Be Your Company’s Biggest Fan

There is a very British habit of running a perfectly good company and then describing it as though you are slightly embarrassed by it.

• “We do a bit of work in that area.”
• “We’re not too bad.”
• “We’ve been going a few years.”

This is charming at lunch. It is less useful when you are trying to win customers, who are unlikely to become excited about a company that appears faintly apologetic about existing.

Enthusiasm is useful information

Being your company’s biggest fan does not mean declaring that everything is brilliant. It means knowing what is genuinely worth caring about.

• Perhaps you have made your sample-request process much easier.
• Perhaps your website now explains a difficult service clearly.
• Perhaps your booking system saves customers ten minutes of faffing around.
• Perhaps you have developed a smarter way of doing something your competitors still make unnecessarily awkward.

Photo: Mikhail Nilov / Pexels

Those details matter because enthusiasm is contagious when it is specific.

• “Excellent customer service” tells us nothing.
• “We redesigned the whole request process because customers kept emailing the wrong product codes” tells us quite a lot.

One is marketing wallpaper. The other is a story.

Give people something to repeat

The best marketing often happens when you are not in the room. Someone asks a customer whether they know a company that can help, and your customer has about ten seconds to remember you and explain why. They will not recite your mission statement.

They might say:

• “They built us a much simpler booking system.”
• “They actually understand how our business works.”
• “Their newsletter is always worth reading.”
• “They sorted the website out properly.”

Photo: Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels

That is what you want: not just awareness, but a usable sentence.

A newsletter is a small act of confidence

• A good newsletter says: we have noticed something useful, and we think it is worth sharing.
• A good blog says: we have thought about this properly.
• A good website says: this is who we are now, not who we were when the site was launched during the first lockdown.

None of this requires becoming an influencer, filming motivational videos before breakfast or using the phrase “delighted to announce” every Thursday. It simply means showing customers that you care about the work, the details and the outcome.

Do that often enough and customers may become fans — not the scarf-waving kind, but the commercially useful kind who remember you, trust you and mention your name to somebody else.