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This hack is so powerful, that you’ll get WAY more word-of-mouth, without even having to ask your clients for the referrals! The answer… Branded Party Invitations! And, it’s A LOT easier to do than you think 🙂
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: this transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate
Hello. Hello, party animals. Today we’re going to do a quick mini training on how to get more word of mouth going for your party business and your children’s entertainment business now. The reason this is on my mind is because earlier this week or recently, I should say we did. We had a big conversation going in our Facebook group, the Party Business Think Tank, and we were talking about how do your clients typically find you? And one of the answers that came up over and over and over again was word of mouth, which is awesome. All right. That means you’re doing a good job and people are spreading your name. Now, in my experience, not having worked with hundreds of children’s entertainers and getting the opportunity to look under the hood of their businesses, one of the trends I have noticed actually is a big mistake. People are making this. Leaving a lot of money and opportunity on the table is that they are taking a very passive approach to word of mouth marketing. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing tools out there. But if you’re passive about it and you’re not proactive about it, you are missing out on so much opportunity. OK, so how it typically looks to a lot of people is they think but do an amazing job and I pour my heart and soul into my service. People will talk about it, and that is true. Some people will talk about it, but there are things you could do proactively to encourage more people to talk about you even more. OK. And if we could do that to me, it’s just silly to not take that opportunity, right?
I don’t know about you, but when my livelihood depends on something, I want to be proactive. I want to be in the driver’s seat. I want to be in control of the situation to the extent that it’s possible. And I want to do everything in my power to make sure that as many good things are happening for my business as possible. So that’s why we’re going to be talking about it right now. We’re not going to belabor the point too much here, but let’s look at the power of word of mouth marketing. I think we can all appreciate this one. If you book a single party and that’s all you have is a single party, right? But when word of mouth starts kicking in, all of a sudden, let’s say I booked a party for Elvis here, and Elvis liked what I did. He might tell his friends, Simon and Garfunkel, about my party. You might have told 10 friends, but only two of them being Simon and Garfunkel decided to take the plunge and also book me right? And if they loved what I did and they want to share about, I mean, they might tell 10 friends each. And in that case, I might end up with another bunch of clients, right? So John, Paul, George and Ringo may book me. So out of the 20 people that both Simon and Garfunkel talked about me now, I might end up with another four clients. And then this cycle and this trend continues on and on and on and on, it becomes this opportunity for exponential growth for your business. But this doesn’t happen if you don’t have a strategy in place to make sure it happens. And what happens when you don’t have that strategy is that Elvis may or may not tell people about your service. And if he doesn’t, all that opportunity that you could have had is gone and you’re left with just the one party, and the situation you find yourself in is now you got to scratch and claw and do whatever it takes to find another Elvis to book another party and booking one party at a time like that is much harder than booking a party that has an opportunity for exponential growth. Right? And it’s a system and a machine that just feeds itself after that.
OK, so we want to make sure that this isn’t what it looks like for you, but rather it looks more like this for you. OK, now let’s talk again about why word of mouth marketing is so powerful a little bit. Let’s dig a little deeper in, you know, in that first sale where you’re just trying to sell you to a potential client who maybe has never heard of you before, right? You don’t have the trust factor. They don’t necessarily know you and like you and trust you already. And so making this sale is a much harder than if they already knew you liked you and trusted you. Right now, there are a group of people who do already know you like you and trust you because you’re doing an awesome job, delivering an amazing service, right? And those are your clients. So these people already have that trust in you. All right. Now the question is, who do your clients already have that trust with as well? And so if we go one step further? Your clients have that trust factor with their friends. Right? So if I’m friends with somebody or I’m related to somebody, my friends and family or the people I go to first, when it comes time to figure out what who I should book for any service right or where I should buy a product for any product, I always go to my network first. And so when you leverage word of mouth marketing, the trust that your client has between them and their friends and family is automatically transferred over to you. And so making that sale now, you’re now doing it with that trust factor, and it makes a world of difference in how easy and how effective your sales strategies will be.
OK, so the real question now is how how do we get the clients that we have spreading our name? How do we be more proactive about it, right? And there are three different categories of. Motivators you could use to try and get your clients to spread your name all over town. There are three separate categories and as you can see here, there is some overlap between the categories as well.
So the first category, let’s pull this one up here is the functional category. So this is when you do things within your service built into your offering that are very functional. There are functional value to your client, but also happen to spread your name all over town. I’m going to give you some examples of what I mean by that in just a second, right? That’s just the first category.
The second type of motivator is going to be things that are a status or a relationship builder. So people like to have status. It’s feeding our ego. Maybe they like to be helping to people that they that they love and that they know. So friends and family? So what can you do to help build their status and help build their relationships with their friends and family? And how can you do it in a way that spreads your name all over town? That’s the second motivating category.
The third category, and this is maybe the most obvious one is rewards, right? So I give you a thing. You do a thing. For me, there’s a transaction that’s taking place and we’re good. OK. So that’s the third category. So we have our functional motivators or status in relationship motivators and our rewards motivators. All right. So let’s look at some examples of what these might look like. So if we go to our first one, we’re going to look at the functional ones first. So here we have our, you know, things that are built into our experience or things that are of functional value to our clients that also spread our names. So the first example I’d give you is branded invitations. So if you have a way of of offering them electronic and printable invitations that have your logo, your colors, your images, your contact info but done in a way that’s better than any other invitation method they have available to them, they’ll use it, and now they’re spreading your name all over town. Right?
So that is one strategy within the functional category. And if you’re if that intrigues you, then reach out to me and I’ll share with you the tools I use to do that right. Branded giveaways is another awesome functional motivator when it comes to word of mouth. So what I mean by that is, let’s say, as an example, you offer loop bags or goodie bags, or it may not be something that you charge for. It might just be a free giveaway that you that you give out. If it’s done in a really creative way that’s branded and has your contact info and people are excited to hand this out, excited to receive it. That is now spreading your name all over town in a way that is functional. OK? And the third example of that is branded photo ops. Let’s say you do a really spectacular thing in your shower in your event, and there’s a great opportunity for a picture. Be strategic about where you’re standing and how you’re set up for that picture. Make sure you’re right in front of your backdrop with your logo and your contact information because what’s going to happen is and tell the crowd, this is your chance. Get your cameras ready, get people taking those pictures because what will happen is they’ll take the picture. And if it’s not good of a photo op, they will share it on social media and all of their friends are going to see this thing that looks almost like an advertisement. But it isn’t because it’s just their friend sharing this awesome picture of this awesome thing that they already trusted, which means that your those people seeing it are going to be thinking, Oh, it was good enough for them. Maybe it’s good enough for me too. I should look into that one. All right.
So branded photo ops is another example of a very functional way to get more word of mouth marketing. All right. Let’s look at the next category here. The status and relationships. I remember I talked about this being ego being relationship building type stuff. So if, for example, you’re known as a premium, high caliber, high quality brand, high quality company, that might be something that motivates people to want to brag to other people that they got you, that they booked you. If you’re known as the best in town and not by your own standard, but by your reputation, and that’s what people are saying of you, then that’s going to motivate people to want to brag about the fact that they had you OK. And of course, if you’re doing an outstanding job and I mean high quality service right the way through from the moment they reach out to you, to the moment the event is done and you followed up high, high quality service, then when their friends and family are looking for a service like yours, you can bet that they’re going to be right there recommending that they book you right just based on their experience alone. So think about things you can do that are going to help people boost their ego, boost their status and boost their ability to help those that they have close relationships with.
All right, the next category is the rewards category. So let’s reveal what that means. So this is the most obvious one. These are the incentives. These are free upgrades. Sometimes people use discounts. I mean, it’s share with you in a second way. I don’t recommend discounts, necessarily, but essentially this is saying if you do this, spread my name all over town or share, share this with five friends, then I will offer you this write or post this on your social media and you will get this. Things like that right now. The reason I don’t. Love discounts here, and there are other reasons that I don’t love discounts, but with regards to word of mouth in particular, when it comes to rewards, the perceived value of the reward has to be at least equal or greater than the perceived cost of whatever it is you’re asking them to do. So, yes, you know, passing an email along to five of my friends is of no actual cost to me. But I know on some level I’m interrupting my friends with this message, and I don’t really want to do that unless it’s worth it to me, unless it’s worth my time, unless it’s worth the hassle, right? So the perceived value of the offer has to be at least equal or greater than better if it’s greater than the perceived cost of the thing you’re asking me to do. All right. So that’s the big thing when it comes to rewards. Now, when you look at a discount, if you tell me I’m getting a $50 discount, the perceived value of that is $15. No matter how you slice it, it’s always going to be $15. That’s all it could be worth to me, right? Whereas if you say, OK, you’re going get this free upgrade or we can do this free premium add on for you, don’t worry, no charge. If you do this thing, the perceived value of that could be way higher than $15. And the actual cost of that could be way lower than $15 to me. So this is why discounts aren’t a great option when it comes to rewards. I much prefer value add that will have high perceived value.
OK, now, as I mentioned earlier, there are some crossover areas, right? And so we’re not going to break down every single one of them right now. But just to give you an example of one, let’s reveal what this one says. So here’s an example Refer a friend and you both get a reward. So do you see how this is tying in both the rewards category motivator and the status and relationships motivator? So I’m going to get this reward. Whatever it is, it’s it’s the free add on or the free upgrade and the free premium, whatever. But if I do this thing, not only will I get it, but my friends will get it too. So now I could go to my friend and say, Look, you got to check out this company. They’re awesome that I’m booking them for this, that the other. And if you book them, tell them, I sent you because you’re going to get this special add on a reward or whatever it is. And that becomes a status and relationship builder. So there is that crossover area. All right. So this is what I want you thinking about thinking about this big picture. I really hope this gets your mind racing and thinking about different ideas of what you could do that go across all of these different motivator categories. OK, because what we want is we don’t want you fighting through and clawing your way through this relationship all the time when this one is available to you. And not only is this available to you or that trust is transferred over to you. But we saw it has exponential opportunity for growth. OK, so let’s get this rolling here now.
I just wanted to say on behalf of both myself and Adam and everyone at the Party Business Growth Solutions team, thank you for watching this video. Thank you for tuning in. Our mission, as always, is just to help party business owners like you grow their business as rapidly as possible. OK, so if you’re not sure where to get started, oops, sorry about that. If you’re not sure where to get started on your your journey for growing your business. The best first step I can recommend and this is absolutely free, so this is a really simple thing for you to do, is we have what’s called the party business growth quiz. So you go to partybusinessgrowth.com/quiz. So I have it up on the screen for you right now. You go there, it walks you through a pretty quick quiz and it’ll help identify for you your opportunity, your greatest opportunity for growth within your business. All right. So it’ll get your mind going, and I’ll get you thinking about your business in a different way, and it’ll help identify a score for you and show you this is the area to work on first, because this is your opportunity for greatest improvement. OK, so go ahead. Take the quiz. If you have any questions below this video, I’m going to drop a link on how to reach out to me and our team. So if you want to reach out, reach out any time. Let’s get the conversation going. We’re here to help you. You can always join us in our Facebook group, the party business think tank. And that’s it. Wishing everybody good luck and party on.
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