How to Get Customers to Evangelize Your Business

Want to increase your business's exposure in social media feeds? Curious how word of mouth can help you overcome algorithm changes?

To explore how talk triggers encourage customers to evangelize your business, I interview Jay Baer.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Jay Baer. He's the author of multiple books, including Hug Your Haters, and co-author of the new book Talk Triggers. He also founded Convince & Convert.

Jay explains why talk triggers help your business stand out from your competition and on social media.

You'll also discover the elements of successful talk triggers and ways they can generate word of mouth.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Why Is Word of Mouth Important?
To start, Jay defines what "word of mouth" means to marketers. It's when a customer tells somebody else about a particular business. This conversation could be face to face or online via email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, or any number of other media. Also, the conversation could be one to one or via a review site like Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Angie's List.

As Jay and co-author Daniel Lemin did research for the book, they found that 83% of Americans have engaged in word-of-mouth recommendations in the past 30 days. Sometimes you don't notice you're giving a recommendation. At a recent party, Jay listened to the conversations for 3-4 minutes and heard at least 8 recommendations for movies, books, software, and conference speakers.

Most research Jay and other engagement labs have done focuses on online word of mouth, which is anonymous or semi-anonymous. A Yelp reviewer doesn't know who'll see their review. When you tweet, you know only that you're speaking to your followers in the aggregate. However, the newest research finds that online word of mouth accounts for only half of all recommendations.

The other half of all recommendations are offline and happen in face-to-face conversations or over the phone, so these recommendations are just as important as online ones. Also, in business, neither type of word of mouth is studied as much as it should be. Depending on your business and product, word-of-mouth recommendations influenced 20%-90% of every dollar that you have.

After outlining how important word-of-mouth recommendations are to every business, Jay notes that businesses typically don't have a word-of-mouth strategy. Whereas businesses have an overall digital strategy and strategies for social media, public relations, and content, they approach word of mouth by assuming their customers will talk about them. But maybe customers won't.

Jay draws a distinction between a word-of-mouth strategy and a viral post. Businesses welcome virality because it provides disproportionate reach, and they'll try to produce posts they hope will go viral with a surprise-and-delight tactic. That is, the business treats a particular customer in a remarkable way, hoping the customer shares their experience on social and it goes viral.

Aiming for a viral post isn't a strategy; it's a stunt. It's like buying a lottery ticket. Although delighting a customer in this way isn't a bad idea, this approach isn't a strategy because it's not repeatable. Even if you're fortunate enough to have a viral post, you can't grow your business with viral social media posts over and over.

To grow your business with an approach that's scalable, you need to think about how you can encourage word-of-mouth conversations every day. You need to do something different in your company so that customers notice and tell their friends, who tell their friends. When businesses are doing this,