Did you know your customers can be your most influential marketing resource? Before the rise of social media, relying on your customers to spread your business via word of mouth was unpredictable and almost impossible to track its effectiveness. Nowadays, with the growth of online marketing and social media use, using your customers to do your marketing for your business is much easier and super effective!
Why wouldn’t you use the voice of the people who love your brand & services/products the most to do your marketing for you? If you’re not leveraging your customers enough to do this, read on because we have six ways for you to get your customers to do your marketing for you.
Make Your Brand Authentic
Building your brand and making it authentic is the first step to getting your customers to work with you. Help your customers see what makes you different from your competitors. What’s your point of difference and why should your customers want to do business with you rather than your competition? Subtly highlight your points of difference in your marketing activities and slowly your customers will gravitate towards your brand more than the others.
Prioritising authenticity is absolutely crucial. 9 in 10 millennials say they prefer ‘real and organic’ over ‘perfect and packaged’. Your customers are asking for you to be more real, more you and to drop the perfection. This year, your marketing needs to be more focussed at authenticity; drop the generic post captions, speak from the heart, tell your customers what matters to you, share your behind the scenes, show them that you are a real human being and enjoy being more natural through your marketing.
With a strong and authentic brand, you can begin leveraging your customers and using them as part of your marketing strategy. Don’t be afraid to be you, the right people will love it!
Referral Programs
Do you have loyal customers who rave about your business to you? Why not encourage them to rave about your business to the rest of the world too? and while you’re at it – reward them for it, so they keep doing it!
Referral programs can be as simple or complex as you make them. Have you ever used Airbnb? They have a great referral program! You can share the app with your friends and family and when one of them makes an Airbnb booking using your referral code, you get a credit to your account to use the next time you make a booking. What an awesome way for a business to encourage its customers to share their business with their friends and family!
There are lots of different ways you can implement a referral program into your business. You could shout them a coffee at your local cafe, you could buy them a massage, send them a card with cinema tickets, they could get a discount on their next order, you can offer them a free additional service, or… simply calling the customer and thanking them for the referral can mean just as much too!
Get Influencers/Brand Representatives on Board
Speaking of referral systems, brand influencers or representatives are the new age referral program! Influencers have a large fan base of people who are genuinely interested in what they say and trust their opinion. When an influencer shares your product or service, their followers will want it too, so they can be more aligned with the lifestyle of their much loved and trusted influencer.
Rather than you trying to sell your product or service to a new group of customers who don’t know you, why not leave it up to the people who already have an audience of trusting and loyal followers?
It’s important to ensure you always work with influencers who align with your business. This is why using someone who has already been a customer in the past works so well; they know your business, they use your product/service and their followers will most likely be a similar demographic to them which means you are targeting the right audience!
Encourage Testimonials/Reviews
Encouraging your customers and clients to share feedback and review your business is a great way to build brand trust online. Think about it, how often do you read reviews on a business before engaging with them?
Having a positive set of reviews on your business helps to build a trustworthy image and credibility in your industry. People trust consumers! In fact: 70% of people say they rely on consumer opinions to make a purchase decision. What does this mean?
Potential customers are far more influenced by real people than they are by your advertisements or branded messages.
Not only can these reviews make a huge impact on your online marketing and brand growth, but you can also use them as testimonials on your website to demonstrate trustworthiness and credibility.
User-Generated Content
Are you struggling to get enough content to use on your social media or want to change things up a bit? User-generated content is where it’s at!
Find a creative way to encourage your customers to share content on social media related to your business, whether it’s ‘checking in’ at your location or sharing a photo of your product and tagging your business in it. Not only will this provide you with content to use in the future, but it’s also getting your customers to do your social media marketing for you, reaching an audience you wouldn’t normally be able to reach yourself.
You may need to create some sort of incentive to encourage them to get involved, but after time your audience will follow along and want to be involved in the ‘hype’ of being associated with your brand and its products/services.
A great example of this is with one of our clients, Aussie Kids at Work. Every year they run an annual competition to win a free outfit at the end of the year. To enter, customers have to share a photo of their kids in their new workwear uniform on Facebook and tag Aussie Kids at Work in it! Not only do we get heaps of authentic photos of real Aussie kids in their workwear to use on social media, but every time someone shares a photo and tags the business, all their friends and family are being exposed to the brand as well!
Focus on Return Sales
Rather than spending all your marketing activities and budget on finding new customers, why not focus on the people who have already invested in your business? The sale certainly doesn’t end when you close the deal! You have a 65% chance of converting a repeat customer as opposed to a 13% chance of converting a new customer. Who wouldn’t want to focus on repeat sales when the conversion is so much easier?
Return customers are already loyal to your brand, you don’t have to prove to them how awesome your product/service is – they know! You’ve just got to remind them you’re there. Not only will you find converting sales much easier, but you’ll also build a loyal following like no other which in turn will support all the other points we have discussed above.
So! What are you waiting for? Start implementing these tools in your regular marketing activities and watch your customers market your business for you!
We understand it can be overwhelming knowing how to implement new marketing strategies and as a small business owner, you simply don’t have any space left on your to-do list to do anything else. If you would like to chat with a professional who can get the job done for you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team and we can look at finding a marketing package that suits your business and budget.