If you are a SME entrepreneur, the concept of customer evangelists is surely tantalizing. Voluntary brand advocates who believe in your company and feel good while passionately recommending your products to their acquaintances? They make a great marketing force that might just output in efficiency any official advertising and PR campaigns for your business.
But wait, an article that shows exactly "How to" create brand evangelists? This seems too good to be true. And guess what - it is. This article gathers wisdom from reputed marketers but no way it can show you any mantras that instantly lead you right to success.
Creating a network of loyal customers (who do more than buying and speak out for your brand) is indeed a matter of empathy company-clients. Well, a strategic empathy I may admit. At any stage, customers are unlikely to think the same about your company as you do, so consider the steps below to get off on the right foot with your "evangelization" tactic.
Real life examples: advertising agency that now has ceased all its self-advertising on the outdoor materials they produce, because the customers Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba from MarketingProfs pinpointed six main to-do's for instilling customer loyalty:
- Continuously gather customer feedback
- Make it a point to share knowledge freely
- Expertly build word-of-mouth networks
- Encourage communities of customers to meet
- Devise specialized, smaller offerings
- Focus on making the world, or the industry, better.
Starting with the last point from this list, let's have a look on how you can plan the actual strategy.
Step 1: Do well by doing good.
This may be the only secret to success we may consider, and it's not even a secret. Customers who have a sense of belonging to a positive cause are inspired to involve emotionally and become evangelists. Define a noble cause your company can engage into and promote it, and who knows? Maybe you can even make the world a better place.
Step 2: Present your product wisely.
Prior to any promotion, you have to create a quality product or service that stands out from the crowd, so it would naturally be further recommended. As for publicity, gone are the days when you just had to release a product and highlight its features then wait for customers to swarm from nowhere. Now you have to carefully craft the image of your product through inbound marketing.
Give trials for services that require license purchase, put up specialized offerings and disseminate neutral knowledge resources such as whitepapers and e-books. What would be the optimum amount of everything? Bite size chunks. This way, customers will digest your message quickly and get a picture of your company's usefulness for their own existence.
Step 3: Get feedback and implement customer suggestions into the workflow.
Listen to customers as to your own family. Give customers the opportunity to involve, to express their views and rate your company's actions (make it a star rating if you wish, it's very handy). Also, pay attention to the topics your customer advisory board brings.
Run expanded customer satisfactory surveys that will guide users towards the topics that need answers, while keeping their creativity unrestrained. Don't be offended by negative feedback, but instead admit your own faults and rectify them ASAP. Satisfaction you will experience when you tell that person that the bug she reported is fixed can only equal that of the customer herself. Needless to mention, you will get instant credit.
Step 4: Create a strong incentive program and feed WOM networks.
This may just contradict with the classic definition of customer evangelists, which are not by any means "bought" because they spread the word out of pure belief. However, it's not a sin if you helped them a little, at least by giving public recognition for those people who prove to be engaged evangelists. Before reaching the stage where people recommend you freely, you have to offer incentives and build a "friends' friends" network. Organize whatever events suit your brand, to give that sense of closeness: collective lunches, members' competitions, parties... and so on.
Step 5: Rock on!
At each step, it's a good idea to analyze how engaged and influential your evangelists are. As your customer base begins to grow, keep it steady with PR and don't rush to advertise. Don't forget that PR creates the brand while advertising only protects it, so use ads after you have built trust and reputation. Good luck!