What if...
What would you do to survive, let alone thrive as a business? I would argue that we are there today.
You might still be using some or all of the tactics listed above to reach your audience. But if you’re like most companies today, you are finding their effectiveness may be so low (possibly nonexistent) that it’s almost like you’re not doing any marketing. One thing I hear a lot today is, “Our marketing just isn’t working very well any longer and very few, if anyone, are responding to our offers and solicitations.”
This is happening more and more and by all indications, this trend will continue getting worse going forward. The noise level of marketing is becoming deafening.
Is this happening to you? What can you do about it? What can you change or how can you turn this upside down so that your marketing efforts are paying off and you are getting your audience to respond to you and you can get more customers? There is an answer…one that has been around as long as time. Most businesses are just not using it to its full potential…nor are they leveraging the most powerful weapon they have in the war on marketing.
WORD-OF-MOUTH Marketing
I know, right now you’re probably saying to yourself, “I already know about the power of word-of-mouth but it’s hard to get more word-of-mouth.” And you would be right…it isn’t easy to just decide you need more word-of-mouth and it appears. But one thing is for certain, the investment is worth it and it pays dividends for a very long time…it is a “long-tail” solution. And if you want more word-of-mouth in the future, you need to START NOW!
There are prescriptive ways you can start building more word-of-mouth and referrals over time…it just requires focus and persistence.
There are two CRITICAL INGREDIENTS to building more Word-of-Mouth
Once an organization commits to creating a business strategy around getting more word-of-mouth, they can literally stop worrying about the more traditional marketing approach. These aren’t “silver bullets” or “magic pills” you can just take today and life is better tomorrow, sorry, word-of-mouth doesn’t work that way. But like in everything we do, small improvements made consistently can lead to big changes.
There are several steps you can take to start getting more word-of-mouth…and you can start doing something in these areas TODAY! There are two critical cornerstones for creating massive and consistent word-of-mouth, regardless of your industry or competitive position.
Upgrade your Customer Experience
First, and without hesitation, you should UPGRADE YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. This is the number one thing people talk about when it comes to a business…not their products and services, but HOW THEY WERE TREATED and HOW THE COMPANY MADE THEM FEEL.
Visualize this…Disneyland empty, after hours and closed. What does it look like? Pretty mediocre…I’ve seen it in this state before. A bunch of average rides, average places to eat, small areas to walk, not many places to sit, and certainly not new and shiny. When you look at it in this light, you wonder why anyone would ever go there. These are the “products and services” of Disneyland if you were looking at it like a normal business. There is nothing impressive about it and nothing is certainly differentiating or worthy of any word-of-mouth.
Now inject what their business is really about, the GUEST EXPERIENCE, and you have a completely different business. The place comes alive and it becomes the “happiest place on earth.” It is vibrant and exciting and full of fun and energy. You don’t mind waiting an hour in line for a mediocre ride or foo because you are having an incredible time and everyone is happy. You see, the “product and service” of Disneyland isn’t the rides, food, and shops, it is their guest (customer) experience.
And since this is their “differentiator,” they get massive word-of-mouth. Everyone who has ever been there has a story to tell about their experience at Disneyland…and it’s usually awesome. This is how Disneyland markets…they get you and I to rave about them and tell all our friends that they need to go there and have their own experience at the happiest place on earth. Even though Disneyland sends out information and has a website, along with all the other things listed earlier, if they were all taken away they would still survive and people would continue to go and tell others about it. Even without any other marketing stuff, people would continue to talk about Disneyland regardless of whether or not they use any other source of marketing.
Build More TRUST
Second, and a close second to creating and incredibly awesome customer experience, is BUILDING MORE TRUST with your audience. As with the customer experience, this isn’t easy work either, but work that needs to be done if you want to get massive word-of-mouth. NO ONE TALKS ABOUT YOU IF THEY DON’T TRUST YOU…period.
There isn’t a single part of your life that exists in an awesome state without Trust. No relationship, no customer loyalty, no friendships, no partnerships, no nothing…all of these need Trust to be successful. Your business isn’t any different from any of these other relationships. To obtain more Trust and ultimately get more word-of-mouth you need to have a very specific TRUST STRATEGY.
Keep in mind, you can’t go to your employees and tell them, “OK, starting today we are going to build more trust with our audience and customers.” That will fail…and most likely make things worse. Keep in mind if you start to build more trust and not everyone is on board with how you are doing it (the processes you use), you’re going to cause your customers to think you are schizophrenic…one day you do things that they trust and the next day you don’t…this will cause confusion in the eyes of your customer.
Trust is one of those things that when you get it you are golden and when you lose it, it is incredibly hard to get it back. It takes five times the effort to get trust back than it does to keep it. This is why you need to create a “Trust Strategy” to help you steadily and consistently demonstrate to your audience you can be trusted. When this happens, it is a game changer for any business.
CUSTOMER OBSESSED companies have a distinct advantage…they get tons of word-of-mouth!
I would encourage every business leader to do some introspection and give your company a grade on these two critical elements to building more word-of-mouth. Obviously we all want to have an A+ grade, but that’s not where most organization start. Start by assessing where you are today in these areas and then make a leadership decision that you want to significantly improve them and get them to a top, differentiating level. If you do, you will see the results through more word-of-mouth and more buzz in your market.
Ask yourself a very important question, “If we didn’t have use any of the current marketing tools, would we have people spreading word-of-mouth about us and be able to survive and grow?” After you implement some of these changes necessary to deliver an incredibly awesome Customer Experience and your audience knows they can Trust you, word-of-mouth will start to go up…and go up quickly. And once word-of-mouth starts to climb, it feeds on itself and you get more and more of it every day. Word-of-mouth feeds on word-of-mouth.
Just Ask...
If you ever have any questions about this or any other aspect of what it’s like to be Customer Obsessed, just ask and I’ll be happy to answer them. Or if you want to understand it in more detail and how you could move your company to becoming more Customer Obsessed, I’d be happy to meet with you (complimentary of course) to discuss it further for your own particular situation. And if you found this helpful happened to think of someone you know who could benefit from this post, please help them out as well and share this with them.
I hope you decide to take advantage of the massive opportunity that awaits you and become Customer Obsessed so you can be known as a company that is memorable, remarkable, incredibly helpful, delivers and unbelievable Customer Experience, and garners massive amounts of Trust. That would be awesome!!
