3 Ways To Spread the Word About Your Biz

Three Steps to More Word-of-Mouth — and More Business

In the days before social media and the Internet, it wasn’t as easy to listen in on your customers’ conversations about your company. Nor could you easily encourage people to spread the good word about your business through word-of-mouth.

But when you connect with your customers online, you stop speaking to them and start talking with them. And wonderful things begin to happen. Those golden word-of-mouth moments that happen naturally offline at parties or networking events suddenly begin happening online right in front of your eyes on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and review sites.

On social networks, word-of-mouth referrals become amplified: the friends, families and networks of your customers see these referrals and might just beat a path to your door.
How does it work? I call it the engagement marketing cycle.

The engagement marketing cycle has three parts:

• Experience
• Entice
• Engage

It begins once you’ve attracted a prospective customer or client to your business. This first point of contact can happen at your physical location, website, Facebook Page, trade show booth — anywhere the conversation turns to business.

Related: Six Tips for Mobile Marketing to Engage Customers

Although relatively simple, the steps in the cycle are quite powerful.

Step 1: Provide a Wow! experience

As a small or midsize business, you have an advantage: You can create personal connections with your customers by providing extraordinary every single day. How? Consider these examples:

• Manufacturing firm: Doing a small production run for a special client — on the weekend — to help it meet its customer’s rush order.
• Consulting practice: Sending clients small gifts, such as cookies or gift cards, once in a while as a thank-you for their business.
• Bank: Offering biscuits to customers’ dogs in cars at the driver-up teller window.
• Retail shop: Personally delivering goods during special circumstances, such as an illness, birth of a new baby or death of a family member.

Continue reading this article at Entrepreneur.com after the break!