Is your marketing strategy focused mostly on remarkable word of mouth marketing? It definitely should be. It is the best marketing technique in my mind, hands down.
The key to its success is the way to get people to talk about you and start the buzz. These are called word of mouth triggers, and word of mouth marketing examples will be the focus of this article.
The first thing you need to know about word of mouth marketing is this: generating consumers to talk about your business isn’t as random as you think. There’s a science to creating a marketing buzz, and it’s something you can learn to do.
Related: 12 Lessons from Ben and Jerry’s Marketing Strategies
Remember, the main goal of your business is not just to create customers. It is to create customers who then will also create customers (that is, customer advocates). This is the perfect marketing solution for 99 % of all businesses and is why we believe word of mouth marketing is your most important marketing campaign tool.
Word of mouth marketing takes consumers by surprise, makes an indelible impression, and pops up where and when people least expect it. It often has a large targeted audience and often can be accomplished at a reduced cost.
By being a little more clever and unpredictable, you challenge consumers who appreciate a little fun in their products.
Let’s examine some excellent ways others have created a marketing buzz. Your company can easily copy many of these.
Remarkable Word of Mouth Marketing … create surprise
Surely you have seen the tear-jerker commercials for abused or abandoned puppies or kittens. Not something you’ll often share with friends, is it?
North Carolina’s Wake County SPCA tried a very different approach to this problem. They made a lip-synching music video to ABBA’s song “Take a Chance on Me,” with the entire shelter staff and most of the adoptable animals.
A success? It was watched on YouTube over 3.4 million times the last time we looked. Just because others do the standard tear-jerking videos doesn’t mean they are popular. Surprise your audience with original things that are fun and approachable like this SPCA did. It may even surprise you.
Fleur, a florist shop in Chicago, puts a bucket full of bright balloons by the door of their shop both inside and out, with a handwritten sign that says: “Take a balloon.”
That’s all. No logos, no catch. It is just a small action to make people smile. Inside the store, it makes a pretty display, and outside the store, people are likely to ask where you got the balloon.
That’s a simple, fun way to get a conversation started without a marketing message. A bucket full of balloons is a bucket full of word of mouth memories waiting to happen. It doesn’t have to be branded or a part of a larger campaign — in fact, the simpler you make it, the better.
Remarkable Word of Mouth Marketing … Zillow
The family in this ad is looking for a new home using the real estate company Zillow. It eventually can find exactly what they are looking for. What the mother and children don’t expect is what is waiting for them on moving day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3bZz_JHyyA
Some of the best emotional stories effectively use the element of surprise like Zillow has done here.
Weird experiences
At Catbird Creamery in Maine, when you order a conventional flavor, they’ll insist that you sample something a little more adventurous. And even if you’re going to order vanilla anyway, they want you to at least try the strawberry balsamic or green tea ginger.
Catbird knows that anyone can make good vanilla, but what makes them stand out is helping their customers see all of the other fantastic flavors they also make.
They’re giving their customers an experience to talk about. Even if the customer doesn’t order the hot pepper flavor they just sampled, they will likely tellothers they tried it.
Little actions to surprise and delight your customers can easily be created all the time. Follow Headsets.com example and treat feedback like a well-oiled machine, carefully gathering the information and doing something about it every time.
Headsets.com sells headsets and phone accessories, but they are most likely remembered for adding Tootsie Rolls to every order they ship. It’s a great word of mouth tactic, and they like feedback.
They use it to do something even more special. When customers thank their operator for the Tootsie Rolls received in order and mentioned their favorite flavor, you can guess that information is noted for the next time.
Are you mysterious? Do you think you can be? We looked at how people delight in the puzzle-solving aspect of pattern recognition. Now, let’s go a bit deeper and explore what drives this pattern-seeking behavior: curiosity.
Great storytellers know how to turn an ordinary event—say, a trip to the grocer—into a suspenseful one by withholding information. In new relationships, flirtation often involves some element of playful teasing, whether through conversation or more sensual revelations.
And newsrooms have made a science out of crafting irresistible headlines: “Your PC might be infected!” or “Are you prepared for the tax law changes?”
We are captivated by unanswered questions. So try and put this mystery to good use.
The bottom line
The next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. If it was easy to see coming, everybody would be doing it already and the market impact would be minimal. So you can never create something truly new based on what you already know. The only way to find it is to start looking.
Not all who wander are lost. The trick is to wander with a purpose.
Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer engagement from our library:
Given the wealth of information available online, the need to learn the Pepsi relationship building is becoming ever more important. Why? Because today’s consumers are more informed than you can imagine.
This has resulted in a drastic shift in consumer power and has altered the selling process by placing a greater emphasis on both customer relationships and customer experience.
Most businesses do not have a clear understanding of what relationship building is and how to successfully put it into practice. Pepsi is not one of them. Let’s debunk one misconception right from the start:
Relationship building isn’t the opposite of traditional marketing, and it doesn’t exclude older channels (like email marketing and content marketing) in favor of solely using social media.
To clarify this important practice, today we’ll look at the most important recommendations in relationship building campaigns.
We’ll even give you the inside scoop from notable entrepreneurs and Pepsi on how relationships helped build the audiences that built their businesses.
Let’s get started.
What is the business relationship building?
With a focus on loyalty, retention and long-term relationships, the aptly named practice of “relationship marketing” is designed around developing strong connections with customers by directly providing them with information that is tailored to their needs, wants and interests.
As opposed to transactional marketing’s focus on direct sales, relationship marketing emphasizes increased word-of-mouth activity, repeat business and a willingness on the customer’s part to provide information to the organization.
And unlike “interruption” marketing, this process is started willingly via an opt-in by the customer.
But is this focus on creating a Pepsi relationship with customers worthwhile? As we previously discussed, the shocking truth of brand loyalty is that most customers do not want to be engaged with a business or brand; their priority is shared
The secret here is that the relationship marketing process has nothing to do with engagement and everything to do with being practically useful for both your business and customers.
According to a management study by Robin Buchanan and Crawford Gillies, the increased profitability associated with relationship building is the result of several factors:
Less “dating around”
Satisfied, long-term customers in your marketing funnel are statistically less likely to switch.
As a bonus, they tend to be less price-sensitive; experts say that customers who feel taken care of are less concerned about what they are paying.
Pepsi relationship building … avoid the cost of acquisition
The famous Bain & Company analysis that it is 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one is something that keeps marketers up at night.
Longstanding customers are much more likely to purchase your ancillary products and embrace your new ventures (think of those folks you know who buy each new Apple gadget).
Pepsi relationship building builds customer trust
Most businesses today consider themselves to be trustworthy, and by yesterday’s standards, they are.
They post their prices and rates honestly, they try their best to maintain the quality and reliability of their service, they protect the security of their customers’ funds, and they do what they promise.
But even though they don’t lie or steal, the fact is that the vast majority of financial services companies still generate substantial profits by fooling customers, or by capitalizing on their mistakes, or by taking advantage of them when they simply aren’t paying attention.
That approach in today’s environment is a direct route to customer attrition. Retention and growth now entail acting in customers’ best interest.
Acting in the customer’s interest requires companies to balance the benefit of an immediate profit against the cost of earning respect and confidence of a customer—an asset that is, in the long term, far more valuable.
Financial services companies must become more trustable because as the rising power of customers exposes untrustable behavior the question of a company’s trustability will go to the heart of its value proposition.
Trustability will become an essential element of any bank’s customer service in the future in much the same way that having a website has become an essential element of customer service today.
For survival
To survive in this new, hyper-transparent world in which extreme trust is a prerequisite for business success, Pepsi has shown must pursue these basic courses of action:
Having empathy for customers, and treating each one the way you would want to be treated if you were that customer, is the single most important element of trustability. Pepsi has this down pat.
To be trustable, you have to adopt a customer-centric philosophy, and then re-engineer your value proposition and customer experience from the standpoint of the customer.
This will have consequences for your operating policies, of course, but the eventual implications for your firm’s culture will be even more profound.
If your call center reps, sales, marketing, don’t believe you are a trustable company, then your customers won’t either.
Rethinking control
In the transparent future, Pepsi won’t be able to retain control over communications about their brand. The only thing you will control is how well your business processes protect your customers’ interests.
To make your command-and-control, hierarchical firm more trustable, you will have to give more authority to individual employees, empowering them to “sense and respond” in real time to customer issues.
And don’t be too afraid to allow your workers to show your company’s human side, including its vulnerability.
A little vulnerability will encourage customers to be empathetic to you, and empathy generates trust.
Many people think good listening means always letting someone finish every thought and nodding along.
Instead, active listening requires that you ask questions while you are listening. Sometimes this means interrupting – but this isn’t something to be afraid of.
Often the interruptions will lead to tangents that create more intersections for both of the people in a conversation.
Build community
One of the secrets of the e-social revolution is that people have an irresistible urge to share with others. They make their opinions known, they contribute ideas, they collaborate on things such as Wikipedia and open-source software.
Pepsi even finds that customers provide the best kind of customer service for other customers.
If you want to become more trustable, you have to tap this sharing instinct, first by sharing your honest counsel with customers.
Talk to them not just regarding how they can get more value from their financial products, but how they can better manage their resources, and how they can save and spend responsibly.
Pepsi facilitates customers collaborating with other customers, through online community platforms, social sharing sites, product reviews, and problem-solving customer forums. Wow, does that work well.
Pepsi relationship building shows competence
To be trustable not only must you intend to act in the customer’s best interest, but you also have to have the competence to act on that intention.
On a basic level, this means paying close attention to the quality of your product and service.
But as important, you should upgrade your data, analytics, and systems. Quantifying the financial benefits of long-term customer trust and confidence requires good analytics.
Customer lifetime values are not easy to compute, but in the financial services industry, more than in most other categories, the statistical data is available.
There is no shortage of analytical tools to make these calculations.
If you want your company to become more trustable, you’ll have to begin paying attention to the data and pushing the envelope on analysis.
Stimulate stories
Some questions lead to answers, and then there are questions that lead to stories. Here’s one way you might start a story seeking question, “What inspired you to …”
When people share stories, they go beyond feeling like they are being interrogated. They open up, and they connect.
The more stories you can hear, the more connection you’ll feel to everyone you speak to.
Make observations and draw assumptions
Consider starting questions with this phrase: “I noticed that you …” What happens when you are forced to think about this is that you start to consider what you know about someone before you meet them based on where you are, what they look like or what you know about them already.
One of the best conversations I had at an event recently was because I noticed that someone was using two different phones at the same time.
Asking why led to an amazing conversation about time optimization and technology.
The bottom line
For customers who do want a relationship with your brand, their concerns are primarily about how useful you prove yourself to be (outside of your product).
In a world of extreme trust, you always have to take a step back from whatever business policy you’re considering, whatever new idea you’re thinking about, and ask yourself:
“If this became public, would it be an embarrassment to us? Would we be proud of it?
Would any of our customers hold it against us?”
Because in the highly interactive, extremely transparent future everything you do, every policy you have, will become public.
Hidden fees won’t remain hidden, and bad intentions will be quickly exposed. If you want your financial services company to be genuinely trustable, then you have to have clean hands, not just a good alibi.
Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer engagement from our library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
