Digital Marketing Agency Tips
Remember a time you couldn’t stop talking about a place to your friends? I once had a dentist whose hands were so tiny, she could work miracles and you hardly knew it was happening. I told everyone I knew that I’d found the key to painless dentistry, and those friends that visited her showered me with thanks.
I realize that small hands isn’t exactly a change most dentists can easily make to create more buzz around their practice, but every business needs to think about the experiences they create for their customers each day and determine if they are the type that will get people talking.
Of course, customer experiences can be both good and bad, so businesses need to look across every customer touch point to determine if they are creating conversation. Over the holidays, like millions of other Americans, I did a lot of my shopping online. The downside, of course, is that not every online purchase turns out exactly as expected. I purchased $175 on clothing at one particular online store which all turned out to be too big. When I returned it (albeit just after the 30-day window) they wouldn’t refund my money and offered me instead a merchandise credit with a rather short timeframe for purchase. This isn’t the first time I’ve had issues with this particular company, but I can assure you it will be the last. With service-oriented competitors like Nordstom and Zappos out there, why would I do business with a company seemingly hell-bent on making my life difficult? They have definitely created conversation, because I’ve told at least four friends about the experience and urged them not to buy from this company. That’s relatively mild since statistics show that the average person will share a bad customer experience with ten people while only sharing an extraordinary experience with one or two.
So, let’s figure out what it takes to do extraordinary experience marketing. At Webolutions, we advise our clients to consider the N.U.D.E. model, but not the “nude” you might be thinking about. In our vernacular, N.U.D.E. stands for:
- Novelty: Is the experience surprisingly different in an enjoyable way?
- Utility: Are you conveying a breadth of services that would be of interest to my circle of acquaintances?
- Dependability: Is the experience consistent every time?
- Economy: Is the value I receive from the experience worth what I pay?
Let’s look at some examples. Imagine a pizza delivery experience so cool, that folks in Denver are buzzing about a restaurant in Dubai. Now that’s the power of experience marketing. Red Tomato pizza went beyond the ordinary refrigerator magnet employed throughout the pizza delivery trade by creating a VIP magnet with a built-in, wi-fi based one-button ordering application so that when their customers feel the urge for pizza, they just go to the fridge and press the button. Take a look.
Now you don’t have to go halfway around the world to find good examples of experience marketing. One restaurant I visited during Denver’s recent $52.80 Restaurant Week has placed their full wine list on iPads so that diners can access more background information on each wine before making their selection. It was both useful and fun, and our wine was delicious!
But great experience marketing doesn’t have to require investments in expensive technology. Let’s go back to the dentist. On a recent visit, the receptionist greeted me by name when I walked in the door and told me how funny and bright she thinks my sons are (they had both been in a few weeks earlier). While in the chair for a cleaning, I was asked what music I preferred and if I wanted a hand massage—WOW, the gold standard used to be a free toothbrush!
How to Use This Information
Conduct an honest mental evaluation of the experience you are creating for your customers. Think about the different stages of your interactions with them. Are you creating an overall experience that they would be excited to tell five other people about? Remember that just delivering a good quality product or service, as your customer expects, is not creating an experience. You have to move well beyond their expectations. Imagine what you can do to enhance the experience before, during and after each interaction for your customers.
Whatever you choose, make sure your customers can depend on it each and every time by training all your team on the customer experience you wish to create and helping them understand their role in making it happen.
If you are creating amazing experiences in your business, please share how you are doing this in the comments area below. If you would like to learn more about how Webolutions can help you design an experience marketing program that will give you a competitive advantage, give us a call at 303-300-2640.
