Ways to Create Word-of-Mouth Marketing with Vanessa Joy
You always hear that cliché, don’t you? The best marketing is word-of-mouth. Well, sure, not having to pay for marketing is great. But how do you get people talking about you without paying them to do it?
At a not-so-recent photography conference panel I was on, someone asked Prince McClinton, the founder of an amazing Instagram account called Art of Visuals, how to get clients talking about you. His response was so simple as to seem obvious: “Be amazing.”
On the surface, that’s just as vague as people telling you to go out and get word-of-mouth advertising, isn’t it? But when you really start to think about it, those two words tell you everything you need to know to figure out this whole word-of-mouth thing. What does it mean to be amazing? How do you stand out from the next photographer? That’s what I want to talk about in this article. And I bet if you think about it yourself, you’ll come up with some ways to be amazing that I don’t even mention. Because you know what? You are amazing!
Under Promise and Over Deliver
A lot of people want to hype themselves up to clients. They think this is the best way to close the sale. Maybe it helps that sale, but it doesn’t help the longevity of your business. When you oversell yourself, you are likely to underwhelm the customer. Even if you promise them the moon and somehow manage to give it to them, you’ve only succeeded in matching the expectations that you yourself created for them.
That’s why it’s important to do the opposite. Under promise, and then over deliver. Let’s say you know that you can get photos delivered to a customer in two to three weeks. Tell them that it will take four. You know you are going to get it to them faster, but they don’t know that. They’ll have their expectations set low and you’ll exceed those expectations for them every time. Of course, you must be intelligent with this strategy. If you tell them it’ll take a year to get the photos and deliver them in two weeks, they’ll probably be happy, but that happiness isn’t going to overshadow their initial disappointment at your ridiculous time frame. Like most good things, practice this tip in moderation.
