Page 78 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

The best way to encourage loyal customers to influence their peers is to start by
encouraging them to talk about the product. Having them rate and review the
products is the first step. You’ll be surprised how many customers are happy to
rate and review products. What’s more, as they rate and review the products,
they’re also happy to broadcast the reviews to their social network. Allow them to
do that. Provide the technological means for them to share their own reviews of
the product with their friends and family.

Another way that social media marketing can help at the loyalty stage is by con-
necting prospective customers with loyal customers. In some cases, you can link
prospective customers with loyal customers who they know in the real world. For
example, if you’re looking to buy a Ford Taurus, and you have a network of 350
people in LinkedIn, you may find that someone else in your network drives a Ford
Taurus. Now, wouldn’t it be valuable if Ford told you which friend drives the Ford
Taurus so that you could ask that friend her opinion? That’s increasingly possible
to do in the social networks.

Regardless of whether you have any friends who own Fords, you might be
interested in learning about Ford from other Ford customers. Social media mar-
keting is about connecting customers to one another so that they can socially
influence each other to make better decisions. In this instance, Ford should defi-
nitely try to connect all the prospective Ford Taurus owners with the current ones.
One simple way to do this is to set up a Facebook page or a LinkedIn group for Ford
Taurus owners in specific locations and then point prospective customers to that
page, where they can ask existing owners questions. It can only help them make
more purchases. Not surprisingly, Ford does exactly that, and in fact, it now goes
a step further by offering Ford customers the opportunity to put a “badge” on
their Facebook profiles showcasing the fact that they are Ford customers!

The loyalty stage of the marketing funnel is important because that’s where the
most remarketing happens by your own customers. Just because the customer has
already bought the product doesn’t mean you should care about her less. In fact,
with her ability to spread the word (positively or negatively) about your product
across her social network and the social web in an exponential fashion, you had
better take good care of her. Otherwise, you may have a PR disaster on your hands.

Probably one of the most classic examples of a PR disaster at the loyalty stage has
to do with Netflix. Without consulting its customers, Netflix made an attempt to
divide its business into two, with one focusing on DVD rentals and the other online
streaming. The pricing of each also increased with this announcement. Upon
hearing the news, customers fled en masse, including those who had previously
been among the most loyal. Management had to completely reverse the decision
to split the company, and only now has gained back its lost customers.

On the bright side, when JetBlue suffered probably its most major PR disaster in its
history, the chief executive officer decided to issue an apology via YouTube — using

62 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing