sell.  He said that these same customers would be coming back to this store, and if I told them the right product to buy to solve their problem (even if it was a competitor) that they would come back and buy more products from me.

As a vendor, my job through the week was to keep the shelves and displays stocked, then on Saturday I would be in the stores selling.   Basically I would be waiting on the aisle that had our products, helping customers that came by.  Usually, another vendor from our main competitor would be there.  Typically, when a customer would walk up to him the customer would tell them what type of bugs were in their lawn and the vendor would say ‘Well we have a product to get rid of them, here you go!’  When a customer would come up to me, instead I was taught to ask them more about their lawn so I could diagnose their problem.  Then I would educate them on the chemicals they needed and the products that had these chemicals.  And sometimes I convinced them to buy a competitor’s product, but better than that I gave them the product to solve their problem.  I was selling solutions to problems while the other guy was selling his products.  One day a customer came down our isle and the other vendor pounced “Can I help you?”, ‘Nope!”, replied the customer, “I want to talk to him!” and he pointed at me.  He then came over with his wife and explained to her that he had come in last week looking for a product (a competitor’s) and that I had convinced him to buy the product that worked.  He said he had come back cause he wanted to get rid of another type of insect, and this time my company did make the best product for that.

He came back because even though I hadn’t made the first sale, with that first sale I won his trust.  Which is far more important than winning the sale.  Trust creates more positive WOM than pushing a product that doesn’t solve the customers problem, just to make a sale.

You earn a customers’ trust by showing them that you care about them as people, not as a potential transaction.  When you solve a customers’ problem, you win their trust.  When you win their trust, you will have them as a customer for as long as you have their trust.  The huge additional benefit is that trust transfers.  If you win the trust of Betty, she will then go tell her friend Sarah about your brand.  Sarah doesn’t know or trust your brand, but she knows and trusts her friend Betty.  So when Betty suggests to Sarah that she should buy your brand, she buys your brand.  Trust transfers and spreads in a hyper-connected world like the one we live in.

What’s more important today: Making a sale, or winning your customer’s trust?

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Great Marketing Is About Understanding People, Not Tools

About five years ago I talked to a District Attorney who spent a lot of time talking to high school students about the dangers of drug usage. It was a passion of his and it allowed him to gain a great understanding of how teenagers communicated with each other online.  He told me something (again, this was in 2011 or 2012) that surprised me.  He said “The kids I talk to have left Facebook and they’ve moved to Snapchat.” Now fast forward 5 years and it seems like within the last 6 months every marketer on the planet has suddenly ‘discovered’ Snapchat.  It’s the hot shiny social media tool of the moment, even though it’s been around for years.  The next Instagram, maybe even the next Facebook depending on who you talk to.

But let’s go back to that revelation from 5 years ago that ‘the kids have left Facebook’.  Why?  What caused these teenagers to shift their behavior away from Facebook and move to Snapchat?

In short, it’s because their parents were getting on Facebook. If you want to push teenagers and millenials off a social media site, then add either their parents, or marketers on the site.  And what was happening 5 years ago?

Marketers everywhere were telling us that we had to be on Facebook.  Now fast forward 5 years, and what are marketers telling us today?  That we have to be on Snapchat.

Marketers have never understood that it’s not about understanding the social media tools, it’s about understanding the people using the tools. The only way to understand the people using a tool is to be a part of the community of people that use that tool.  You have to interact with them directly to understand their motivation for being there.

Marketers typically don’t want to ‘waste their time’ with that, they just want to sell.

Surfing

You can only sell to someone that is ready to buy.  Seems like common sense, but too many companies market their products to potential customers that have no idea how those products fit into their lives.  It would be like marketing a surfboard to someone that has never surfed.

If a potential customer has no interest in a surfboard, then you don’t market the product (surfboard), you market how the product fits into the customer’s life (surfing).  Once you’ve sold the customer on surfing, then they are ready to buy a surfboard.

At that point, it makes sense to shift to product-specific marketing that focuses on the surfboard.  But if I have never surfed and have no idea why I would ever want to, selling me on why I need to buy your surfboard is a complete waste of time and money for you.

When you’re crafting your content strategy focus on these key points:

1 – It’s more important to understand your customer than it is social media tools. You don’t need to understand Snapchat, you need to understand IF and WHY your customers would use these tools.  That gives you insights into how you can use the same tools in a way that creates value for them, instead of distraction and irritation.

2 – If your goal is to leverage social media to build awareness for your business, then you want to create content focused on how your product and services connect with your customer.  Create content focused on surfing, not the surfboard.  Create content focused on safe driving, not your auto insurance policy.  Creating content focused on the connections between the customer and your products helps get their attention.

3 – If you know your customer is ready to buy your product, then you can create product-specific content, because that’s what they want and need at that point.  But if they aren’t ready to buy, then sell how you product fits into their lives, sell the product itself when they are ready to buy.

Sell me first on how your product makes my life better, then I’m ready to buy, and you can sell me your product.

Pic via Flickr user Kevin Cole