The #1 Most Overlooked Marketing Trick
Who doesn’t want to grow their business this year? I know I do.
Writing articles for Forbes and Inc. over the years, I’ve gotten to meet and interview lots of outstanding leaders who have grown massive companies.
I’m always most intrigued by their mindset, particularly around marketing. Although I own a marketing agency, I have to honestly admit that most of the stellar leaders I meet didn’t grow their companies because they figured out the secrets to Facebook advertising.
Instead, they focused on the #1 most overlooked marketing trick there is, and ironically it’s the first trick in the whole business book:
Incredible customer service.
Everyone wants to increase word of mouth (WOM), but few are willing to do what it takes.
What does it take? It takes the following:
- Map out your entire customer journey. Get a whiteboard and a four-hour time block, and truly put yourself in the customer’s shoes to figure out how your customer finds out about you, tries you, buys you, etc.
- Figure out where all the opportunities are to communicate: Pre-sale, during sale, post-sale, weekly, monthly, on special occasions, it can be anything that relatively fits within your mission or purpose.
- Figure out where all the shit will go wrong. What happens when the customer gets unhappy? What actions do you want them to take? How will you respond? (How much time have you spent to date coming up with a strategy for this? I bet not very much…)
- Design the whole process, start to finish, that touches all these potential points above.
Look, all your company is, is a conduit for some other person out there to have an experience. When you look at it that way, you’ll discover that you control your customer’s destiny, and the extent to which that person becomes your advocate and tells everyone about you online.
But if you haven’t planned your customer’s experience, then you’re leaving your best marketing trick for the fates to decide!
Let me give you an example I’m working on right now. The mission of this example company is to “take care of your challenges.” We certainly don’t want to give customers more challenges, so we made it easy to reach out nearly 24/7 on nearly every channel imaginable — phone, chat, email, social media, etc.
We’re uniting all those tools into one database so that when customers contact the company, we can see their entire history and can personally address them along with their prior challenges.
Then, we’re empowering all the customer service reps to ask one simple question at the end of each encounter: “Are there any other challenges I can help you with today?”
We can’t solve everything — like if you put tin foil into the microwave and it blew up (don’t try that at home). But if someone says, “yeah, I’m having a problem hiring a salesperson but I don’t expect you to solve that,” what can we do? Well, we can send them a related article, or a TED Talk, or another helpful reference to help them take care of their challenge, because that’s what the company stands for.
That’s the kind of surprisingly delightful customer service that customers will notice and talk about.
When you read through that example, ask yourself how thoughtfully you’ve designed your own customer service strategy.
Then remember that incredible customer service is the best marketing strategy you could hope for, which it makes it worth a little extra love and attention.
Hey there! Thanks for reading :-)
I write about using brutal honesty to achieve massive success. So if you’re an honest person, come join us here: www.PeterKozodoy.com
It’s like an honest reminder to be f*cking awesome, delivered every Monday morning.
Cheers to your success!