Creating compelling and motivating marketing messages can be one of the most difficult parts of getting a product or service company noticed in the crowded marketplace. Most marketers and business owners feel that whatever they are promoting is valuable and they just need the right message and medium to communicate the value effectively. Yet when it comes time to create the actual message, most people end up settling for either an over simplified (see meaningless) message and blasting it across what ever medium they can afford, or they create an over complicated message (see confusing) and distribute to a very narrow audience. Of course, they end disappointed and frustrated by the lack of response that either route produces. Then income the experts with many different reasons why the efforts failed and many hindsighted examples of marketing that produced stellar results. Case studies are all well and good, but unless they are translated into results they are educational and nothing more.

So why are some product and service companies so effortlessly successful in capturing the people’s attention and creating widespread buzz, admiration, and passionate users?

On the most basic level, their approach was the antithesis of traditional advertising and marketing. The starting point of the massive success of recent companies such as Google, Vitamin Water, eBay, and Crocs, was simply a product or service that solved a common and under-served need. Once they had established that their offering was perceived as a favorable solution, they pretty much got out of the way and let the forces of human nature take hold, where satisfied people went around and told others about their experiences. It’s important, albeit obvious, to note that the solution to creating great marketing messages is not to build the next Google/eBay/Vitamin Water/Crocs; that would be nice, but it’s just not happening.

Reverse Construction
While we cannot expect to achieve results on the scale of these great companies, we can use the simple elements of their approach to our marketing advantage by following a simple three step approach:

Step One: Ask - Listen - Record
As a starting point, it is important to find out what exactly your current group of customers like about your product or service. By asking questions you’re hoping to elicit an authentic response, so keeping your questions straight forward, open-ended, and delivered via an actual live conversation is very important. Surveys are good, but people reply to canned questions with canned responses, and canned is never as good as fresh. If you don’t pay close attention to the actual words customers used to describe their experience, you will miss the best part. Customers use common words and phrases in conversation, which are both authentic and easily understood, and therefore far more believable and relevant to others. As the marketer your job is not only to ask questions and listen intently, but to record the actual verbiage of the responses.

Step Two: Capture the Message
Recording the words customers use to describe their experience with your product or service eliminates the need for you to create anything. Whatever they say is going to be more powerful than anything you could have come up with. At this point what you need to do is capture the core message and preserve its authenticity. Don’t boil it down into three meaningless bullet points (i.e easy access, good price, and fast service), and don’t use one long winded testimonial to convey every benefit. Do identify the common benefits in people’s responses and use their words to describe them.

Step Three: Motivate Sharing
People love to share satisfying experiences with others; it makes them feel special and tickles their egos when they are perceived by their peers as being “in the know” and “a step ahead of the pack.” Again your job mostly is to get out of the way, but also to ensure that your customers realize the experience they crave in the process. Making this happen involves finding out what they need to spread the message (i.e filmed testimonials, rewards & recognition, early access to new products, etc.), and delivering the tools that allow them to spread the word.

Having candid conversations with real customers is a very powerful experience for a marketer. Moving away from the developer of messages to that of conduit is the first step in crossing the chasm between advertiser and relevant marketer. The next step in this journey is to further engage your current base of satisfied customers in becoming messengers of your brand. While it may appear that this is a coveted relationship only reserved for the few great companies that have created such remarkable products and services, that the whole process occurs organically, its actually quite simple and accessible.

Of course not everything you hear is going to be glowing but it will be authentic and nothing is more powerful in marketing than trust. The companies that have achieved this level of marketing success are never the ones you see plastered on billboards and on splashy commercials. Mass advertising is a channel reserved for companies whose growth has dwindled and are far farther along in their lifestyle.

For the rest of us, the path to viral, efficient, and authentic marketing communication starts with the consistent delivery of a satisfying customer experience, then the recycling and of the actual words and messages that those first customers use to describe their experience, and finally the act of real people using the many free and personal methods of communication to reach out to their social circles. Its far easier and effective to have others be the creators and messengers of marketing messages than to do it on your own.

Technorati Tags: customer satisfaction, customer experience, relationship marketing, marketing 2.0, referrals, voice of the customer, authentic marketing

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