Fuel Their Passion: Stirring Up True Intensity in Your Customer Base
Passion is intense, craveable, inspiring...and above all, authentic. You can’t fake passion, you can’t buy it, and you can’t make other people feel it if you don’t. So how do you get your customer base to feel the excitement?
Show your passion.
When you’re inspired by what you do, it’s easy to inspire others. Tell your customers why you’re excited and invite them to get excited with you. Take a marketing hype lesson directly from Steve Job's launch playbook. Treat every launch with “change the world” enthusiasm, even if it's not all that new and different. Your new product, whatever it is, is the best thing ever. If you believe it, they'll believe it. Bringing that kind of enthusiasm to a B2B scenario requires a deep understanding of customers' pain points. Show your customers how you can fix their problems and make their lives easier in the process.
Tap into their passions.
Give your prospects and customers awesome, branded shareable graphics that speak to their interests. For example, if you’re paying attention to your customers’ social data, you can find out what TV shows they watch and build graphics around quotes:
“Winter is Coming.” -House of Stark (from Game of Thrones)
This theme is perfect for a retail store. Add “Be Warm” or “We Have Sweaters! Visit FictionalStore.com.” Overlay the quotes and your brand on a picture of a warm outfit and voila! the copy writes itself. You should be able to find an appropriate quote for any kind of business...and be sure to throw in a little humor.
"It’s not that 'content is king,' but content certainly is The Hand of the King." ~ Marshall Simmonds, Define Media Group. (See what he did there?)
Invite customers to participate.
User Generated Content (UGC) is hot, and customers love it. Give them a reason to participate and they’ll jump right in with selfies, poetry, memes, and even performances. Some of the biggest brands around have launched UGC campaigns, including Lego, T-Mobile and Pepsi—but you don’t have to be one of the big-guys to do it!
Show some love.
You’re never going to get customers to trumpet their love from the rooftops unless you show them love first. And that love needs to extend past the hot-new-romance honeymoon phase while you’re trying to get that first sale. Oh, no. You need to bring the heat all through the life of your relationship. Give your former and current customers the incentive they need with a little VIP treatment to make them feel special. Massage their cares away.
Let’s be honest here. New customers are passionate and fun for a time, but the real love (and the big money) is in your stable, long-term customer relationships. Learn more about treating your customers right over the long haul with our free guide to Growth Cycle Marketing.
Give out content they want to share.
Great content inspires passion. That’s just the way the web works. People search for information, you provide what they want, they’re happy, and they tell their friends. Simple. Figure out what your prospects are searching for and give them lots of it. Provide the answer to every question you can conceive they’ll ask.
Break the rules.
Be the kind of company you want to be, and not the kind of company that represents tradition in your industry. Break the stuffy old mold. Let your customers see your personality. Some industries, like stock trading, lean on gravitas and dignity, because what says, “Trust me with your money” more than high ceilings, marble floors, and somber men in expensive suits?
But eTrade came along to make the point that anyone can trade stocks...so simple even a baby can make money in the market. eTrade chose to eschew the traditional route favored by old money and appeal to the masses. The day after the first Super Bowl ad featuring the eTrade baby aired, more new users signed up than on any other day in the company's history. Six years later, one of the most memorable campaigns in history has finally come to an end.
The bottom line? Customer engagement. If you want customers to love you, shower them with attention, gifts and thoughtfulness…without smothering them with sales pitch after sales pitch. True passion isn’t demanding, and it isn’t one-sided, either. Excitement is contagious.