How to get your customers to promote you - Ask???

For all our regular readers out there, you’ll remember that last week I offered an explanation as to how viral marketing works and discussed important strategies to consider when creating a viral campaign (Read: “Can you tell me what Viral Marketing is?” for a quick update).  Continuing in the same vein, this week I’m going to chat more specifically about getting your target audience to pass along your key marketing message and having them promote your business to others.  After all, the key to a successful viral campaign is to have your audience spread the word.

 In his article “6 Non-Salesy Ways To Ask Your Customers To Promote You” Rohit Bhargava offers some insight into why customers don’t recommend businesses to their friends and then makes some suggestions on how you can remedy this.

Interestingly enough, Bhargava, proposes that reason why clients don’t recommend you to others isn’t for the reasons that we’d initially assume. It’s not that they didn’t like your store, service, or product. It’s not that they’re too busy or they don’t care.  It’s that you don’t ask them to or make it easy for them to do so.  I’m going to take this one step further and say the reason why most people don’t offer recommendations is that they don’t think to. 

Chew on this for a second:  Let’s say you went out shopping last Saturday and stumbled upon a little store tucked away on a side street somewhere. You go into this store and buy a t-shirt, it’s a lovely t-shirt, you’ve being looking for something like it for ages, it fits well, it’s fun and best of all it’s pretty inexpensive. More-over the sales lady, who for the sake of this example will be the owner, is great. She’s polite, friendly, and helpful while not being overbearing; she’s exceptional really.  All and all you could say it’s a perfect shopping experience. So you’re immediately going to go out and tell all your friends about it right? Probably not.  Life is busy, you’re busy and there are a lot of distractions out there. Maybe traffic’s bad on the way home, maybe you have to pick up your children, or dry cleaning, we all know that the list goes on and on.  And then guess what, for most people, this amazing little shop that you found in the middle of nowhere falls off your radar. Not intentionally of course, but when would you bring up this shopping experience? Probably the only time it crosses your mind is when you’re wearing your new shirt and someone pays you a compliment.  Then you stop, think and say something like “Thanks, I got it from this great little shop just down the road, you know, just off of Sifton blvd. You should check it out.” And that’s about it folks.  You probably don’t think to go into any more detail than that.   And they probably don’t visit the store. 

Now how do you think this story would change if the store owner nicely mentioned on your way out the door that it was a new business and she was really trying to build her client base.  “Would you please be able to tell all your friends about me?” hmmm….well, that’s not so easy to forget now is it?  In fact, it's probably a fairly easy strategy to implement in your own business.  All you’ve got to do is make sure you ask in the right way.

Bhargava has several suggestions on how you can do this and I’ve included a few of them:

• Let them be a fan: Offer some way for your customers, friends, family etc. to show that they support your brand.  If you’ve got design skills, creating a badge for them to put on their blog, is always a great idea (text links work too).  As an added bonus, because this badge will link back to your site, there are SEO benefits to be reaped too.  Or get customers to join your Linked-in or Facebook group, Twitter too.  Sweeten the deal by posting/tweeting out promotions that are only available through these networking sites.
• Encourage online reviews: Encourage your customers to go to prominent online sites or social networks, (if they blog that’s another fabulous channel) and ask them to discuss their shopping experiences at your store.  Because these positive opinions are public and searchable, they’re far more valuable to you than something you just post on your own site.
• Refer a friend: Find ways to get your customers materials so they can pass on information about your store to their friends.  “Tell a friend” buttons work if you’re tech savvy, as does having friends and family pass along your business cards to their personal networks. Even getting your customers to forward on newsletters if they’ve found the subject matter particularly interesting that month can be effective (Just remember to offer a link back to your site in it so that friend can easily get to it).
• Pass along an offer:  To build on the concept above, create promotional offers that your customers can share (encourage them to do this) with their friends and families.  This is a great enticement for them to forward your details to others and get people to visit your store.

So what’s the moral of this little story?
There are lots of ways to encourage people to promote your store, get creative.  I’ve listed off a few ideas, but don’t let these limit you. There are plenty out there that I haven’t touched on.  The point here is to get as many people as possible telling others about you and your business.  Do what it takes and get them what they need to do this. 

Finally and most importantly, all these suggestions are great, but remember the key to everything is one magic little word (and no it’s not “please” for once): ASK.  You can set up all the Facebook groups and Twitter pages that you want, spend days coming up with clever promotional offers, but if you don’t ask people to join and encourage them to get their friends to do so, you’ll only have done half the job.  And you won’t reap any of the rewards.  Always remember to ask.

References:

“6 Non-Salesy Ways To Ask Your Customers To Promote You”, Rohit Bhargava