How to Inspire Customers to Tell Your Brand Story

Be a Story Maker

Imagine your consumers being so genuinely excited about your upcoming event that they are tweeting and talking about it a full year ahead of time.
You can absolutely achieve this. Michael Stelzner, the Founder and CEO at Social Media Examiner, has fine-tuned the art of putting on fantastic events that draw eager crowds and lots of media and consumer coverage. He’s all about connection, early engagement, and crafting memorable experiences for his consumers.
When you build excitement, value, and provide the space for sharing, consumers can quickly become brand advocates.
Michael also chats with us about setting up opportunities for organic growth, grabbing engagement early, the importance of exceeding expectations, the struggle against algorithms, the growing value of micro-niche markets, and how to create your own fun.
And Michael says it best himself, “I just knew that if we could create an incredible experience that exceeds people’s expectation for networking, for the content itself, and for the fun component, they would just be talking about it constantly.”

In This Episode

• Why excitement can be such a valuable tool for a marketer
• How to create an environment for sharing your brand story easily
• Why exceeding consumer expectations is essential to ‘wow’ them
• How to plan and get around constantly tightening algorithms
• Why starting consumer engagement early is key to creating buzz
• How to set up a solid digital home base to communicate to your consumers

Quotes From This Episode

“I think we’re going to see a rebirth of content, the creation of content.” —@Mike_Stelzner
“Part of what you want to try to do is wow people. You want to kind of exceed expectations.” —@Mike_Stelzner
“We’re not going to worry so much about the number of fans we have. We’re going to worry about how many customers we have.” —@Mike_Stelzner

“I’ve got to tell you, this is something that anybody that’s selling anything that has any level of excitement for their customers can do. Because after someone’s finally decided to make a purchase, they’re generally pretty pumped that they’re going to be attending or receiving something. It’s at that moment that you can just simply share your excitement. We use Click to Tweet and we just have a simple little tweet they craft.” —@Mike_Stelzner

“The thing that mattered the most—what I discovered the most—if you’re trying to sell an event, [is that] there’s no better way to sell an event than to activate the people at the event to help evangelize the next event.” —@Mike_Stelzner
“Those that decide to play ball in the early days can be quite successful, but it’s not a sustainable long-term plan. That’s why having a podcast that is ultimately fed from your website and having a blog that is fed from your website and having video that is on your own website area all things that you can control. Instead of going for big numbers, I think we’re going to see a lot of marketers going for the smaller, micro-niche communities.” —@Mike_Stelzner

Resources

• Michael Stelzner
• Michael Stelzner on Twitter, @Mike_Stelzner
• Social Media Examiner
• Social Media Marketing World
• Ezine
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Bizzabo
• “The Hero’s Journey,” by Joseph Campbell
• “Your DIY Guide to Crafting and Telling Compelling Brand Stories that Sell,” by Park Howell
• BusinessofStory.com
• Park@BusinessOfStory.com