In the first part of this short series on creating a business marketing plan, I talked about Element #1 – Reciprocity and you can read that by clicking the link there.
This post could equally well be called “Know, Like & Trust” but as Robert Cialdini, in his great book “Influence” called it “Liking” I’ll stick with that.
Liking……how do you create that online?
I went to the Roger Hamilton event last week and someone who I know from the Worthing & Adur Chamber went too, and I think they were a little surprised by how many people came up to say “hello”.
What he didn’t realise was that I have been blogging and sending out an ezine for well over 10 years now, and those two things build a huge body of that “know, like and trust” feeling. Or not.
I’m sure there are many people who loathe me, my opinions, my overly promotional ways and my blog posts about all and sundry, business and personal. Luckily for me, they tend to unsubscribe pretty quickly and I hardly ever get hate email nowadays, even from my biggest anti-fan – bless him and his rants.
There are lots of videos online where I’m either sharing my knowledge or speaking on stage and that creates a very strong sense of “knowing” because humans are very visual creatures and we also respond to the emotion in other people’s voices.
Anyone who watched that video of my telling the story of the LAST but ONE time I was temporarily homeless could not fail to realise how genuinely moved I was telling that story or how I’m grateful to my sisters for standing by me all these years as I’ve tried to build business after business and, until relatively recently, failed miserably. By the way, you catch a glimpse of the elusive Steve in that video as he tries to sort out the yellow line across my face, then my microphone.
Being willing to share yourself online, the highs and the lows, your learnings and frustrations, this creates a powerful bond with your readers, who then feel like they know you.
It must be a bit like the feeling people get when they identify with characters in soap operas and then they go up to the actors in the street and interact with them as if they were the characters they saw having a dram a last week.
The other side of the coin of living your life in public – hanging your arse out as one of my coaches, Chris Barrow, used to call it – is that sometimes you can go too far. You say stuff on your blog or in your ezine that offends, or hurts, or incenses people. You lose subscribers and potential future customers. I’ve definitely done that on two occasions I can remember easily. Not too bad in 12 years or so but painful when it happens.
Because of their honesty, sometimes brutal honesty, I love to read the blog posts of Yaro Starak’s “Entrepreneurs Journey”, and I WAS going to say Dave Navarro’s “Rock Your Day” and Naomi Dunford’s IttyBiz – but both of those sites seems to have been hacked and infected with a virus, following Dave’s leaving his wife and family, presumably for Naomi as they worked together occasionally, which information I only found out when I went to get the links for you. I hope they are both ok – whatever has happened! Don’t’ visit the sites in the meantime for your computer’s safety’s sake.
The other thing that drives me mad when I get asked to do a website review, is when they are so soul-less and corporate that you can’t get any sense of the person or people behind the site. No photos, no mission statement, no story about how the company came into being.
And then they wonder why their sites don’t work. Why they don’t build subscribers and a customer base.
We don’t know who you ARE!
One of my concerns when a graphic designer offered to redesign my site and my logo recently was that I should lose the home-made, touchy feely element of it. I don’t’ want to be too slick – it puts people off.
Or does it? Only time and testing will tell.
The other thing I do to let people get to know me is to give loads of my best stuff away in the form of a free report, 6 x videos and a webinar – by the time you have got to the end of all that, you know who I am, what I know and whether you want to work with me.
Equally effective is to host a live webinar each week for existing customers and potential future customers – Minesh Bhindi and I are the only people I know that do that. We sit there, week after week and take the chance that someone will rock up and ask a question we don’t know the answer to. Actually, neither of us care because we would just say “I’ll find out and have the answer for you next week”.
Again, I’m one of the only internet marketing mentors who has ALWAYS had a private client group, first on Yahoo, then Google Groups and now on Facebook – where, as long as you have paid me something in the Money Gym days, or are paying me something now, you can hang out with all my other clients and, if I piss you off, you could tell them all about it in seconds. How many companies do that?
How much does that do for my potential trust factor?
Although we are all actually in that position whether we like it or not, with Twitter and Facebook, as our customers can tweet about us or post a complaint on our Facebook pages and we can’t do a thing about it.
Except try and minimise the damage and make good.
I’m currently complaining bitterly about Sky and BT on my Twitter / Facebook because it’s taking three whole weeks to turn the broadband on in the house I’ve just moved into – a house that had broadband installed when my sister lived here just last week!
I’ll shut up when I’m connected!
So when you are putting together your marketing plan, pay careful attention to how you are going to let people get to “know, hopefully like and trust you”.
You will reap dividends.
