Viral Marketing for Building Professionals
A couple of months ago, Rob Faraj (GQ’s VP of Engineering) forwarded me an excellent article from Nisan Gabbay on viral marketing for web businesses. The article proposes some requirements for a web business to be an “over-night success”–or more plainly stated, “attract millions of monthly unique visitors in less than two years time.” Gabbay asserts that many of the big web successes of recent years have been “viral” services, “where each new user must involve friends to derive personal value from the service.”
While GuildQuality’s members don’t need to involve other building professionals to “derive personal value” from our service, the value we bring to each of our members certainly increases the more builders, remodelers, and real estate developers there are contributing to our database of customer satisfaction information. So the article was a nice reminder of some of the reasons I started GQ in the first place, and it resulted in the re-launch of our Build the Guild program.
It also got me thinking about how building professionals market themselves. Some of our folks have been preparing for a presentation on the relationship between customer satisfaction, value, brand, and sales. The more we discussed the relationship, the more I began to appreciate that those that deliver an exceptional customer experience are inadvertantly marketing themselves in much the same way as viral web businesses like YouTube or Flickr: Customers want to share with other customers the experience they had with XYZ Homebuilders.
But, while the building industry may have been doing this for decades, the big-brained folks at YouTube and Flickr still have something to teach us: They’ve made it EASY to share. In fact, sharing that experience is part-and-parcel to the customer’s transaction. For example, I post a picture to Flickr, I add a description so I can easily find it again, and I invite a few friends and family members to check it out. Next thing you know, my friends are using Flickr and sharing their photos, etc, etc.
So here’s my question for you: What are you doing to make it EASY for your customers to share with others the positive experiences they’ve had with your business?