How to Capitalise on Your Best Marketing Tool: Your Customers

Before social media, brands spoke for themselves. Companies had to advertise on their own. Today, a social media post about a company can come from anyone.

It's a double-edged sword. A bad review can cost companies millions of ringgit. Nowadays, almost all consumers read online reviews. But, a happy customer who posts a positive review will beat any ad that money can buy.

So how can you get more of the latter and less of the former? 

Put your employees first, as they give customers an amazing experience. Their hard work will develop loyalty with your customers. Loyal customers will say good things about your brand on social media.

Use these four tactics to increase the chances of positive reviews on your brand:

1. Prioritize authenticity.

Nowadays, people care about brand authenticity. People prefer "real and organic" over "perfect and packaged" brands. 

It's not easy to define authenticity, but it's not so hard to implement:

1. Be transparent in your brand communications, 

2. Provide actionable tips and minimize superlatives.

Your brand needs its own voice, partly because you can't curate user-generated content.

2. Build a bench of influencers.

According to influencer marketing platform SocialPubli.com, 93% of marketers use influencer marketing. Six in 10, in fact, are growing their influencer budgets in 2019. When an influencer suggests a certain product or service, their followers want to be associated with it, too.

Influencers are very effective in specific sectors such as cosmetics. But you need to find an influencer that matches your brand's voice. If your brand's voice is serious and sophisticated, you will need an influencer with the same voice.

3. Set up stellar experiences.

Instead of giving away pens or water bottles and hoping they get seen around town, give customers an experience. Not only will they appreciate it more, but they're more likely to share it on social media, which is more scalable.

4. Incentivize sharing.

Even the strongest content isn't much use if it doesn't get seen. Use small rewards such as a product tasting, facility tour or service credits to encourage consumers to push brand-positive content on social media.

Given how valuable user-generated content is, give an additional reward if users can drum up online attention for their own post.

Companies may lament the loss of control when customers become their advocates, but it's the best way to maximize the loyalty those brands have worked so hard to build.

Source: Inc.

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