Do your members/customers love your brand? With the stiff competition in today’s marketplace, senior management may be concerned with what other organizations are doing.  However, turning the focus back to their own organization is important to understand how to make their brand lovable! In the next three tips, you will find the marketing strategy, online connections and personal brand tips to consider for your success in 2011!

Let’s explore “Woohoo!”

 

Marketing Strategy Tip –Tell the Brand Story

Often it seems that organizations think their customers/members should notice or immediately grasp why doing business with them is different, special or great.

Getting people to love your brand, here are three steps:

• Concentrate on the “Woohoo” Factor – what sets you apart from your competition, whether great service or amazing rates or products that really makes a difference for their lives.
• Tie all marketing messages to this “Woohoo” Factor with the positioning statement or tag line that is placed everywhere.
• Remind your customers/members with every touch point about how using your products add more to their lives.

In essence, tell the story of your brand all the time, in terms of why it is better than the competition, what makes doing business with your brand “special,” and how you can add to the customer’s life in a meaningful way. If you are thinking that your organization does not have the special something, then start by taking a walk.

• Go out to your front line and see the interactions of your employees and customers/members. Watch to see if there are smiles and some lighthearted laughter. This will show the brand communicating at the human level!
• Walk into your call center and listen to the conversations. See if your people are smiling to the person on the line or simply answering questions. You can hear a smile over the phone.
• Take all your marketing materials and lay them out on a conference room table or tape them up on a wall. Do they tell a story of value that you add to the customer’s/member’s life? Is it easy to see the brand “flow” across all the pieces that make your organization easily recognizable?

These are just a few ways to see your brand in action to ensure building the “Woohoo” Factor!

 

Online Connections Tip – Ask Customers/Members to Tell Their Story

 

The ability to build the “Woohoo” Factor requires feedback from the most important audience, your customers/members.  One way to connect with how they feel about your brand is to ask!

With a simple microsite that offers an online poll or brief survey, or using a landing page with a link to a survey software site like Survey Monkey, you can gather input from customers/members all the time.

Couple key things in doing an online survey:

• Keep it short and focused on identifying what it is the responder perceives about your organization that is keeping him/her coming back
• Ask three demographic questions; age, zip code and male/female. This will allow you to determine more about the respondents.
• Use a CAPTCHA code to require a person had to retype a sequence of letters or numbers to make sure there is a human leaving responses and not an automaton or hacker software.
• To increase response, collect e-mail addresses by offering a chance at a gift card.

Personal Branding Tip – Tell Your Story

Have you heard a mention of crafting your “elevator speech?”  The term was coined about a sales pitch that you can tell someone in the time it takes to ride in an elevator to the next floor. The point is to drill down the most salient points of the subject that will pique someone’s interest in about 60 seconds.

If you were asked, “What is so special about you and why should I hire you over other candidates?’ – what would you say?  If you cannot easily describe your competitive advantage in a quick and compelling way, you will likely lose opportunities.

As a business, You, Inc., is a brand, albeit a personal brand. And it has to have a good brand story to gain the edge over the competition.

This is an excerpt from the new e-book version of Almost Famous Marketing Yourself 2.0. Want to be alerted when the e-book is ready this spring? Click here to sign up!

Got a favorite “woohoo” brand, or have a “woohoo” brand moment to share? Leave a comment and be entered to win a gift card!