One of Team Edgar’s favorite books is Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard.
Every business wants to create raving fans who are a community of loyal followers and brand ambassadors.
Raving fans are more than followers on social media. It is possible to find them using simple tactics that showcase your brand in its best light.
Average brands will have average fans, right? And you are definitely not average. You deserve raving, loyal fans. Keep reading to learn how to create the fans your business deserves.
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What is a Raving Fan?
A raving fan is someone who is a big advocate for your business. They’re more than a customer and are highly engaged with everything your brand does. That could be sharing all your social posts or writing an article about your new products on their blog. They tell everyone who will listen about your brand and are a great ambassador for what you do. Why do they do this? Because they are behind your mission and simply love everything you do!
How to Create Raving Fans
Creating raving fans isn’t as simple as doing your thing and waiting for the fans to come. If you want raving fans, you need to be tactical in your marketing approach and create a little hype around what you do.
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with 8 amazing ideas on how to do just that. Here goes!
1. Offer Amazing Products and Services
The book Good to Great by Jim Collins explores the concept that people don’t talk about good or average service, they talk about bad service and they talk about amazing services and products.
You want to be on the amazing services and products side of the spectrum to get people to speak about you with their friends and family.
When people speak about your brand, they’re doing you a huge favor and building trust for your brand online. For example, if you hear about a brand from someone you trust, you’re more likely to trust that brand as your friend or family member already trusts them.
You need to go above and beyond if you want fans who talk about your brand. Give people a clear way to tell their friends and family and colleagues about what your brand does and why it is so special.
Whether you’re a brand who is online or offline, word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most powerful things you can do to increase sales and build brand awareness.
Consider what sets your company apart from being just another average company. It may be a feature of your product or service or it could be your company values. For example, TOMS shoes is a great example of a company that sets itself apart with its values.
They are aligned with a specific mission and value to get shoes to those in need. Their word-of-mouth marketing exploded because it was such an amazing cause and their customers were aligned with their values.
Are you running a business in a transparent way and sharing your values on social media so that people actually know about them?
Your customers are going to always take notice if you contribute to a good cause so if your company goes out there and participates in charities, let that be known! People love to talk about brands that positively contribute to making a change in the world. If they connect with your values, it also helps them feel like their doing something good when they make a purchase from you.
2. Set Yourself Apart with Your Packaging
You can also create raving fans by having a unique packaging experience, right?
We’ve all seen our friends or family or those unboxing videos on YouTube, where people are taking packages that they get from unique companies. For example, boxes with quotes on them, or inside the box there is something fun like confetti.
It doesn’t have to be that complicated, it could be something like a handwritten note, thanking the person with their name on it and telling them a little bit about why you personally love the product.
These personal touches can increase someone’s connection to you. Remember, humans like to do business with humans.
3. Offer Impeccable Service
Service is also a huge one when it comes to creating raving fans. How can you go above and beyond? We all know the expectation of writing into a support team is set pretty low.
We’ve all written to companies when we need help with something and have been let down.
Can you be a brand that people love to reach out to? So when people talk about a service experience they had with you, it’s only positive. Exceptional customer service is one of the small things that can set you apart from other products or services like yours.
4. Write Unforgettable Copy
Copywriting is one of the easiest ways to get a follower to become a fan. If you are an online business, you should develop the ability to write great copy.
Derek Sivers is a long-time entrepreneur and online marketing thought leader who first got his start with the business CDBaby, a business where you could have CD shipped to you (this gives you a little insight into how long Derek has been in the game!). Derek first got so much traction and word-of-mouth marketing because of the confirmation email that he sent after someone purchased from him.
Your confirmation email is an opportunity, regardless of whether you send it after a client has booked a call or a customer has purchased from you. It’s an opportunity to provide a fun moment or a fun experience that people will talk about. Here’s CDBaby’s confirmation email after you purchase:
What an awesome email to get. You’re going to laugh if that comes to your inbox, right?
This one fun email got him over 20,000 results of customers sharing it online. People were screenshotting this email, sharing it to social media, sharing it to their blogs, because they thought it was an amazing experience.
Great copy can provide this hype around your business. Look at your emails, your confirmation emails, your billing emails, look for those little ways to make it more unique.
You don’t want to be average, you don’t want those emails to just match the exact email everyone else’s. The worst thing you can do for your business is just to be a watered-down version of someone else’s, right?
Look for ways to be more unique out there and people will start talking about your brand.
5. Plus It Up!
To create raving fans, you can’t just do the job. You need the customer in mind with everything you do. One of the ways that Disney explains this is “plus it up.”
Disney employees are encouraged to stop and think, “How can I add one more per cent and plus this up?”
For Disney, their four pillars are safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency. Staff can follow the guidelines and provide a consistently amazing experience for everyone at the park. But within that, they have the freedom to plus it up.
Think about what your core values are and everything that your business does from product to copywriting to customer service should have these values in mind. That’s how you create a consistent brand voice and attract those social media fans who are obsessed with your brand.
Empower your team, take care of them, so that they’ll take care of your customers and you can get that raving fan effect. Be consistent, but adaptable enough to make changes if needed.
Let’s take a look at a mission statement from a large company like Microsoft. Their vision says they want to get a computer on every desktop in America. This means they need to make sure that they’re designing in an affordable way if they’re going to get a computer on every desktop.
It also guides their way that it’s got to be kind of compact and small. If it’s going to fit in every home in America, it can’t be this huge thing, so that’s going to guide their product design. You need to make sure that your salespeople can talk to a wide array of people with this vision in mind.
The vision of getting a computer on every desktop in every home starts to guide the product and guide the sales team and guide the customer support team.
Business owners who understand and encompass this in their business, know that the lukewarm idea of customers saying, “Oh, I just have to buy this product to solve my pain point,” is not going to give you the brand awareness you want.
6. Be Obsessed With Your Customers
Remember, if you are obsessed with your customer’s life, your business is going to reflect that.
Go and see what other pages they follow, have some calls, and ask them what podcasts they consume, what YouTube channels they love, what blogs they love to read and then go and consume that content yourself.
It helps you get in your customer’s minds about what they are thinking about on a daily basis. With this knowledge, your content can show up, resonate, and support what is going on in their lives.
The better you serve the customers you already have, the more raving fans you’re going to create and the more new customers you’re going to get.
Too often, we obsess over getting new customers and bringing in new leads, and we forget about our existing customers. They are the ones we need to be talking to, the ones we need to be serving because they’ve already proven that they want our product or service.
If we can serve existing customers in a “plus up 1% way”, they’re going to tell their friends and that’s going to bring in new clients.
Make sure you’re getting to know the customers you already have on an intimate level so you can resonate with new ones, as well as taking advantage of word-of-mouth raving fan marketing.
7. Use Social Media to Show You & Your Values
Another way of getting out there on social media, is to talk about who you are.
People need a way to talk about you. If you’re not giving people your origin story, sharing a little background on what your personality is like, it’s hard for them to describe your company to their friends.
Think about if someone were talking about your brand, do they have a one to two sentence elevator pitch that they could tell their friend very easily?
Analyze your social feed and add some updates that give people a couple of sentences that they can use to describe your product or service.
Make sure you’re connecting with your ideal clients by sharing why you’re posting everything. Everything on social media should go back to the fact that you are there to serve your followers.
You should know exactly why every single post is going out online.
To be relatable to your ideal clients you need to identify with what’s going on in their reality. Seeing your content should not be a chore for your followers. It should be short, sweet and impactful for their lives.
Look at your queue in Edgar and make sure you know why your posts are there. (Not an Edgar user? Get your first month free here!)
Remember it is not always about getting sales for your brand, it’s also about serving and helping your ideal clients. That mindset shift is going to change everything for getting word-of-mouth marketing out there. The easier it is for people to talk about you in a way that you have gone above and beyond for them, the better.
8. Ask for Testimonials
Once you’ve created these raving fans, what are you going to do with them?
You want to make sure that you’re thanking them, you’re being generous about it if you see them creating user-generated content online with your product or service.
You also want to harness this in the form of testimonials that you can share on your feeds.
Set up a Google form or a system where your DMing people to ask them to provide you with a testimonial. If you haven’t doesn’t this before, it may feel awkward but remember human beings love helping people out, so don’t rob people of that feeling of being helpful.
Need more ideas for how you can harness these testimonials? Here are three simple strategies to ask for referrals for your brand.
Start Attracting Raving Fans
You are unique and are the heart and soul of your business. Give people a reason to rave about you and the brand you’ve built.
Think about your unique selling proposition and how you can bring that into your social media posting.
Follow these tips and we’re sure you’ll have your own raving fans in no time!
1 Comment
So get out there and get someone with a nice camera on your team.