Build a Following: The Art of Surprise

As I continue to pursue my education, to run a business, and to help others get their businesses off the ground, I can’t help but notice a very distinct similarity. It seems to me that all successful companies in some way or another have developed a following. This is a group of loyal customers (fans, etc.) that are very active in spreading around the brand name to potential customers, participating in anything you have to offer, and generally the ones who are first to sign up for that new product of yours. But how do you develop a following? How do you turn customers into supporters? I would like to take a look at a few examples from my own experience.

Duct Tape Marketing

A small business marketer by the name of John Jantsch from Kansas City produces a phenomenal amount of quality content. Last semester I had the privilege of driving to grad classes 3 times a week that were around 60 miles away. I used this drive time to listen to audiobooks and podcasts and one of my absolute favorites was the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I was taking marketing management that semester and John really had a way of bringing the concepts that I was learning about in class to life.

One day on twitter he mentioned something about his book (Duct Tape Marketing) being available to another follower. At this point I regularly read his blog and listened to EVERY podcast, so I was already a fan. I wanted to show him my support by buying his book, so I sent him a direct message asking where I could purchase the book. His response was that he wanted to send me a signed copy… for free.

This is the kind of thing that I’m sure happens for John all the time. He’s got someone who enjoys his content and decides to interact with him online. Instead of doing what is expected of a good business owner, he goes completely over the top and over delivers, surprising me with a signed copy of his book. Let me tell you, everyone I talk to about marketing hears about that book and everyone who asks me about finding great web content gets sent to his site. He continued the growth of his following that day.

Team Covenant

Team Covenant is the gaming content site that I started in 2007. Since the beginning, I have stressed complete customer satisfaction. Early on I hadn’t really thought about what we could do to go above and beyond. During the second year of the business one of my business partners, Steven, had the idea for us to write a note and sign every single invoice that left our offices. This has paid off tremendously. Every time we go to a convention or a tournament somewhere, we have people reminding us of a joke we told about the products they were ordering or a tip we offered that really helped them. Things like this turn people from being your customer to being your supporter.

Last weekend I took a step back and looked at a few things on our sites and social networks. I realized that we had been disregarding our Facebook Page. We had 102 followers, yet the only thing that was active was that our RSS feed was being imported to the page. This made the fan page somewhat irrelevant. So I wanted to try something out. I posted a status update that announced we would be giving away a free miniature from one of the games well sell under 2 conditions:

1. The page for that miniature on our wiki had to be filled out
2. We had to have at least 3 customer reviews on the reviews section of the fanpage

Within 5 minutes there were 10 responses and 2 reviews. By the next day there were tons of replies to our update and 7 awesome reviews. Within the week, we had gone from 101 fans to 127. Something as simple as an update on the fan page and sending a $15 item out got an entire crowd of people excited and I bet you anything it turned a handful from customers to followers. You can check out the fan page here.

So What?

While sending a free book to everyone that contacts you is not something that all of us in our small businesses can do, it is something we can model our interactions with customers after. I catch myself all the time getting into the routine and then just doing the daily grind. This is partly to do with the fact that I am extremely busy so a routine makes everything possible. However, I would highly recommend taking a step back.

Look at what is going on in your business and see if there are small, non-costly ways to surprise your customers. There are countless ways to start turning your customers into followers. John is soon to release a book (The Referral Engine). You can imagine how easy it will sell due to the sheer number of people who are his following. Imagine if you did that with your business. What can you do to take it to the next level like John?

Zach