Want Customers to Market Your Brand? Make Them Look Awesome. Take a page out of the Facebook and GoPro playbook by allowing clients to showcase themselves for all the world to see.
By Kai Sato •
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We've almost all posed for a group picture, after which someone has shouted, "That's Facebook worthy!" Said picture is soon online being liked and commented upon by everyone we know. Even people we haven't seen in months ask us about it when our paths cross at the local watering hole.
Whether we like it or not, this is a form of personal marketing, as most people not only enjoy capturing memorable experiences but also want to share them with others.
Related: Let's Get Visual: Have Photos Can Tell Your Story Online
Done properly, your company can build on this notion and benefit from extensive and genuine exposure. But the key is to put your clients first and make them look awesome. When you do, they will share and talk about it, which subsequently markets your company.
This was one of the brilliant marketing strategies that Facebook used as social media rose to prominence. Facebook made it absurdly easy to create a website about yourself and share pictures of -- you guessed it -- yourself. Facebook leveraged the fact that humans tend to be self-interested and usually aren't bashful about self-promotion to reach over a billion users.
But as social media has evolved and become ever more ubiquitous, many companies still focus too much on themselves. It's not enough for your company to have a slick website and social-media accounts, where it publishes content about how it is "revolutionizing" this or "disrupting" that. Your company should help its clients create extraordinary content about themselves that they want to share, and they'll in turn market your company.
Perhaps no company is currently doing a better job of this than GoPro. Whether it's a diver riding a great white shark or a biker doing a backflip over a 72-foot canyon, GoPro helps its customers create personalized content that is cool and prone to being shared.
Related: How to Sound Human: Data-Backed Keys to Making Your Voice Stand Out Online
As GoPro CEO, Nick Woodman, told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, "It's a marketer's dream, and it's all based off of authenticity. It's our customers doing interesting things around the world, and they're so stoked that they're able to finally self-document these things that they like to do and share it with people. They're so stoked of how good they look in the video, that when they share the video they often give us credit."
In approaching this for your business, here are three questions to keep in mind:
1. What does your company enable its clients to do that makes them look great? Identify the ways that your product genuinely excites and showcases them. But heed to Woodman's advice: authenticity matters. No one wants to share things that are forced or fake.
2. Which specific aspect or message do you want them to share with the marketplace? No doubt you do many things of value but you can't be everything to everyone. Focus on sharable content that makes your clients stand out and uniquely upstage the competition.
3. Is your customer's content powerful enough to incite reactions and get people talking both on and offline? Regardless of the medium: pictures, videos or personalized websites, their content should cut through the noise and be memorable. You want your customers to be proud, and the competition to be nervous.
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