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Transform Happy Customers Into Brand Ambassadors

Step six, transform happy customers into brand ambassadors. Transform happy customers into brand ambassadors. I gave this example earlier when I talked about my buddy who was in the personal training business, how he had people go up there and post. "I'm starting my transformation today. "This is where we're gonna do it." That was an aha moment. He kinda got a twofer. It was an aha moment because, he was involving the community, but he was also baking in advocacy, 'cause when those people said I'm starting this thing, I'm really, really excited about it, they had they're friends going, oh, what are you doing? Can I hear about that? He was baking advocacy into his process. Brilliant! Really, really, really smart. Another buddy of mine was the senior VP of Median Acquisitions over at Beachbody. You know, he did P90X and Insanity. Those kind of things. For them it was, give us a before and after video. Send us a customer story. Tell us how before you were out of shape and now you're in re...

ally great shape, and for giving us that, we will give you, wait for it, a T-shirt. Y'all, T-shirts are magical. I can't explain it, but if you've ever been to a game, like a basketball game or anything like that, and you've watched a grown man sling an elbow at a little kid so that he can catch like a two XL T-shirt with the Ford logo on it kind of thing. People lose their mind for T-shirts, and they found that they could never beat the T-shirt. Giving people a T-shirt. In exchange for getting a customer story, they got people to walk around with an ad on them. That's pretty smart. In exchange for advocacy, we're gonna give you the opportunity to advocate for us more often. At Digital Marketer, we do it with stickers. Anytime somebody joins Lab, here's your Secret Sticker. I have no idea why we call it the Secret Sticker. It's not a secret at all, it's our logo, but you know, you call it that, you print up a bunch of them and there it is, but people put it on things. They put it on stuff. I was an only child, so I didn't necessarily have to deal with this, but if you were a younger sibling, you know, you'd sit down for dessert and you got your food there and you pick up your brownie and lick it so your older brother or sister wouldn't take it, right? Like, claimed it! Right? That's what we're talking about here. How do we get them to lick it? How do we get them to lick the brand? How do we get them to claim it as their own? That's what we're talking about with advocacy. I can tell you, customer stories are absolutely positively worth the investment. If you will invest, if you've got somebody who has a phenomenal experience, and you will invest in a high quality, high production customer story, that will pay off again and again and again. I mentioned Lori Taylor who owns Trudog. This is a customer story that we shot of hers. I'll just show you the first 30 seconds or so, but watch for the fact that we don't really talk about our product at all. It's all about the customer as the hero. So, we're going to come back to that. (inspirational orchestral music) This is my favorite place on earth. This is my happy place, being at the barn, being anywhere where there's a group of animals. So, I have a company that's focused on dogs, and I love that, because I can easily tap into the hearts and minds of people with dogs. Like most entrepreneurs, I had a dream, and it was to turn my passion into a business, and that passion is Trudog. Notice that she's not in the office. It's really growing fast! We're almost to ten million dollars, and in the next 12 months, we're going to be at 20 million dollars, and it's an insane amount of growth, and the only way to really make that work in a productive manner is to have a really, really strong team. As the CEO, it's my job-- So now I'll stop, now that we've got to the part where they're actually talking about us, 'cause I know you don't care, and guess what? Neither do, I know you guys don't care to hear us talk about us and I know our people don't either, but what they say is, I want what she has. I wanna be the CEO who can be out on my horse farm while somebody else, I got a team back there doing it, right? So, advocates are great. These customer stories are great because I can say all day long until I'm blue in the face, look, if you sign up for digital market or HQ, if you're a business owner, if you're a founder, if you're a marketing manager, let us train your team for you, so you can go do whatever you wanna do and your team will focus on growth. I can say that. No one will hear it. No one will care. But if I tell the story about a customer of ours who had just that experience, they'll say, I want that. Customer stories are magical. Let your customers tell your brand story for you so you don't have to. They're worth the investment. That was not an inexpensive video shoot. We had to send a crew out. She's in Ohio. We had to send a crew out to do it. It was expensive. It was worth every single penny. So, question seven: how will you encourage your happy customers to say nice things about your brand to everyone they know? How will you give them an opportunity to reach out, to raise their hand to say, yep! I like it. How will you incentivize to do it, and how will you bake it into your marketing effort? Right? We don't just say, here's some stickers. Right? We say, here's your Secret Sticker. By the way, here's where you put it: on your laptop. We tell them like, put it in the lower left hand corner. Do you know why we say the lower left hand corner as opposed to any other corner? You know what's so special about the lower left hand corner? Nothing! It's arbitrary! It's arbitrary! But if you don't tell them what to do, they'll do nothing! Right? So, that's all marketing. Just like, is marketing! It's all messaging. So for us, we wanna get our people to provide a case study or a customer story. When we're talking about building brand promoters, talking about having a referral program, affiliates, internal champions, value-added resellers, these are all the different things that we think about when it comes to building promoters. Now, not every single advocate will ascend to promoter status, but the more you get, the better, because this is where we close the loop. This is when our customers become our marketing partners. This is when our customers begin generating awareness for our brand and that's when you get this virtuous cycle of growth. This virtuous cycle of growth. You know, in fancy-pants terms, they call it a viral coefficient. Right? You've heard this term, the viral coefficient? It simply means a certain percentage of your people are telling other people about you. I tend to use less fancy words. So, the question that you need to ask at this point if you wanna be really active and pro-active about this, is who has your customers but they're providing a different product or service than the one that you are offering? Who has your customers but they're providing a different product or service? Those are your best friends. When we asked this question at Digital Marketer, we found that it was agencies. Agencies are out there actively serving the same people that we're serving. They're providing a service, we're providing training. We don't step on their toes, they don't step on ours. Really, we should hang out. We should kick it together. That's why we launched our certified partner program. So, for us, a promoter is someone who's either a referral partner or a certified partner. You can see how we position that at Digital Marketer dot com forward slash partners. Okay? So, who has your people? Who has your people? Who's already selling to them? Give you some quick tools to help facilitate these programs once you have it. Proof is really great for automated advocacy. Proof is a tool that, as soon as somebody buys, it just is a little widget that shows that Bob from Georgia just purchased this product. So it's passive advocacy. It requires no real action, and it doesn't violate any personal stuff, 'cause it's just giving their first name. So, we're kinda gonna start with the things that are the lowest form of advocacy. There's nothing wrong with it. It's good. Proof. Fomo is the same way. Fomo is the same way. I believe it's a Shopify plugin, but when somebody buys something, they're an advocate. Space Squirrel allows people to share that they bought something on the checkout page. So, it's a tool that encourages advocacy and promoter. Feedback Genius. This allows people to give feedback on your products and services, both positive and negative feedback. If it's negative feedback, look, you wanna take that in, that's what's gonna make you better. If it's positive feedback, then it's probably worth reaching out to them and seeing if they wanna become a more active advocate or promoter. We use Drift. Drift is a, an online conversational marketing tools that you can actually talk to your people. It's amazing when you begin talking to your people how much faster it is to ascend them to advocates and promoters, 'cause you can ask them, hey, will you tell people about me? And they can say yes. Whereas if you send an email, they can ignore it. Intercom, same kind of thing. Now, both of these tools do different things, but they can be really great for identifying possible advocates and promoters. Referral candy is a referral, if you wanna launch a referral program. Ambassador is actually what we use at Digital Marketer. These are not affiliate links, by the way, just so you guys know. They're just telling you guys what we use. And then, Friend Buy is another solution if you wanna launch a referral program or some type of value added reseller program. So, question eight: how will you turn your best customers into your marketing partners? I should also say, I believe that there's gonna be a resource list with every resource that I mentioned posted into the group, so if you just had a little mini panic attack there 'cause you didn't write those down, whether you're in the room or whether you're at home, they will be made available to you. So, question number eight, how will you turn your best customers into your marketing partners? I mentioned for us, it's having affiliates or being a certified partner. All right, so now it's your turn. If you haven't already done so, download your Value Journey Canvas and begin to map your journey. I don't expect you to have every single stage figured out just yet, but it's worth looking at, what are the things that you're doing that you're actually doing pretty well at? Without even really trying. What are the areas where like, you know what? There is a giant gaping hole there and I gotta focus in on that. The first thing that this gives you, is it gives you a framework for where you need to focus your optimization efforts. It gives you a framework for where you need to focus your optimization efforts. If you're crushing it in awareness, if everybody knows about you but nobody's buying, the worst thing in the world that you could do is go out there to get more traffic. The worst thing in the world that you could do is sit in a room like this or a webinar or go to an event to figure out, how can I increase my search? No, no, no! You wanna be seen less right now! You suck right now! Get good, then get seen more. Right? So, it's going to allow you to do that.