You know your products and services rock. And, your customers absolutely love you. So, how can you put the two together to influence everyone else to check out your company? Easy! Turn your current customer base into a team of marketing mavens who sing your praises every chance they get.
How to Get Customers to Brag About You
For a moment step away from traditional advertising methods. Stop thinking about creating messages that tell potential customers how great you are how you can help them.
Instead, turn the tables. Ask your current customers to tell their friends and family how much they enjoy your products and services. How? Make your current customers feel important, appreciated and valued. In turn, they will brag about you to everyone they know on social media.
Here are a few ideas to get your customers talking:
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Email them a coupon or discount code.
During the download process, ask them to send a pre-written tweet that lets their followers know they’ve been rewarded. A message like “Company X just sent me a coupon for free ice cream. They rule! #icecreamrocks” will get your name out there.
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Offer your top buying customers the opportunity to try your newest product for free.
Send them the item and ask them to let you know what they think by posting a picture on Facebook showing them using the item. When potential customers scan your business Facebook page they’ll see everyday people showing off your great new product and get interested in seeing what the buzz is all about.
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Create a contest.
Ask bloggers in your niche to share how they use your product. For example, if you make the most amazing chocolate chips, ask foodie bloggers to come up with an original recipe featuring your chocolate chips. Post links to the blogs on your social media and have people to vote on their favorite recipe. In the long run, you will have dozens of blog posts out there for potential customers to find and read that mention (and praise!) your product.
Leverage Your Super Fans to Promote Your Business
Every business has a small but faithful crew of cheerleaders. These super fans use your product or service daily and are chatting about you on Twitter and Facebook.
Now, it’s time to harness their enthusiasm and get them to do even more for your company. Create an influencer marketing campaign with your super fans who have personal blogs. Offer to pay the bloggers to write a product or service review post, or mention your product in one of their upcoming posts. In turn, your business name will be in front of an audience who already follows and admires that blogger, and likely has similar interests — including your product.
Creating Win-Win Partnerships
Finally, it’s possible to team up with other businesses to really get customers bragging about what you do. Pick and choose your companions carefully, though. You want to create a relationship that’s beneficial to you both.
Let’s say you create all natural, organic dog shampoo. Your product is really unique and in demand by pet owners who love to spoil their pets. Consider teaming up with your local big box pet store to see if they will offer your product on their shelves (and in their ads). After all, they don’t have an organic dog shampoo option, and their green-minded customers would like to see your product at the store they already shop at, rather than trying to order the shampoo online or make their way to a small boutique. And the benefit to the store? They get happy customers and possibly a few add-on sales of their own each time the customer comes in for more shampoo.
You can tell shoppers your products and services are number one. But, until they see, hear and read that people just like themselves love your business, they just see your messages as advertisements. People trust recommendations from a friend. Make your current customers a tribe of chatty online friends!
Angela is a contributor to the Connectivity blog. She also writes about content marketing and working online at Web Writing Advice. Angela was ranked in the Yahoo! Top 1000 Writers from 2009-2013.
