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How To Get Your Best Customers To Do Your Marketing For You

How To Get Your Best Customers To Do Your Marketing For You | Must Market | Scoop.it

As a small business owner, you’ve got a lot on your plate. With so many different hats to wear, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.


Wouldn’t it be great if you could get your best customers to do your marketing for you?


If only it were that easy, right?


Via Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com
Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

Our epiphany was realizing the most socially shared and linked to content on our websites and blogs wasn't ours but THEIRS. When customers share content they support it with links from their social nets. This "Friends of Friends" marketing is how your brand breaks through to the other side of the filter bubble. 

Filter bubbles, well outlined by Eli Pariser in a TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en,  make it all but impossible for branded marketing messages to reach their intended audience. 

Marketing today must be done by friends of your and friends of theirs where "theirs" are people your brand doesn't know yet. When your brand is introduced thanks to "friends of friends" marketing then trust and conversion aren't far away.

Going in cold is not something that works very often in a socially connected time like this.  

Matt Rogers's curator insight, September 14, 2014 11:16 PM

This article presents an interesting five step process for effectively creating brand ambassadors.  The process consists of creating goals, recruiting a small group, creating a community around your product, rewarding the ambassadors, and adjusting it based on what works and doesn't.  Brand ambassadors can be vital to the success of a company and potential superiority over competitors.  Getting customers involved can also create a greater sense of loyalty than just doing business as usual.

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Toy Story's Creator Shares Magical Storytelling Tips [TED Talk Video]

Toy Story's Creator Shares Magical Storytelling Tips [TED Talk Video] | Must Market | Scoop.it
Filmmaker Andrew Stanton ("Toy Story," "WALL-E") shares what he knows about storytelling -- starting at the end and working back to the beginning. Contains graphic language ... (Note: this talk is not available for download.)
Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

We are entering a time when STORY is paramount. Anyone and everyone can share content. Few can tell great stories. Fewer websites will tell great stories. 

Andrew Stanton shares great tips every Internet marketer and web designer should take to heart as we enter "the time of online stories". Loved this explanation of why stories are so important for humans:

"We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined."

and ...

"In 1998, I had finished writing "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. So I wanted to become much better at it and learn anything I could. So I researched everything I possibly could. And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty." It's an incredibly insightful definition. "|

I love the idea of Story as affirmation. Reviews are affirming stories. Comments and other forms of User Generated Content (social shares) also feel like "affirming signals".

Affirmation goes in two directions as my friends at Bazaar Voice taught me years ago. I asked, "Why would someone write the 251st review of a product?" "To join the tribe," was their simple and beautiful explanation.

One VERY important role for User Generated Content (UGC) is to confirm the contributor as a member of the tribe. The other is to confirm the content being reviewed or commented on. More than affirmation UGC can help reset a company's branding and positioning.

As marketers we have our own language and the "curse of knowledge". We know too much about the stories we tell. UGC helps confirm our story is consistent with the experience our products create.  

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