- [Announcer] Brittany Hodak.
(upbeat music)
- So let's say for someone listening to this,
they're entrepreneurs, they're running companies,
how do they, what do they need to do,
what are the steps, what are some strategies
that you teach them to create superfans?
- So one strategy that I like to teach is something
I call the WAVE method, W-A-V-E, like wave,
or like.
- Yeah, like, like a concert, right.
- Exactly, yeah.
Okay, I get it, I get it, yes.
- [Brittany] Or a football game and doing the wave.
- Wave, yes, I got it.
- Yeah, right, there's a lot of great energy around
the word wave.
It can mean a lot of different things.
Usually energy is part of the meaning of the word, right.
But I use WAVE as an acronym.
It's a little bit like Maslov's hierarchy of needs.
If you think about that, you know the Maslov's pyramid.
- Right.
- We all know so well, you gotta have the physiological,
and then the safety and then it goes up from there.
- Right.
- So I think that superfandom is the same thing.
You've gotta have a base.
I use the acronym WAVE to help people remember that
you've got to make people feel Welcome.
- Welcome. - Appreciated.
- Appreciated.
- Validated.
- And Engaged.
- Okay.
- Right, welcome, appreciated, validated, and engaged
for them to become a fan of what you're doing.
And just like Maslov, it starts at the bottom.
If somebody doesn't feel welcome, they're not going
to feel appreciated, and if they don't feel appreciated,
they're not going to feel validated, and if they don't
feel validated, they're not going to be engaged.
So you've got to do each of these things.
You've got to be conscious about taking people up
through each one of these levels to get to the point
of engagement.
And once you've got engaged customers buy into your why,
they buy into what it is that you're doing,
you've connected your story to their story in a very
tangible way that they understand.
Those are the engaged consumers that begin to have
a spillover effect, right.
They start to make referrals for you.
They start to help you get these really highly qualified
in bound new customers based on the strength of your brand,
based on the strength of the business you've done
with them already.
So that's one of the methods that I teach people, WAVE,
to think about making sure that,
and a lot of people would say, oh, I would never make
a customer feel unwelcome and you probably consciously
wouldn't, right, like a lot of business people would say,
yeah, I would never want to make people feel unwelcome.
But I say well have you ever maybe posted something
on a personal social page or on your blog that you thought
was really funny but maybe to somebody from a different
background wouldn't be so funny.
- Yes.
- How do you think that makes them feel?
It doesn't make them feel welcome, right.
- Yes.
- And the same thing with appreciation.
I think we've all been in situations before where
we haven't felt appreciated by a business, right.
- Yes.
- Commodities are notorious for this and utilities
are notorious for this about making people feel like
they're just one of a million people, right.
Like I don't appreciate you as a customer.
Validation, again there's an amazing quote from Oprah
on the power of validation.
She says she's interviewed over 30,000 people and
every single one of them has been looking for that
exact same thing, and that's validation.
- [Dan] Yes.
- They want to know, I hear you, I feel you,
what you're saying matters to me.
A great quote from Oprah, no I can't take credit for that.
But validation and then the E is for Engaged.
If you do these things and you build it up correctly
and you give people a platform to engage with your brand,
they absolutely will.
That's sort of the basic of how you start to go about
creating a superfan strategy.
- How does that tie to let's say social media,
because I know you work with all different companies,
you do keynotes.
A lot of companies even now they're still very much
very corporate, very like faceless, right, that
here's my product, you buy my product and that's it.
There's no story, you know.
I definitely want to ask you the next question
about how storytelling ties into all this.
But how does the concept of superfan,
how does that tie to social media,
and in terms of bigger company, who they have a brand,
they have a logo, it doesn't have a ton of emotions
around that and that doesn't create superfans,
what's your take on that?
- Well first I would challenge you to say that just
because you have a logo, you don't have a brand, right.
- That's right.
Like you might have a business,
but a logo does not make a brand.
- 100% - I think that's one of the
principles of marketing that a lot of people get wrong.
- Yes.
- They think, oh, I'm doing enough.
I would say, you perhaps don't have a brand
if you don't have a personality on social media.
Because people buy from people, right.
- Yes.
- People don't buy from companies.
People buy from people.
- Yes.
- And people want stories that they connect with.
So if your business isn't relating to people in a very
personal way perhaps you don't have as strong a brand
as you think you do.
Perhaps those people might be a little more likely
to try a competitor than you think they are.
You might not have them locked as you think you do.
- Yeah, it makes sense.
And then in my mind, like I say the same thing,
people buy from people, right.
Where you don't want just a transactional relationship,
right, you buy something, you sell something, and that's it,
we want a transformational relationship.
Now it's the beginning of a relationship where, okay,
now we've done business, you enjoyed the experience,
you enjoyed the product, now how do we cultivate
that relationship and take it to the next level, right.
And that's how you get all the referrals and
that's how you have all the customers coming back
and buying more from you again and again, right.
So it's, I know it sounds such a basic concept,
but I agree with you most companies don't think about it.
And I think you brought a very, very important point out
I want to make sure that our listeners get this.
It's about competitor, right, that prove your business.
Because in terms, I take relationship what I do.
They say in terms of teaching sales and closing,
how many people teach sales?
How many people teach closing?
How many books are out there on Amazon, right?
But how many people who teaches closing,
who maybe is an Ironman fan, who is a Bruce Lee fan,
who has my immigrant story?
Then there's only one.
Right. - Exactly.
You're uncopiable.
- Right and that's why I started, what makes you
gives you that edge in the marketplace?
So Brittany, what about storytelling?
In terms of success, I'm entrepreneur, I want to create
more superfans.
What do you recommend?
I want to kind of get my name out there more.
I want to build my brand more.
What are some of the stories that I should share
with my audience to create the connection?
- So, there's not one stock answer,
because everybody is different.
Every entrepreneur is different, every company
is different.
What I always say is the most important story
isn't yours, the most important story is that of your
potential customer, right.
Your job is to figure out the points of intersection
between your story and their story.
Where is that in the Venn diagram,
like that circle in the middle?
- Yeah.
- That's what you're trying to get to, is the overlap.
So it's probably not one story that you're going
to be telling as an entrepreneur.
- Yes.
- It may be a collection of five, or six, or eight
different stories that have some overlapping themes.
But you're going to tell a different story
based on the audience because you want to connect
with them, right.
So you're looking for points of commonality,
you're looking for things you have in common.
As people we inherently like people who we perceive
to be like us
more. - Yes.
- Because we, it's like a safety thing, right.
- Yeah.
- It's like a physiological, oh, I have something in
common with that person.
- Yes.
- And we like it.
We get that little shot of dopamine,
or whatever it is to our brain.
- Yes.
- But that's what you're trying to do.
You're looking for points of connection.
So if you're just telling the same story out there
to everybody, you're not going to connect as well
as you can.
It's just like, you know, a restaurant that has one thing
on the menu.
Yeah, like, maybe I'll go there when I want mac and cheese
because they have great mac and cheese,
but if I want more people to come on a more regular basis,
I've got to have more than one thing on the menu.
- Right, right.
And how has the shift in terms of when you work
with companies that they maybe they do just advertising,
do traditional marketing, how does the concept superfan,
like how do you, how do they integrate this,
in terms of, okay, so storytelling,
being more on social media, okay,
they get that, but what else could they do?
- So, you know, it's really the first thing
that I always tell companies to do is figure out
who your ideal customer avatar is.
Who is it that you want to be the superfan?
Because you're never going to get everybody, right.
- Yes.
- And that's something a lot of people like to say,
oh, you know, I have a product that applies
to everyone.
Well if you have a product that applies to everyone,
you're never going to be the best to anyone, right.
You can do anything, but you can't do everything.
I don't know who said that, but I think that's
the best saying ever.
You can do anything, but you can't do everything.
- Yes.
- So the first thing you've got to do is figure out
who it is that you're uniquely qualified to serve
in a really fantastic way.
- Yes.
- Then once you've got that avatar in place,
that's when you can start doing the ground work
to figure out how you're going to make these customers
feel like I was talking about, who are welcome,
appreciated, validated, engaged.
What does your superfan strategy look like?
- That makes sense.
I love the WAVE because it's so easy to remember, right.
Welcoming I think is also sometimes like you said,
where the welcome's not just, hey, it's more after
even they've done business with you,
or the minute they've done business with you,
they feel ignored.
Sometimes we buy from businesses, now after I paid them
the money, like that's it.
You don't hear from them again.
There's no thank you, there's nothing, right.
- Yeah, yeah, people don't have a strategy for
after the click.
Or they think they have a strategy for after the click,
but it's really just a follow up when they want
something, right.
Like they want a referral, or they want a review
or they want something else.
Like we've all got that friend who only reaches out
when they need something.
- That's right.
- Don't be that person, don't be the person who only
reaches out to your customers when you need something
from them because that's how you build a relationship.
That's how you build a very, like, one way
- Yeah, we all know that that friend calls
and you say, okay, what do you want.
You know that, just tell me exactly what you want.
Like, just cut the BS, right.
It's always that kind of relationship.
You know, you don't want to spend time with that person.
You don't want to hang out with that person.
It's exactly like that.
What about in terms of, does this apply just for the
service business, or does this also apply
for product business?
- This certainly applies to the product business as well.
This applies to anybody who wants to get referrals.
Certainly product and service businesses are different.
Also depends on the cost point of the product
that you're looking to sell, but certainly
this is applicable to everyone
because as you said before the cost of acquiring
a customer is typically so much higher
than the cost of keeping a customer,
especially if that customer is referring
new customers to you.
- And customers they have now so many more choices.
It's nothing new unless you have some breakthrough
technology, but for most of us it's nothing new
under the sun, right.
They can buy this product from you,
they can probably have like 10, 20 other choices.
You could argue, your product is better and you've been
in business longer, and all these things, but at the end
of the day, people have a lot of choices.
It's good and bad.
When you do have more choices, then it forces all of us
to be elevated to be better, right.
- Exactly, yeah.
I mean that's going to continue to be the story, right.
Like we live in an age of technology.
We live in a world where everyone is forced to up their game
constantly just to compete.
That's, I saw a really great stat the other day
in a Forbes article and it said the cost of people
switching businesses is 75 billion dollars a year.
75 billion dollars is lost from people switching
from one company to another because of
poor customer service.
And 67% of people in that same study said that they had
switched companies within the past year because of a
poor customer service experience.
- Oh, wow, oh, wow.
- 75 billion dollars, right, and two-thirds of people
who say if I have a bad experience, I'm going to switch.
Like that's the high stakes.
We're at a point where again, it's like great customer
service is no longer something that's nice to have.
It's the cost of entry.