Engagement Marketing

How Small Business Wins in a Socially Connected World

Gail F. Goodman

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118237113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Desarrollo empresarial

A definitive guide to growing your small business through "Engagement Marketing"

As a small business owner, you've always relied on word-of-mouth referrals to grow your business. Thanks to social media—and its nimble partner, mobile technology—it's now easier than ever to turn customers and clients into engaged fans who spread the word about your business across a variety of online platforms. And that's what Engagement Marketing is all about. Written for anyone who owns or manages a small business or non-profit, this book is filled with practical, hands-on advice based on the author's experience of working with thousands of small businesses for over a decade.

You'll learn how to attract new prospects—as well as how to increase repeat sales—using your existing customers and social networks.

• Learn how to create customer experiences that increase positive customer reviews and endorsements
• Get practical advice on how to entice people to join your social networks and run engagement campaigns that increase visibility—and endorsements—for your business
• Understand why engagement is so important—and how you can use it to turn passionate fans in your social networks into tomorrow's new business
• Author Gail Goodman is CEO of Constant Contact, America's leading email and social media marketing company for small businesses

Engagement Marketing will help you make a bigger name for your company, build your network, and reach your goals.

Part I

Rev Up Your Engagement Marketing Engine

CHAPTER 1

The Engagement Marketing Cycle

A couple traveled to the Boston area to attend a wedding, and their host—who lived in the area—booked them a room at a gorgeous bed and breakfast. The B&B’s website featured fabulous photography of its stunning location, so the bride felt good about choosing this particular B&B. She requested a room on the first floor and informed the person handling the reservation that the husband had trouble climbing stairs due to a physical disability.

When the couple arrived, they learned that no first floor rooms were available; instead, they had been given a room two flights up at the back of the B&B. You know how this works. You don’t like to make a fuss, so you say, “Okay, we’ll deal with it.” The room, although difficult to access, was lovely. After attending the wedding, however, the couple returned to their room to find a freshly made bed . . . and a pile of wet towels on the floor. When the couple reported the mess to the front desk receptionist, they got a blank stare and a shoulder shrug.

This is the negative TripAdvisor.com review that I—and thousands of others like me—read about the B&B “[that] didn’t care enough to give us a first floor room even though one was specifically requested due to physical disability.” I found this review while looking for a place for friends to stay while visiting my town. Do you think I booked a room at this B&B? No! And I’m willing to bet that many other viewers followed suit.

Compare this to a grateful bride’s positive review of an inn in Connecticut. The couple’s wedding reception had to be rescheduled at the last minute due to a hurricane. The inn owners helped plan the reception right down “to the last detail” and even hosted the entire bridal party. The bride praised the staff, the food, and the grounds and raved, “We’ll definitely be back! Thank you!!” Think about how many bookings the inn may receive from other brides seeking exceptional service and a worry-free wedding day—all thanks to one glowing review.

When we ask business owners, “What is the single most effective source for generating new customers?” the most common answer is, “My customers telling others about me.”

Everyone Has a Circle of Influence

Whether we join to build professional relationships (e.g., industry associations) or for more personal reasons (e.g., parenting groups, lifestyles, similar hobbies or interests, alumni associations, and so on), we all belong to various networks. These groups include our close and extended family, personal friends, acquaintances, colleagues, neighbors, and coworkers, to name just a few. Usually, our networks are filled with people like us—whether we belong to a group of new mothers or a group of serial entrepreneurs. Our networks, which can be forged online or offline, form our circle of influence; we influence them and they influence us.

When we get together with our peers within these groups, we share information and updates about our personal and professional lives. Think about the last time you caught up with a friend or family member. You probably discussed what your kids and spouse are up to or where you went on your last vacation. Similarly, when you last attended an industry association meeting, you most likely shared resources, anecdotes, news, and business challenges with other small business owners or marketers in your industry. If one of your peers asked, “Say, do you know of a marketing consultant? We need help with developing an online marketing strategy,” you may have said, “Actually I do. You’ll want to call Jane Smith. She does great work—five stars.”

This word-of-mouth referral is the golden moment for a business or consultant, but several factors make it difficult to encourage or track: (1) You can’t influence how your business is portrayed in the conversation; (2) You have no idea when someone refers a friend to you unless that friend calls to inquire about your services and you happen to ask how he or she found you; and (3) You can’t reward your clients for referring you if you don’t even know who made the referral.

Social media completely changes this scenario.

In the days before social media and the Internet, you, the business owner, could not listen in on your customers’ conversations about your company. Nor could you easily encourage people to spread the good word about your business unless you used loyalty marketing or a “tell a friend” campaign, both of which are expensive to conduct and maintain.

With today’s social media tools at your disposal, you can encourage your clients to tell your story for you through Engagement Marketing. Engagement Marketing is built on a simple yet powerful idea: When you connect with your customers online, you stop speaking to your customers and start talking with them, and wonderful things begin to happen. Those golden word-of-mouth moments that once happened in the backyard, at parties, and at networking events suddenly begin happening right in front of your eyes on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and review sites. Through Engagement Marketing, word-of-mouth referrals become socially amplified: your customers’ friends, families, and networks all see these referrals and beat a path to your door.

Your New Business Engine: New Customers and More Repeat Business

Engagement Marketing helps drive more leads, more repeat sales—and more referrals. Engagement Marketing stimulates conversations and inspires participation. As you engage with your customers (and their friends), you’ll achieve surprisingly targeted social visibility; your customers’ networks are filled with great prospects for you. Remember, we’re all part of networks filled with people like us, so we all tend to have friends and colleagues with similar needs. When a friend of a friend finds your business through a trusted connection, it comes with the explicit or implied endorsement that this person stands behind your business. This endorsement gives you greater reach and adds to your credibility—or “social proof”—as prospects that find you through other channels can easily see your positive engagement with returning customers.

Your customers’ testimonials carry more credibility than any marketing message you could ever deliver yourself. This is because we value the feedback of others more than a vendor’s claims. If we actually know the person who is giving positive (or negative!) feedback, the review’s credibility skyrockets. In fact, 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know1 while only 14 percent trust advertising.2

The Engagement Marketing Cycle: Three Simple Steps to Success

The Engagement Marketing Cycle begins once you’ve attracted a prospective customer or client to your business, as represented by the door in Figure 1.1. This first point of contact can happen at your physical location, website, Facebook Page, trade show booth, charity event—anywhere you make a connection with someone and the conversation turns to business.

Figure 1.1 Word of mouth drives people to your door

The Engagement Marketing Cycle, as seen in Figure 1.2, is comprised of three simple steps: Experience, Entice, and Engage. Although relatively simple, these three steps, when done right, are quite powerful. What follows is a brief description of the cycle. You’ll find more in-depth information on each step, plus practical tips, in the following chapters.

Figure 1.2 The Engagement Marketing Cycle

Step 1: Provide a WOW! Experience

The good news is that as a small business, you have an advantage that larger or national companies do not: you can create personal connections with your customers by providing extraordinary experiences—every single day. These experiences include everything from remembering your customers’ names and preferences to providing them with exceptional service they just do not get anywhere else. Creating a great customer experience from the moment a prospective or existing customer enters your business is crucial to revving up your Engagement Marketing engine. As Figure 1.3 shows, your goal at this step in the cycle is to deliver a positive, memorable customer experience that stays alive in your customers’ memories long after they have exited your business.

Figure 1.3 Step 1: Provide a WOW! experience

I don’t have to tell you that the bar is set pretty low in many businesses when it comes to creating great customer experiences. According to the 2011 Global Customer Service Barometer Research Report prepared by American Express, only 24 percent of survey respondents said that businesses “will go the extra mile.”3 Almost half of the respondents, or 42 percent, said the businesses are helpful but don’t “do anything extra to keep [my] business,” while 22 percent said that companies “take [my] business for granted.”

Clearly, businesses can step it up with regard to providing exceptional service. As a small business owner, you have an advantage: you can easily assess your customer experience and implement necessary changes faster than large businesses can, and the rewards—new and repeat business—appear fairly quickly. Great customer experiences fuel the Engagement Marketing Cycle; without them, you won’t get the cycle started. In Chapter 2, we’ll explore ways to create great customer experiences.

Step 2: Entice to Stay in Touch

When you create a great customer experience, you make it easier for customers to be receptive to doing business with you again, to remaining in touch with you, and to sharing their experiences with their networks. But you can’t keep that great experience alive, if you have no way to stay in touch! You need to make a connection while the experience is fresh in their minds. To this end, you must persuade the customer to agree or “opt in” to staying connected. For this second step in the Engagement Marketing Cycle to work as shown in Figure 1.4, you must learn how to connect with your customers through a variety of media including social networks, e-mail, mobile (SMS or texting), events and, yes, even direct mail. Once you decide how you want to connect, you have to entice your customers to make the connection (often called opt in). Creating opportunities and methods for enticing new customers to connect with you is limited only by your imagination and creativity. E-mail marketing and social media platforms (such as your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and Twitter) tied specifically to your business are the two most frequently used methods for maintaining connections.

Figure 1.4 Step 2: Entice to stay in touch

In Chapter 3 you’ll learn how to comfortably ask people to connect with your business and entice them to opt in. The key takeaway is this: consider how you can entice people to connect with you during or immediately after they’ve done business with you.

Step 3: Engage People

Now that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Rev Up Your Engagement Marketing Engine
• Part II: Get More Business With Engagement Marketing
• Glossary
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Index