Neal is the author of tons of amazing marketing books (and speaker of 3 languages), this guy is really a jack of all trades. He knows it all. We are SO lucky to have him here today to give us some more ways we can try to use social strategies and social media to grow and connect with our audience.
One of the best forms of marketing (because it’s free!), word of mouth has shown to be insanely powerful in drawing in people to check out your product or service. People are more inclined to investigate a brand when they have other people encouraging them and telling them how great you are. It’s extremely powerful, but could be harder to ignite than you may think.
How do you get people to tell their friends about your product, more than just the “check out blah blah blah” you’re used to putting at the end of every video or social post? One word:
Collaboration.
As Neil puts it, “If you want to utilize social media marketing not as paid media, but you truly want to insight word of mouth marketing which is the original intent of it. You have to collaborate with people”.
The more people you collaborate with, the farther reach you have to people who may have not been aware of you before. Easy peasy!
In today’s highly social world, followers and subscribers hold massive value. The more followers a person has, the greater their influence and the more people their messages can reach. This is extremely important for businesses, where their main goal is trying to be seen by as many people as possible.
Being more influential than your competition will make other people with a high amount of followers want to work with you, over someone with a very small following and low engagement.
Confused? Neal explains, “If you want to work with an influential business, you need to become more influential, because influencers want to work with other influencers. I would much rather work with Coca Cola than some beverage company I’ve never heard of. It’s credibility and social proof as an influencer”. Make sense now?
The more followers you are able to attract, plus the more you focus on boosting up your engagement, the more influential you become and thus the more sought after you seem. Even though we may not like to admit it, having followers and getting lots of likes makes you seem important. Which is why it is so important for brands to focus on making their social media platforms as polished as possible.
I’ll leave you with one amazing quote from Neil that ties both word of mouth marketing and influence together: “If you want to insight word of mouth marketing, where does word of mouth come from? It comes from your customers. Why don’t we treat your customers like influencers and find ways of encouraging them to help spread that word of mouth, which very few companies do.”
But hey, if you want to hear more of the greatness he shared, go ahead and listen to his episode of Lately Live here: https://bit.ly/3dCaeRt
Neal has been helping both professionals and businesses utilize everything they can to reach maximum success for years and years. You can learn more about him and all his awesomeness here on his website: https://nealschaffer.com/social-media-speaker-neal-schaffer/. Also you can take a look at the 5 amazing books he’s released here: https://www.amazon.com/Neal-Schaffer/e/B002R440WQ/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1.
