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Your Guide to Leveraging User-Generated Tourism Content to Drive Higher Engagement and Referrals

user-generated tourism content

User-generated content is vital to the tourism industry. In fact, 83% of travelers make booking decisions based in part on reviews from travelers like themselves.

But there’s another reason why user-generated tourism content is so important, and it’s unique to the tourism and travel industries.

Have you ever heard the saying “Money can’t buy you happiness?” Science has proven this statement is correct, with a pretty big caveat: Money CAN buy you happiness IF that money is spent on EXPERIENCES. If money is spent on products, the satisfaction you have with the purchase typically is at its peak at the moment of purchase, and it continues to fall over the lifetime of the product as its usefulness fades.

Yet when money is spent on experiences, such as when traveling, the opposite occurs. Because those experiences become memories and those memories are shared with the people who traveled with you, and with others. This is why user-generated tourism content is so important; it’s a wonderful selling tool for your destination or attraction.

Let’s explore proven ways travel brands can effectively source, showcase, and maximize the impact of user-generated tourism content:

Strategically Sourcing Relevant UGC

The first step is developing ongoing streams of authentically created, relevant user-generated tourism content you can pull from. Some key sourcing tactics include:

  • Actively encourage visitors to share photos and experiences during their trip through prompts, signage, and incentives. This captures UGC directly. Along with this, regularly survey your visitors about their activities at your destination in order to uncover where visitors are creating content organically. For instance, if your visitors are telling you that they frequently stop to take a picture at a particular point, add a prompt or sign to encourage this behavior.
  • Monitor traveler review sites, Instagram hashtags, Facebook groups, etc. to identify photos, videos, testimonials to potentially feature. This allows you find UGC directly, but it can also give you ideas about the type of content that travelers are creating. Also, it can help you identify potential travel ambassadors that your attraction or destination could work with.
  • Run UGC contests and campaigns where travelers submit entries for prizes. This incentivizes volume and quality. The tourism case study More Fun in the Phillipines is a classic example of utilizing UGC from travelers, as well as locals.
  • Contact recent visitors who created stellar content for permission to feature their posts. Seek varied perspectives. Never assume that because a traveler posts content that you can grab it and use it as you wish.  You can’t, but this will likely lead to huge online backlash against your attraction or destination if you use someone’s content without permission. Always contact visitors about any user-generated tourism content, and you may actually begin a working relationship with that traveler!
  • Source user-generated tourism content tied to your unique selling points – ex. family-focused for resorts, honeymooners for tropical locales, adventure for outdoor spots. This helps you stand out from the pack. You can also brand your destination to particular groups. Such as how Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism is promoting Alabama’s white sand beaches to females for a ‘girl’s getaway’. I think this is a great example of tailoring your destination to a specific audience. (Disc – I have spoken at a Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism conference on tourism marketing before).

The wider the content sourcing net, the more diverse and engaging user-generated tourism content you’ll have to leverage across all your channels.

Showcase UGC Prominently Across Touchpoints

Now that you have a library of user-generated tourism content to choose from, amplify it where travelers are engaging and converting:

  • Create website galleries and testimonial sections to build credibility and expectations during research. Let your best salespeople, your happy visitors, sell for you.
  • Feature photos and stories from recent visitors in your email newsletter. This is a great way to effectively promote your destination and create more content as well.
  • Paid social posts should heavily utilize UGC rather than purely polished ads. Real photos from real people are shown to drive higher levels of engagement.
  • Retargeting campaigns reminding potential customers of real traveler perspectives. Consider promoting the testimonials or other UGC in your website galleries as mentioned earlier. This makes a past visitor to your site aware of new content, coming from visitors instead of the destination itself.
  • Local display ads featuring UGC paired with special offers target nearby travelers. This can be particularly effective if paired with UGC or a testimonial from a local traveler who would be known in that area. This can create additional word of mouth for their inclusion in the ad.

The more platforms where you feature user-generated tourism content, the greater the exposure and impact.

Optimize UGC for Maximum Discoverability

Making your user-generated tourism content more discoverable in organic search and on social media enables broader reach and engagement.

  • Add UGC galleries and sections optimized with relevant titles, URLs, metadata, alt text. Pro tip: Publish blog posts that focus on these relevant keywords and phrases, married to the corresponding UGC that has the same focus.
  • Encourage travelers to use your unique hashtags when sharing on Instagram, Facebook, etc. to associate the content with your destination or attraction. Sharing content that includes your hashtags also encourages other travelers and visitors to use your hashtag organically with their content.
  • Syndicate UGC on travel info sites optimizing with keywords travelers are searching for.
  • Ensure experiential UGC is easily shareable to encourage word-of-mouth.
  • Leverage geotags and location categories so UGC appears in relevant results.

Precision optimization makes your user-generated tourism content work harder as travelers often search destinations, attractions, experiences, and more. Taking into account visitor behavior and tailoring your UGC for the traveler’s needs is simply smart strategy.

Motivate Referrals and Loyalty with UGC

The benefits of user-generated tourism content extend beyond the initial prospect. UGC also fuels referrals from happy past visitors and nurtures their loyalty.

Some ways to maximize lifetime value include:

  • Contacting recent visitors to thank them for UGC contributions and encourage sharing with networks. Reward the behavior you want to encourage. Simply saying ‘thank you’ goes a long way.
  • Featuring UGC from loyalty program members to make them feel recognized. Additionally, if a particular ambassador or member of your loyalty program excels in content creation, acknowledge them for their content. But also, point out why their content is exceptional. This makes the member feel appreciated, but it also communicates to the other members how to create better content. When the Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association sends out a ‘welcome pack’ for its ambassadors, it includes instructions on how to better create content and post on social media.
  • Sharing visitor content contributions when announcing new offerings, events, etc. as social proof. This can serve to remind your followers and subscribers about your destination or attraction, but it also attaches content from your best salespeople to your new offerings.
  • Reward repeat UGC contributions with loyalty perks, profile badges, and recognition. Also, vet these contributors as candidates for your ongoing brand ambassador or advocacy program.
  • Repurpose visitor content across multiple channels and touchpoints to reinforce memory of positive experiences. Visual content such as photos or videos can perform better on social media sites like Instagram and Twitter, while a long-form story or testimonial is perfect for a blog post or an issue of your email newsletter.

The more you spotlight satisfied travelers in ongoing communications and marketing, the deeper their engagement becomes while spreading positive word-of-mouth among current and potential visitors.

UGC is the Authentic Storytelling Today’s Traveler Craves

At the end of the day, user-generated tourism content is your destination’s best marketing. Leveraging real stories, stunning visuals, and genuine advocacy directly from past visitors forges an emotional bond and credibility that your brand alone cannot manufacture. Smart tourism marketers understand this, and are willing to cede some communication control to their visitors, in order to realize more revenue in return.

With abundant sources and creative presentation formats, user-generated tourism content provides a foundational ingredient to engage and convert audiences across multiple online touchpoints covering the entire travel journey. Are you leveraging UGC to inspire travelers and build visitor loyalty? The rewards make the strategy well worth the effort.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Threads’ Userbase Collapses, Data Marketers Use to Personalize Ads, Meta’s Ad Rev Up While X Offers Discounts

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you had a wonderful weekend and are ready for an even better week! You can just feel social media going through a midlife crisis right now, trying to reinvent itself, not sure what it wants to be. And it seems like most of us who have been in this space for years are looking around wondering what happened to all these sites I used to love? It seems the space is ripe for disruption, but I’m not seeing any serious contenders at the moment.  Let’s hope that changes and social media gets back to being social and fun, soon!

Meanwhile, here’s a few news and business stories that have caught my eye:

 

I have a confession to make: I’m not on Threads and have no intention of joining. Now, Meta is announcing that most of you that flocked over on launch, have already bailed.  BTW I love Zuckerberg’s reaction, yeah, how do we maybe Threads STICKIER???  This reminds me of a brilliant post written eons (in social media terms) ago by Tara Hunt. If I remember correctly, she was in a website design meeting where similar questions where being asked about how to make the site ‘stickier’ and keep users on.  She blurted out ‘Where is the ability to throw sheep in this plan?’ Which was an allusion to the feature Facebook had years ago that would let you ‘throw a sheep’ at someone.  It’s a reference to those playful little features that help us build connections and community, which is how you build and sustain growth on a site or social platform, much moreso than ‘stickiness’.

 

Interesting stats on the data that marketers use to personalize user experiences. As I was looking at this list, I’m thinking about what data I would want marketers to use, versus what they prioritize. For instance, my transaction history and any preferences I set sound good to me. But if they get into areas like my social media history or website activity, then I am less receptive. I’d be curious to see how others feel about this.  Hmmm…this may warrant a standalone post at some point.

 

So Meta’s ad revenues get a nice bump, while Twitter/X is having to slash prices to get advertisers back on the platform.  Could these two stories be related? Quite possibly, as I am sure some of this is simply a case of ad dollars being transferred from Twitter to Facebook. While I do believe Elon will eventually get Twitter/X on track, the rest of the year could continue to be very bumpy.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute, look for a new post on tourism marketing tomorrow, and I think one on artificial intelligence on Thurs. I’ve been experimenting with a new tool the last few weeks that’s been a godsend for my writing productivity. I can’t wait to share with you what I’ve learned.

Till then, have an amazing week!

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5 Loyalty Program Hurdles That Retail CMOs Must Overcome

retail loyalty program

Loyalty programs have become ubiquitous in retail, with brands large and small launching initiatives to incentivize repeat purchases and gather customer data. But even as adoption grows, retail CMOs grapple with lingering concerns around cost, complexity, sustainability, and more that come with implementing a productive retail loyalty program.

Let’s take a closer look at the Top 5 concerns that CMOs have about launching a retail loyalty program, and find a solution for each:

1 – Concern Over High Costs

Rolling out a loyalty program requires significant upfront investment in the underlying technology infrastructure and integration needed to run the program, track activity digitally, and surface data insights. Ongoing costs also pile up for funding rewards, customer service, marketing and other program elements. Especially given slim margins in retail, proving a positive ROI can be difficult. Still, the average ROI for loyalty programs is approximately 10%, and roughly 80% of companies with a loyalty program are planning to up their investment in that program over the next 3 years.

Strategies to Address Cost Concerns:

  • Start small and scale program complexity over time rather than overinvesting initially before proving value. The reality is that whenever any new marketing initiative is launched, mistakes will be made at first. And mistakes cost money. Launching your retail loyalty program with a more limited scope allows you to lower the initial investment, while more easily proving ROI. This will make it easier to justify a greater investment to scale out the program as it grows. One company that utilized this strategy in launching and growing its retail loyalty program is Walgreens. The retailer rolled out its loyalty program in select markets first, then scaled program aspects to the national level, after worth had been proven.
  • Offer tiered benefits aligned to reasonable repeat purchase levels rather than overextending perks. Remember to balance rewarding customers for purchase behavior they are already engaging in with trying to encourage new purchase levels. If customers can see the benefits from additional purchases as being helpful, they will pursue them.
  • Leverage lower cost digital rewards like free shipping, exclusive content, early access along with discounts. For example, Publix’s Club Publix loyalty program gives members a sneak peek on the weekly ad. Every Tuesday, members can access the new circular that will publish the following day. This not only gives a tangible benefit to members at very little cost to Publix, but it also makes members feel appreciated to get early access to upcoming sales.
  • Closely track attributable lift in purchase frequency, order values, and margin impact from the program. Keeping a closer eye on what’s working (and what isn’t) for members allows you to be more engaged and flexible in pursuing incremental improvements to program efficiency.

2 – Anxiety Around Execution Complexity

Well-planned loyalty programs require tight integration of technology systems across channels, extensive employee training, setting program policies and architecture, significant customer education, and complex point tracking and redemption procedures. That’s a mouthful of a sentence, and it can easily become a headache for the retail CMO that’s trying to take a loyalty program from the drawing board to implementation.

Here’s Some Ideas For Simplifying Rollout:

  • Conduct pilot programs with small customer segments to refine operational processes before full launch. Recall the example of Walgreens above, it selected individual markets to test run its loyalty program before going national. This process helps give your retail brand tighter control over the process at launch, and lets you make ‘smaller mistakes’, before a more grand rollout.
  • Invest in user-friendly program management software and automated tracking to streamline administration. Employee training will be key and help create a smoother launch.
  • Create detailed protocols for customer service teams to easily explain program policies and procedures. Integration is key, when a customer contacts your support team, they need to understand all aspects of the loyalty program so they can give the same level of support as with all other areas of your business. A consistent experience across all brand touchpoints is vital to customer satisfaction, and creating customer loyalty.
  • Minimize complicated tier structures and redemption options that create friction. Prioritize easy enrollment.  Target has simplified its loyalty program down to just Target Circle, which allows for digital registration. This greatly reduces signup friction and gets members onboarded and in the program quicker.

3 – Fear of Diminishing Engagement Over Time

Even successful loyalty launches see attrition as customers initially excited about perks and benefits lose interest when the novelty wears off. This is because poorly designed loyalty programs build loyalty to a particular offer or sale, not to the brand. You build loyalty AFTER the purchase, not before.

Strategies to Keep Members Loyal to Your Loyalty Program:

  • Continuously add new benefits and offers rather than remaining static after launch. If the majority of the perks of your loyalty program are tied to short-term sales, members will lose interest once those sales expire. Find ways to tap into existing behavior and encourage more participation.
  • Provide surprise bonuses and value-adds at random to reengage lapsed users.
  • Remember that your loyalty program will work best when it is rewarding existing behavior, versus attempting to incentivize new behavior. If the member views the perks of your loyalty program as a reward for activities they are already taking (such as purchases), this encourages them to continue to engage in those activities.
  • Mine your data and determine where you are losing members. Find the churn points and work to eliminate them.

4 – Concerns Around Data Privacy and Security

Collecting customer transaction data, contact info, and purchase patterns raises obvious data privacy considerations. Ensuring data practices are transparent, securing sensitive information adequately, and avoiding misuse are top-of-mind for your program’s members, as they should be for you.

Best Practices for Data Protection:

  • Provide easily accessible and understandable privacy policy explaining data practices. Clearly explain what data is collected, and how it will be used. Also, make sure your loyalty program’s data collection policy is easily accessible to all members.
  • Allow customers control over data sharing preferences and opt-out abilities. This will help alleviate concerns over your data collection policy, and help establish trust.
  • Limit internal data access to essential personnel, with air tightsecurity and usage protocols. Safeway ensures that only key decision makers have access to member data.
  • Any member data that is stored in conjunction with your retail loyalty program should be secure and encrypted.

5 – Questioning Long-Term Program Sustainability

If your program’s benefits focus heavily on discounts or giveaways, margins can easily erode. An additional problem will be that members will become more loyal to the giveaways or discounts than the brand itself. And if stringent requirements make points redemption difficult, perceived value diminishes. Achieving optimal behaviors to drive growth long-term is an elusive balancing act.

Steps for Building a Lasting Retail Loyalty Program:

  • Structure rewards aimed at driving incremental visits and purchase rather than discounting. Remember, we want to reward members for behavior they are already engaging in, instead of trying to incentivizing new behavior. Remember earlier I mentioned how Club Publix members get a sneak peek at that week’s sales. This is a simple way to give a tangible benefit to members that ties into existing behavior without trying to force the member to do something new in order to get a ‘treat’.
  • Measure cost per point redeemed and adjust accrual rates and caps to maintain profitability.
  • Monitor program analytics closely to identify perks and behaviors with highest ROI. Likewise, identify the activities that aren’t producing, these could actually be contributing to member churn.
  • Continually experiment with reward types and messaging to refine most value-driving features.
  • Ask members for feedback! Regularly survey members and find out what features they like and dislike, as well as any suggestions they have for additional perks or benefits. When you can add a member-suggested feature, make sure to communicate this to members. Letting members know you are listening and implementing suggestions as you can is a great way to build trust and…loyalty!

 

One Final Note About Building a Successful Retail Loyalty Program

Whenever I first begin working with a client on structuring a retail loyalty program, I remind the client that there must be a clear benefit to both the retailer AND the member for participating. As long as the member can always easily understand how the program benefits them, they will stay a member. So have that in the back of your mind at every stage of planning, development and execution; How will this change benefit the member?

As long as you can consistently ask and answer that question, the potential for success for your retail loyalty program will always be higher.

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7 Ways Tech Brands Can Build Customer Loyalty Through Digital Experiences

customer loyalty technology industry

Building customer loyalty in the technology industry can be quite the challenge. The industry marketplace is crowded and this creates a very competitive environment for customer attention, much less loyalty. Unfortunately, the days of simply building a better mousetrap and reaping the financial rewards are long gone. Over two decades ago, Apple carved a niche in the music industry for itself with the iPod. Despite being a technically inferior product to competitors, Apple better understood WHY customers would want its product, and that made all the difference.

The reality is that today, you need a superior product AND a focus on designing superior customer experiences. Couple a great product with a great customer experience, and you can create genuine brand loyalty and turn current customers into passionate fans that love your brand. Let’s look at 7 ways that your technology company can tap into digital experiences to increase customer retention, loyalty and advocacy:

Leverage Social Media to Its Fullest Potential

Social media optimization is an easy starting point for a better digital experience. Still, you don’t want to simply create a presence on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and call it a day.  Remember that technology customers tend to be more analytical. They are more interested in diving deeper into topics and 101 level content that can be found on some social media sites may not be their cup of tea.  For instance, if you want to stay up to date on the latest technology news, you are more likely to hang out on Reddit and LinkedIn than you are on Facebook and Instagram. No matter what industry you are in, always keep in mind what type of content your customers are looking for, and where they would expect to find it. Ditch the boilerplate when it comes to planning your social media strategy!

Here’s some tips to optimizing your social media efforts:

  • Responding promptly to comments, queries, and feedback shows you are listening. Don’t let mentions go unanswered. Warning: Make SURE the information you give is correct, and if you make a mistake, own it and apologize. Technology customers will often know your product as well as you do. So if you give incorrect information, they will call you out on it. However, if you can quickly correct any misinformation and act on the customer’s feedback, you will often win their approval and advocacy as a result. I’ve worked with technology companies like Dell that realized the benefits in real-time of connecting with customers and utilizing instant feedback from customers and acting on it. It can create big loyalty and advocacy wins for your brand.
  • Proactively highlighting and thanking followers who post about your brand or share content. I have a saying I tell all my clients: Reward the behavior you want to encourage. There is no easier way to encourage customers to create MORE positive content about your company than thanking them. Whenever you see any customer on any social media channel saying ANYTHING positive about your company, thank them immediately. You would be amazed at how many companies ignore customers who positively promote them. It’s the lowest hanging fruit in social media. Learn to say ‘Thank you!’ early and often.
  • Featuring user-generated content like reviews, unboxings, or creations showcasing your products. User content builds authenticity, and it is viewed as being more credible than content that comes from the brand itself.
  • BONUS TIP: Don’t be afraid to promote content from your customers who are promoting your brand. If a customer has written a blog post that includes an endorsement for your company, then promote it on your social channels! Ford used one of my tweets waaaay back in 2010 as a Promoted Tweet! The automaker was using content from fans and enthusiasts, as a way to draw attention to others who were talking favorably about the brand. As I said, it’s all about rewarding the behavior you want to encourage.

The more you reward and spotlight social media advocacy, the more it will grow.

Optimize User Experiences Across the Entire Journey

Every touchpoint that customers have with your technology shapes their loyalty. Ensuring seamless, frictionless experiences is crucial.

This means obsessively optimizing key user interactions like:

  • Onboarding – Making the setup, installation, and initial usage intuitive and simple. Remember that the first experience that customers have with your technology product or service will greatly impact their perception of it.
  • Education – Providing easy to follow instructions, tips, and how-to’s guide users in becoming experts. Additionally, giving customers easy access to help can not only divert customer support inquiries, it can help boost customer loyalty and advocacy!
  • Support – Fast, effective technical troubleshooting and customer service keeps users happy when issues arise. Make sure your CS department has easy access to Subject Matter Experts who can provide more technical support if necessary.
  • Upgrades – Migrations, new releases, and added features should build on the familiar and avoid disruption.  As long as the upgrade feels like an improvement, it will be welcome and lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction. But if every upgrade feels like ‘starting over’, it will lead to a frustrating experience for the customer, and could even prompt them to explore competitor’s offerings.

Mastering end-to-end user experience removes adoption barriers and frustration while exceeding expectations. Delighted users then pay it forward with referrals.  Remember, your best salespeople are your current, happy customers!

 

Build an Engaged User Community

What’s the difference between an audience and a community?  With an audience, all the interaction is one way, from the stage toward the seats.  With a community the interaction is happening from person to person. Creating a community around your products and services is one of the best ways that a technology company can build loyalty and advocacy from customers.

Consider digital community building strategies like:

  • Hosting user forums and groups to share tips, product hacks, feedback, and more. Let users help each other. BONUS: Over time, elevate the most proficient contributors to your group to the role of Moderator. This encourages more engagement from the group, and it signals to your user group that its users will share ownership of the group along with your company.
  • Promote user-generated content and reviews. Even if it promotes the creator as much as it does your brand.  Also, don’t be afraid to highlight 4-star reviews. Most customers actually view 4-star reviews as being more credible than 5-star reviews. If a product or service has all 5-star reviews, it looks suspicious. But if the reviews are excellent overall, a few 4-star or even 3-star reviews sprinkled in can actually make all the reviews as a group seem more credible.
  • Holding live or virtual events and meetups to cultivate relationships between fellow users and the brand. These can be intimate gatherers with a few customers, or massive user conferences like Adobe Summit. Remember, any time you can get your passionate customers and users together in the same place and interacting with each other, it’s good for your brand loyalty.
  • Private community groups on Facebook or Slack for power users. VIP access builds exclusivity, and is viewed as a perk or reward for your most passionate users.

Bringing users/customers together is a wonderful way to build affinity and loyalty toward your brand. Look for ways to connect your most passionate customers to each other, it will pay for itself every time.

Develop a Customer-Focused Content Strategy

Can I let you in on a secret? (Leans in) Content that’s useful to your customers makes it easier for them to trust you.  If you constantly create content that’s relevant to your customers, then they will actively seek out your content and it will reflect positively on your brand. It will also make your customers more receptive to all your brand’s communications.

Valuable types of loyalty-focused content include:

  • “Insider tips” or “pro tips” articles with advice for power users. This is content that’s targeted at your current customers, who have a higher degree of awareness and knowledge of your products and services.
  • Step-by-step how-to tutorials for maximizing capabilities. Become users’ go-to resource. Let’s say you buy a graphic design program for your mac. After a few weeks of using it, you feel like you have the basic functions and usage down, but you want to learn more. So you will start to seek our deeper dives and more detailed how-tos. Why not give your customers and users the content they will be looking for?  If you don’t give them this content, they will find it from another source, or another customer. And that customer might suggest using a competitor’s design program instead. Something to think about.
  • Sharing inspiring user stories and creations featured in the community. Applaud their innovation. Remember earlier how I talked about rewarding the behavior you want to encourage?  This is a perfect example of doing so. When your users create amazing content or art or whatever by using your products or services, put the spotlight on them! Make them feel like rock stars, because they are. All this will do is encourage and inspire more users to create more content with your technology.
  • Insights from product designers, founders or engineers. Pull back the curtain, make your SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) accessible to your community of users.
  • Sneak peeks and early access to new features or product roadmaps. This will be viewed as a perk by your users and they will greatly appreciate your brand giving them access that the ‘general public’ doesn’t have.

Content acts as fuel for loyalty when it highlights common user pain points and fulfills unmet informational needs.

 

Launch a Formal Loyalty or Brand Ambassador Program

Once you have identified your most passionate users and customers, it may be time to create a formal program to manage your ongoing relationship. This can be a loyalty program, or something more in-depth such as a brand ambassador program. In either event, you want to create an ongoing relationship with these customers where you can more easily access feedback from them as well as stay connected. Being in closer contact allows your brand to leverage these special customers to more easily communication key messages to the larger marketplace, as well as collect valuable feedback from your customer and userbase.

Tactics such as:

  • A tiered-points system with points/credits earned for actions like reviews, referrals, UGC. More engagement means more perks.
  • Early access to new products and sales. This could also include special access to your brand’s SMEs, designers, engineers, etc.
  • Swag, discount and free services. Also, create free swag just for your members. It will make them feel special to get a piece of clothing or device that the ‘general public’ doesn’t have, but it also creates word of mouth. People will ask where they got that special item, which then gives the user a chance to brag on themselves for being a member of your program and having ‘special access’!
  • Free products to review or prime positioning in marketing content. One year I worked with a tech company to facilitate an on-site customer event at its world headquarters. As part of the event, a camera crew was on hand to record the sessions and discussions. The following year we had the group back again, and I was again on hand to moderate the event. Part of the event included a sneak peek at a new commercial that the brand would be releasing that included some of the video that had been shot at the previous year’s event. While showing the commercial, one of the attendees suddenly burst into tears, and exclaimed ‘I just saw myself in the video!’ The brand had included a short clip of her speaking at the previous year’s event. Needless to say, it made a VERY positive impression on her!

Creating a well-structured brand ambassador program can greatly amplify your ability to engage your most passionate customers and boost customer loyalty. BONUS: Here’s how a brand ambassador program can work for a technology company.

 

Get Creative with Contests, Games, and Activities

Gamification, when done right, can tap into users’ competitive spirits and drive more active engagement with the brand.

Some examples can include:

  • Photo contests for fan art, or video contests for best product demo. Let users showcase their skills, let the larger community vote on the winners. Promote winners on the brand’s main marketing and social media channels, and use entries as repurposed content throughout the year.
  • Leaderboards and badges for top forum contributors. This is a great way to encourage more community involvement, plus badges and ‘digital flair’ serve to drive online word of mouth. For instance, give top forum contributors a badge they can display on their blog.
  • Referral and feedback quests with prizes or charity contributions. Increase advocacy behaviors.
  • Easter eggs hidden in products, packaging or content. Add an element of surprise and delight.
  • AR experiences along with virtual quests. These help add entertainment and functionality to your technology, along with giving unique digital experiences.

With a little creativity and strategic planning, your technology brand can develop endless quests and challenges that not only entertain users but get them more invested in your brand.  And a deeper investment leads to higher levels of loyalty.

 

Pull Data Insights to Refine Your Loyalty Strategy

The beauty of digital channels is the ability to closely track activity and glean actionable data insights that fuel constant optimization.

Analyze key metrics like:

  • User retention rates (churn rate) over time and after milestone actions. Keeping a close eye on churn, and what is prompting it, let’s you identify bottlenecks in the brand loyalty journey.
  • Web traffic source patterns showing top referral channels. This data gives you insights into where your most loyal customers and users are spending their time. This also helps you refine where your brand spends ITS time, so you can better connect with your customers where they are.
  • Behaviors that correlate to the most loyal vocal advocates. By constantly tracking and engaging with your brand advocates, you can build a persona and understanding of who they are, and the behaviors they engage in.
  • Touchpoints users frequently interact with. By mapping all touchpoints along the customer journey, you can identity where conversions are happening, and where churn is as well.
  • How advocacy amplifies at different customer spend levels.

Crunching user data identifies what is moving the needle on loyalty so you can double down on what works and change course when needed.

 

The Never-Ending Quest to Earn Customers for Life

True brand loyalty and advocacy cannot be bought. Consistently exceeding expectations and nurturing community are the digital building blocks for creating passionate fans that love your technology brand. While challenging in competitive, noisy tech environments, putting the customer first both on and offline establishes genuine connections.

With people increasingly turning to peers for product recommendations, earning customers for life through loyalty and advocacy is the most powerful marketing strategy you can pursue. Once again, your best salespeople are your current, happy customers. The strategies and tips listed in this article will give you the framework to begin cultivating an army of customers who are also advocates for your brand.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Becomes X, ChatGPT Usage Falls, Marketers Say Relax About AI

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you are having a great and productive week! There is SO much happening in the news right now, in politics, in business, in world news. Here, we will focus on the business stories and let the talking heads argue over the other stuff! Let’s dive in!

 

Elon is making moves to rebrand Twitter into X. I’ve been writing about Elon’s plan to create the X ‘everything’ app for a while now, but it looks like he’s moving forward with his plans. It’s honestly a bizarre move that seemingly throws a ton of branding around Twitter down the toilet. The speculation around Elon’s plans for X mostly centered around would he change Twitter into X and build it out from there, or create more apps with additional functionality, and fold them all together as a suite with Twitter that collectively would become X. I assumed he would move toward the latter, with Twitter remaining a standalone app.  Maybe that’s not what he’s planning.

As I was telling an industry friend earlier, this is the most chaotic I can remember the social media space being in at least 15 years. It’s a lot to digest, with Twitter, Threads, everything. I do wonder how many people are getting tired of trying to keep up, and are simply opting out of social media in general.

 

Did you know this? Traffic to ChatGPT and Bard actually FELL in June. There’s been much speculation as to why, the main reason seems to be a perceived decline in the quality of responses given. There’s also been speculation that ChatGPT in particular has been slammed with server usage issues, and is having to scale back as a result, which has lead to a decline in quality.

Personally, I am hopeful this decline is simply because people are figuring out that getting these AI tools to give you useful information truly does require you to spend a good bit of time with them. You have to invest in having deeper ‘conversations’ with these tools to get meaningful outputs.

 

And marketers are seeing the same things I am, AI will assist with most tasks, but won’t supplant humans. It feels like the initial hysteria over AI taking over the world is dying down a bit as people become more versed in using the tools. As I’ve written here before, AI is capable of being a powerful tool if you use it correctly.  I’m using it in my work as basically a conversational search engine. It’s making it much easier to get more relevant information, however I still have to fact-check info I am given. I’m currently experimenting with ChatGPT, Bard and Claude.  Of the three, Claude is my favorite for now, but I want to start playing with some a few new tools before I pick my fav.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute, I hope you have a wonderfully productive week!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Threads’ Rocky Launch, More Twitter Woes, Facebook App Store Soon?

Happy Monday, y’all! We are now into July, which for the South means Summer is halfway over! Thankfully we have been spared the brunt of the heat and humidity so far this year, but I suspect it’s coming by the end of this month and into August.  Ugh….till then, let’s try to cool off with some hot tech news. And oh my is the social media space having some growing pains right now…

 

Threads officially launched a few days ago and you are likely either thrilled with this news, or pretty indifferent. My take on Threads launching is pretty much the same as when Bluesky launched:  I didn’t trust the guy in charge when he ran his previous site, so why would I trust him with a new one?

It seems my fears over Threads were founded, as many users began noticing that they were being censored as soon as the joined Threads. Some were being flagged before they even posted!

Additionally, Elon is making a move to block Threads, and has already sent Meta a C&D letter.  Which honestly is just free publicity for Threads at this point.

So we will see where this slapfight between Elon and Zuck goes next. I’m on the edge of my seat and I’m sure you are as well.

 

Speaking of Twitter, the site continues to have many issues. Recently, it was revealed that there were still shadowbanning codes found within the sites programming even though Elon had claimed to remove those. Apparently even Elon was being censored at times!  Additionally, Elon recently started ‘rate limiting’ users from viewing a certain number of tweets.  The reasoning given was to address bot activity on the platform.  I’m honestly not sure if this is still being practiced as I’m not spending enough time on Twitter these days to hit the limit (I’m neck deep in website maintenance this month).

 

Finally, Meta is making moves to launch an App Store for its platform. These seems like a move that should have been made a long time ago, but will no doubt be a money-maker for Zuck if he decides to move forward with it.

 

So that’s all I have for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute.  As I eluded to earlier, I am in the middle of my annual website maintenance, so I’m spending WAY too much time with Google Search Console and SEMRush these days, but the results show it’s paying off.  I will probably write a post with some takeaways to help the rest of you, in a few weeks.

Till then, thank you as always for reading, and have a wonderful week!

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Jesus’ Model For Creating Advocates Via Word of Mouth

Hello! In January, I made a commitment to start reading the Bible daily. It’s been a wonderful experience, and on Saturdays I like to publish a post sharing what I am learning from reading scripture. Hopefully these posts will resonate with you. If not, don’t worry, I will return to discussing business, marketing and web3 on Monday!  Thanks for reading! You can view all of my posts on the teachings of the Bible here.

The last week I have been binge-watching a spectacular series on the Bible called The Chosen. Hopefully you have heard of it and possibly even watched it.  If you have not, you are in for a treat, you can watch it at their site. Thanks to generous donations from supporters, you can watch The Chosen for free. I downloaded Angel Studios’ app and watch the episodes with it.  You don’t even have to sign up, just watch.  When you watch an episode, it will tell you who donated and made it possible for you to watch the episode for free, and gives you an option to write them a thank you note, which I think is a very nice touch.

I am a few episodes into the second season right now, and I am loving it. Watching The Chosen is actually helping me better understand what I’ve already read in the Bible. For instance, there is the story of Jesus attending a wedding and turning water into wine. I read this multiple times in the Bible, but seeing the story retold in The Chosen helped me better understand why this miracle was so important, based on the role that wine played at a jewish wedding in this day.

As you know, I love the study of how brands can better connect with their customers to form advocates for their message and brand. It’s main reason why I wrote Think Like a Rock Star, to give companies a framework for building better connections with their most passionate customers. This group is often overlooked, and if a company is smart enough to reach out to their loyal customers, those customers will happily sing their praises and market for them.

As I’ve been reading the Bible, and watching The Chosen, I have been struck by the people that Jesus chose to be the advocates for His message. Jesus repeatedly stresses that He did not come to teach to the righteous and the healthy, but that He came for the sinners and the sick. In one episode of The Chosen, Jesus and his disciples are planning a trip to a nearby city. One of the disciples says that the quickest route to the city is to take a particular road, and the other disciples agree.

But Jesus says that instead, they will take another path, which will make the trip longer, and will bring them dangerously close to a violent city. The disciples immediately protest, fearing for the safety of their Teacher. Jesus explains that He wants to take that path because He needs to have a meeting with a very important person along the way. The disciples are puzzled, but they go along with their Teacher’s plan, and set out on their journey.

At one point in their journey, they come to a well near a city.  Jesus tells His disciples to go to the nearby city and buy supplies for them, and leave Him there. The disciples again protest, but Jesus says He will be fine. The disciples leave, and eventually, a surly woman comes to the well carrying jars to collect water from the well.

Jesus asks her for a drink, and she asks why a Jew would dare talk to her, and asks if He knows who she is and what she has done. Jesus tells her He does, that He knows her sins, and then He tells her everything she has done that she is ashamed of. Jesus then tells her that her well gives you water but you will still be thirsty, and then Jesus tells her that He can give water to her that when she drinks it, she will never thirst again.

At this point, the woman realizes she is talking to the Messiah, and becomes overjoyed. She tells Jesus “I am going to tell everyone about you!” and begins to run toward the nearby city. Jesus replies “I am counting on it!”

Here is a blog post from Angel Studios about this scene and the relevant scripture it comes from. When I saw this scene, it helps crystallize for me why Jesus said He came for the sick and the sinners. What Jesus was saying was, He came to give hope to the hopeless.

Think about this from the perspective of wanting to create advocates for your message.  If you give hope to someone who feels hopeless, how would they react? They would obviously be overjoyed, and want to share what you had done for them, with the world. They would be far more appreciative of the gift you had given them, and as a result they would be far more committed to telling others about you.

This is why Jesus picked the sick and sinners to meet. To talk to, to heal.

To save. Because He wants us to stand up, and go running into the world so that we can share the Good News with everyone.

Here is the trailer for The Chosen. If you haven’t watched the series yet, you are in for quite a treat!

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AI-Powered Customer Support Solutions: Enhancing Customer Experience and Efficiency for Fortune 500 Companies

ai-powered customer support

As today’s business landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, providing exceptional customer support is vital for Fortune 500 companies. Customers want more personalized support, faster. To address the needs of customers, forward-thinking CMOs are turning to AI-powered customer support solutions. Leveraging the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), these innovative solutions revolutionize customer interactions, enabling personalized experiences, seamless self-service, and streamlined operations. Let’s explore some of the benefits of AI-powered customer support, and look at some real-world examples of how companies are utilizing these emerging technologies to drive real business growth.

The Benefits of AI-Powered Customer Support

In an increasingly digital world, AI-powered customer support solutions offer many compelling benefits for Fortune 500 companies. First, AI chatbots and virtual assistants enable immediate and round-the-clock support, addressing customer queries and concerns in real-time. This availability boosts customer satisfaction and improves response times. While there can be some concerns over the quality of the support delivered via AI, these concerns should further abate over time as the technology matures and improves.

Secondly, AI enhances personalization by leveraging customer data and historical interactions. AI algorithms analyze vast amounts of information to deliver tailored recommendations and customized support, creating a more personalized experience for customers. This is an area where AI provides a level of support that humans simply cannot replicate. And as noted earlier, AI’s ability to process vast amounts of customer data and extrapolate relevant outcomes should only improve as the technology continues to mature.

Additionally, AI-powered customer support solutions drive efficiency by automating routine tasks and inquiries. Chatbots can handle repetitive questions, provide self-service options, and escalate complex issues to human agents when necessary. This automation optimizes resource allocation, reduces costs, and allows human agents to focus on more complex and value-added tasks. Also, this allows a company’s SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to spend more time addressing support issues that require advanced expertise.

Examples of How Companies Are Currently Leveraging AI to Improve Customer Support

Let’s look at some quick examples of companies that are seeing real results from integrating AI into existing customer support processes:

  • Fintech startup Tomorrow reduced AHT (Average Handling Time) by 50%, dropping AHT from around 20 minutes down to 10 minutes.
  • According to Satu Karaksela, Service Manager (Digital Customer Service) at Finnair, the airliner realized a 30% improvement in response times for CS cases after adding AI to the mix.
  • Payment and transactions company Efecty realized a 48% reduction in calls to customer support in the first year it began utilizing a chatbot in its CS mix. You can take the internal cost your company assigns to each CS call and get a rough estimate of the potential savings that could be seen from a similar decrease at your own company.
  • Launched in 2018, Bank of America’s chatbot Erica has now helped over 32 million BoA customers with over one billion interactions.

The common theme here is utilizing AI to assist with the more basic customer support requests.  Think of AI as being able to handle the 101-level inquiries, and then handing off to a human agent if more detailed and specific assistance is needed. While this may reduce the need for less skilled customer support agents, it should increase the demand for more skilled SMEs.

 

Transforming Customer Experiences

AI-powered customer support solutions have the potential to transform customer experiences for Fortune 500 companies. This can be done by harnessing the power of AI, organizations can offer intuitive and seamless interactions across multiple channels, ensuring consistent support regardless of the customer touchpoint. As research shows, a consistent experience throughout the buying and/or support process is vital to achieving superior CX.

The use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms enables chatbots to understand and respond to customer inquiries in a human-like manner. These AI-powered systems continuously learn from interactions, improving their responses over time and providing a more conversational and engaging customer experience. It’s worth noting that as investment continues to flow into AI and related technologies, the automated experience that AI can provide will only improve. Keep this in mind when considering or analyzing the current landscape and offerings.

Furthermore, AI-driven personalization allows companies to anticipate customer needs and preferences. By analyzing past behaviors, purchase history, and demographic data, AI-powered solutions can deliver relevant product recommendations, promotions, and content tailored to individual customers, fostering a sense of connection and loyalty. Again, relevance will be key to driving customer satisfaction, and AI’s ability to give relevant interactions will only improve over time.

Streamlining Operations and Enhancing Efficiency

CMOs of Fortune 500 companies understand the importance of efficient operations and cost optimization. AI-powered customer support solutions offer significant opportunities in these areas. By automating processes and handling a high volume of inquiries, AI chatbots can significantly reduce response times, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance operational efficiency. The four case studies linked to earlier in the post were provided to illustrate this very point.

Moreover, AI-driven analytics provide valuable insights into customer behavior, sentiment, and trends. CMOs can leverage this data to identify pain points, understand customer preferences, and make data-driven decisions to refine products, services, and marketing strategies. This data-driven approach enables organizations to stay agile and responsive in meeting customer demands.

Integration and Implementation Considerations

While the benefits of AI-powered customer support solutions are clear, implementing such solutions requires careful consideration. CMOs should evaluate their organization’s specific needs, customer base, and existing infrastructure to determine the most suitable AI solution. Collaboration between marketing, IT, and customer support teams is essential for seamless integration and deployment. Integration is the key to driving success as well as initial adoption. AI, if used correctly, can integrate into existing business functions and enhance current customer support processes. Companies like yours can more easily justify an investment in AI technology if it can improve existing processes versus an investment that requires costly new processes be created to support its function.

Conclusion

In the competitive landscape of Fortune 500 companies, delivering exceptional customer support is a strategic imperative. AI-powered customer support solutions empower CMOs to quickly deliver assistance at scale to customers. This helps companies realize improved satisfaction scores, customer loyalty and reduced support costs.

Leveraging AI to enhance your company’s existing customer support efforts can not only save you money, it can grow your business as well.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: LinkedIn Testing AI, Mercedes Adds AI, China’s ChatGLM has Passed ChatGPT?

Happy Monday, y’all!  Hope you are having a wonderful Summer, which has finally arrived here in Alabama with temps in the mid to high 90s this week.  Ugh.  Hope it’s cooler where you are, here’s 3 stories I found that I think you will enjoy, as we are going all AI this week!

 

This kinda feels like a ‘toothpaste coming out of the tube and it’s not going back in’ moment.  LinkedIn is now testing allowing members to use AI to write posts for them.  Users will give LinkedIn 30 words concerning what they want the post to be about, then LinkedIn will write a post for them, based on the 30 word provided.  The user can then edit or publish the post as is. So you can expect similar functionality to be standard on all social platforms soon, which means the content glut is about to get astronomically worse.

 

If you own a Mercedes that has the MBUX system, you may see you have a new perk: ChatGPT integration. 900,000 Mercedes with the MBUX system have ChatGPT integration as of June 16th. The idea is to make information that the current voice command system relays more conversational, and robust.  The auto industry could benefit greatly from AI integration into voice command systems, I expect to see a huge push into this space in the coming 12-24 months.

 

So apparently, China’s version of ChatGPT, ChatGLM, is claiming that it has now passed ChatGPT in terms of performance. However it seems the benchmarks aren’t quite the same and neither is the data set. Still, this shows how rapidly the AI space is continuing to evolve and grow.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! Please enjoy the pool and/or beach for me this week!

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Being Ready to Receive the Gift of Wisdom

Hello! In January of this year, I made a commitment to begin reading the Bible daily. It’s been a wonderful experience, and every Saturday here, I will share a blog post about what I am learning.  If you would like to read more of my posts on the Bible, please check out the Bible Study category of posts. If this type of content isn’t what you are looking for, no worries, I will be back to talking about marketing and business news and topics throughout the week!

Before I dive into today’s topic, I wanted to clarify something. These posts I am writing on what I am learning from reading the Bible are my thoughts and opinions. Just because I think a certain way does NOT mean I am 100% right, in fact I’m sure my thoughts will no doubt change and grow the more I learn. Think of what I write as more of a ‘conversation starter’ or ‘here’s what I think’ versus ‘here’s the way it is’. I want these posts to be accessible to people who are curious about the Bible, and wanting to learn more. Because I am too!

Now, here’s what I want to talk about today. As I’ve been reading the Bible, one of the themes that continually comes up is the concept of God granting wisdom, or even depriving people of knowledge. For example, when the angels visited Lot in Sodom, the townsfolk came to his house and demanded to see them. The angels temporarily made the townspeople blind so they could not find the door to enter the house. In Exodus, God granted wisdom to Bezalel so that he would understand how to build the tabernacle to God’s exact specifications. In the story of the Tower of Babel, God made the people to speak in different languages so they couldn’t communicate as easily.

When Jesus taught, he often used parables. At one point, His disciplines ask Him why He speaks in parables, which leads to this fascinating exchange in Matthew 13:10-17:

10 The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”

11 He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 12 Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 13 This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’[a]

16 But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. 17 For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.

“Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.”  What a powerful verse! The entire passage above seems to suggest that if we are faithful to God and open our hearts to Him, He will reward us with wisdom and knowledge. And if we take that gift and apply it to our lives in a way that brings Him glory, we will then be given additional gifts. “Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance.”

Every day before I start to read the Bible, I say a short prayer asking God to please help me understand His word, and also the message He has for ME in His word. What I’m finding is that dots are connecting as I read the Scripture in a way that suggests to me that it’s more than me simply ‘figuring stuff out’, it’s divine intervention. As if God is saying ‘you are now ready to learn this…’

It almost makes me wonder if this would apply to every area of my life? What if God is waiting to give me all the wisdom I need to reach my full potential as a person, as a Christian, as a brother, as a son? He’s simply waiting on me to show Him that I am ready to receive the gifts He wants to give me? Almost like a father who can’t wait to buy a car for his son and share in the joy of working on it together with his son. But he knows he can’t do that until the son shows him that he’s learned how to drive the car properly, and is ready to be a responsible car owner.

What if God has endless gifts that He is ready to give us, as soon as we show Him that we are ready to receive them? That’s the thought I am carrying as I read scripture, I ask for the wisdom to understand what I am reading, and also that I will know how to apply what I learn in the way that God desires.  So that I can continue to grow, and be worthy of additional gifts.