You need brand evangelists!”
If you’ve studied marketing at all over the past few years, you’ve probably heard this from more than one person. It’s no longer enough to simply attract a loyal customer base. You want to have evangelists, people who are so enthusiastic and supportive of your business that they freely share information about your company and your products with others. They aren’t paid spokespeople parroting your marketing messages in exchange for a paycheck. They aren’t compensated for their time with free products. They are real, engaged consumers who want others to share the great experience that they have had with you.
Attracting brand evangelists isn’t always easy, and there is tons of advice out there on how to go about doing just that. What few experts fail to share, though, is what you should do with these people once you have them on your side. And that’s a problem. You need to maintain relationships with your brand evangelists so they will continue to talk about your company — and stay on point with your message and brand identity.
So how do you do that?
Build a Community
People love feeling as if they belong to an exclusive club. So why not create one, or at least a community that is dedicated to your brand? When you identify your brand evangelists, invite them to participate in a dedicated community. That might be a social media group, a private online discussion or “members only” area of your website or another means of connecting with each other and your brand. Encourage your evangelists to interact with each other as well as your brand. Consider offering incentives for involvement in the community. Create branded items that you can send to your evangelists to thank them for being involved in the community; you might offer free key chains, work with promotional pen manufacturers to make branded pens or send out bumper stickers to let them show off their brand pride. Above all, make it attractive, engaging and worth their time to stay involved.
Listen to Your Evangelists
The best way to stay in touch with what your customers want and need is to listen to what they are saying about you and your brand — and anything related to your industry. If you build an exclusive community, you have a unique opportunity to engage with your evangelists and ask them direct questions. However, you don’t have to put people on the spot to get them to provide feedback.
There are a number of social measurement tools available online that you can use to measure the social sentiment toward your brand and to gauge what people are actually saying. Set up alerts and review regular reports to determine what your brand evangelists — and your detractors — are saying. You may be able to use their language in your marketing efforts. Or you might realize that the language you’re speaking isn’t resonating with your audience and that you need to make adjustments. Either way, listening will allow you to better serve your customers and improve your business.
Attract More Evangelists
No matter how many evangelists you have, you always want to attract more, right? Can you ever really have too many people spreading great things about your company? If you leverage your existing evangelists appropriately, you can actually attract even more people to your “team.”
One fledgling record company used this approach to gain fans for emerging artists. The company arranged for some of the bands’ most supportive fans to host concerts at their homes. The fans could invite their friends to come and check out the great music, thereby building a larger fan base. As word of mouth about the backyard concerts grew, so did the number of people talking about the bands and the record label — and it was all built by tapping into the power of the existing evangelists.
Why not try that approach with your evangelists? Give them something to talk about, or offer an exclusive deal or promotion that they can pass on to others. If you manage a subscription service, perhaps you could allow select subscribers to gift five of their friends with a free month to check it out. Considering sharing coupons, free trials and other rewards that evangelists can hand out to their friends. It’s all about tapping into your evangelists’ networks and getting your brand message out there.
Attracting brand evangelists to support and assist with your marketing efforts is only the first step in a word-of-mouth marketing plan. Keeping your evangelists engaged and rewarding them for their involvement is important as well. Take time to develop an evangelist engagement plan, and you’ll keep them on your side.
