Have you ever thought about how to build influence in your marketing efforts? Have you ever thought about using an influencer to endorse your product / service to gain more customers?
Marketing has made a shift in the past few years relying on those social marketing influencers to endorse their products / services. Marketers believe that followers of these influencers will buy whatever that influencer has mentioned. Unfortunately, there is a limit to this theory?
By using an influencer, we are essentially using social proof with customers. That is the basis of gaining trust from someone else’s endorsement that others trust their recommendations. It’s literally a exchange of trust. This will work for commodities, but if you are offering a service, you may find it difficult to capitalize with this type of marketing.
When it comes to influencers, they hold up products, but to show how a service works it may be difficult and take time for them to really show how it works. When getting our marketing plans secured, we really need to understand what we are offering before we just throw money at the effort. If we believe we have a commodity then we have already lost because a commodity is only differentiated by price. That is why we need to make sure we have figured out how we are different from others in our same product / service demographic.
Successful organizations that have focused their efforts on customer service have secured reoccurring customers. That’s right the customer experience is more impactful than having a super star wear our products. We need to focus on building customer service and trust with our current customers and yes this takes time. We live in an era with two-day shipping, moves on demand, and grocery shopping online world, but the one true way to gain reoccurring customers is to serve them consistently over time.
Ever try to get a chicken sandwich from Chick-Fil-A at lunch or dinner? It’s a chicken sandwich, not a new cure for cancer, but because they have focused on customer service over time, they have passed up the other fast food competition with fewer locations. That’s right the golden arches which have been a staple were passed by Chick-Fil-A. Their customer service has accomplished this cult following.
We need to focus on the long-term vision of building trust with our customers. Without trust we will not gain influence with our customers. We need to have high levels of trust with our customers before they will tell their closets friends and family members to use us. That is also still the best form of referral. I am also not talking about bribing the customers with a coupon if they share with others.
I am talking about natural raving customers that can’t help but tell others to do business with you.We need to serve our customers well consistently if we are going to having reoccurring customers and eventually partners that will only buy from us and all that we sell. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to market because our customers are buying everything we sell and partner with us?
That is why I consistently post blogs every week for over three years and consistently post videos online to help customers gain more knowledge and understanding about sales and influence. I am here as a guide to help you become successful in your endeavors.
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
“Businesses wonder why the majority of their sales teams struggle at winning profitable business. I teach your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate more sales with high margins!”