Looking for an exciting way to reach a specialized audience? Have you considered a social media campaign collaboration?

In this article, you’ll discover how to partner with another brand to promote products and services to your respective audiences.

Why Run Joint Social Media Campaigns?

The pace and competitiveness of social media marketing often narrow our focus to a cycle of making content and then pushing it through platforms of choice using the latest and greatest best practices.

The potential return on building and serving an audience with this approach is significant. However, as we look for more ways to compete and more ways to engage, we should step back to evaluate the full breadth of assets we develop as social media marketers and look to leverage all of them in a unique way.

Your social media audience and the content you create to engage them are more versatile marketing assets than you might realize.

The audience you build isn’t only a pool of customers to target. The content you create isn’t simply a means to engage your audience.

Think of your content as an access road to your audience. If that access road and audience are high quality, other brands will find value in the path you’ve created.

You can use these assets to extend the impact of your marketing through partnerships, cross-promotions, and other off-social marketing activities to reach and deepen your impact with audiences new and old.

5 Types of Joint Campaigns

The heart of this approach to marketing is the classic idea of bartering. Your audience and your content have value, and you can trade that value to another brand to advance your strategic goals.

That said, you must make these trades in a way that doesn’t compromise the integrity of your brand, or the trust you worked so hard to build between your brand and your audience. When a trade is done well, your audience should actually benefit.

From a high-level perspective, these trades usually involve one of the following:

Partnerships: You enter into an agreement (formal or informal) to jointly pursue an objective with another brand for the long-term. Along the way, you share rewards like revenue or leads.

Collaboration: You join forces with another brand to work on a short-term project or campaign, and share the rewards. The popular practice of co-branding falls under this category, though the true scope can be deeper.

Cross-promotion: You and another brand agree to promote each other’s products and services to your respective audiences.

Content placement: You and another brand agree to periodically share each other’s content with your respective audiences.

Value-add: When making a deal with another brand or vendor, you use some level of access to your audience as a negotiating tool.

All of these potential opportunities hinge upon respecting your audience. If one of these opportunities doesn’t bring value to your audience or compromises the trust they placed in you by supporting your brand, you’ll ultimately poison your own well. When successfully executed, however, your audience will celebrate your willingness to innovate and collaborate on their behalf.

Examples of Successful Joint Campaigns

Some of the most successful brands in the world use this strategy to unlock new opportunities for their businesses. To illustrate, Taco Bell partnered with Frito-Lay to produce the Doritos Locos Taco, which sold 450 million units and led to the hiring of 15,000 more people less than a year after its launch, according to Fast Company. Leading up to that success, though, were dozens of iterations where both Taco Bell and Frito-Lay insisted on developing a product that didn’t compromise the quality of their brands.

In other words, the Doritos taco still had to match the experience of eating Doritos. Simply slapping a logo on the packaging would have sabotaged the goals of the partnership for both parties, so they worked together to develop a stellar product experience that got both of their audiences excited.

Campari Group, one of the world’s leaders in spirits with brands like Wild Turkey and Skyy Vodka under its umbrella, ran a campaign where the comic book character Deadpool took over managing the social media accounts for the tequila Espolòn in the runup to the release of the film Deadpool 2. Deadpool made posts, in character, to the Espolòn pages and was featured in a limited-edition Deadpool Espolòn box set.

Dave Karraker, vice president of communications at Campari Group and one of the architects behind the campaign, told me that not only was the campaign designed to generate interest and engagement for Espolòn’s social media, but the product tie-in gave Espolòn access to premium display placement at stores across the United States. At the same time, the Deadpool brand managers were able to build interest in the new film.

Both of these examples show how different brands can come together to serve their audiences in new, beneficial ways. The relationships may be complex and take time to structure, but the joining of forces and the recognition that they’re targeting similar audiences but aren’t competitors are powerful. And their fans benefited just as much as the businesses, because these collaborations and partnerships meant new products and additional entertainment.

Your brand, big or small, has access to similar opportunities.

How to Develop a Brand-to-Brand Relationship

When you look at the landscape of brand-to-brand collaborations, the work between international businesses can make the scale of these marketing campaigns appear out of reach.

Yes, the Deadpool collaboration with Espolòn was the joining of two brand titans, but partnerships don’t have to operate at this scale to be effective. Several small businesses are applying the same principles in myriad ways.

The husband and wife team behind Inverted Gear, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu brand, uses collaboration with martial arts content creators and business owners to tap into new customer markets.

Their diverse strategy includes co-branded apparel products worn by instructors and event organizers, such as a Greenland-themed kimono to celebrate their growing martial arts community. They co-developed content and videos with those instructors as well.

Through Inverted Gear, the martial artists get access to new audiences while Inverted Gear uses the relationships to deepen community ties.

Many of the Inverted Gear relationships with instructors and athletes begin with basic sponsorships and grow into content sharing, product co-branding, and more involved collaborations like documentaries.

Collaborations can also start out as classic social media marketing initiatives.

The PT Services Group, a B2B appointment-setting firm based in Pittsburgh, used thought leadership content developed for industry publications to build new industry relationships. What started as a guest blogging-style relationship grew into industry event invitations and offers for speaking gigs from those publications, all of which were major wins for the PT sales pipeline.

The lesson small businesses should take from these efforts is to start small, and organically explore more opportunities for your brand to share and work with another brand.

The roadmap for your brand might look something like this:

Reach out to a relevant brand in your space and schedule a meeting with their marketing team to discuss how you might be able to help each other.

Explain that you’re looking for more ways to provide your audience great, engaging content and you think your brands might be able to work together to do that for each other. Be candid about your brand goals and challenges, and ask them to be candid about theirs.

Start slowly with a few shared posts and perhaps small pieces of co-developed content. When that content demonstrates traction, suggest that you look for bigger opportunities to work together such as a co-hosted webinar or event, or an exclusive promotion shared with each other’s audiences.

Hold a strategy session to discuss what your brands might be able to do jointly to establish a new competitive advantage in the space. At this stage, it may be worthwhile to establish a formal revenue-sharing agreement of some kind.

Deploy a co-created product or service into the market, or build a big-picture strategic partnership that allows you to share customers and opportunities over the long-term.

What might start as a sponsorship can evolve into regularly sharing each other’s content, which can morph into a co-hosted webinar and eventually into products and services that involve revenue sharing (for instance). At any scale, however, each brand is still bringing something of value to the table, which is usually a mix of content and audience engagement.

How to Plan a Joint Social Media Campaign

Like the rest of your social media marketing strategy, audience bartering should be approached with thoughtful creativity. Not every idea is a good one, and not every potential alliance is a good fit for your brand and your audience. Though the deeper science of branding and brand management are relevant here, we can distill this large topic down into a few key best practices:

Understand the Value of Your Engaged Audience: While you can look at standard rates for CPMs relative to your audience size for an idea of the market value of your audience, don’t forget that the endorsement from your brand (even if it’s passive) has value, and remember that you’re better off overvaluing your audience instead of undervaluing it.

Look for Potential Collaborators Who Serve Your Audience but Aren’t Competitors: To illustrate, Taco Bell and Frito-Lay likely served a similar demographic within the broader food industry, but Taco Bell wasn’t competing with Frito-Lay for shelf space. The audience fit may not always be perfect, especially if you’re looking to break into a new demographic, but some degree of overlap is a good sign.

Never Compromise Audience Trust: When you begin vetting a potential collaborating brand, look for the value it brings to your audience and make sure that the other brand reflects positively on your own. If a potential partner has a reputation for unsavory business practices, your audience won’t think highly of you for working with them.

The Benefits of Collaboration Should Go Both Ways: When the balance of a relationship is skewed, perhaps by one brand getting far more from the deal than the other, the enthusiasm and interest in the engagement can suffer. Look for brands on a similar playing field in terms of size and reach, and develop plans that are a clear win-win.

Put Your Collaboration Plans in Writing and Set Clear Expectations: Coffee-shop handshakes can feel good at the moment, but laying out a detailed version of which party is responsible for what can prevent disagreements later. Depending on your brand, you might look to make this a formal legal document.

View Your Brand Through NASCAR Glasses: In other words, any blank piece of real estate is room for a potential sponsorship logo. While I don’t recommend actually going to that extreme, you might realize that your weekly YouTube video series is a great fit for the right product placement or that your annual client golfing event could be co-branded. Red Bull has used eSports to engage Twitch streamers, eSports fans, and a range of PC brands (such as hardware and peripherals).

Look for Conversation-Worthy Projects: The best campaigns—and this will be second nature for social media marketers—elicit a response in audiences. If you get excited talking about a potential collaboration, your fans might feel the same way. If the idea seems uninspiring to you, your fans are likely to agree.

Here, BuzzFeed partnered with the Best Friends Animal Society to promote super-cute animal content and the worthy cause of helping furry friends.

Savvy marketers will see this list as mostly common sense, but it’s important to articulate and review these points. Even if we understand these ideas intuitively, our teammates might not, and the true stewards of the brand (our clients or senior management), might need to see these guidelines clearly laid out to be comfortable with this approach to marketing. When you make this facet of your marketing process-driven, you can prevent many fires before they even spark.

Conclusion

When you begin to barter for marketing opportunities, treat the dynamic as a new relationship. Start small and grow the collaboration steadily to build comfort between your brands and your respective marketing teams. Instead of beginning the relationship with a mega-partnership where you jointly develop a new product offering, you might start by supporting each other’s events and sharing each other’s content.

This approach is less stressful for all involved, but more importantly, it helps you test and assess your audience’s reaction to the collaboration.

If your audience is entirely uninterested in content from your new collaborator—especially if your social media following has an established history of engagement—that might be a sign that you should look for other brands to work with. If the reaction is positive, you can water those seeds and grow the collaboration into bigger campaigns.

Though there’s potential on this front to make a big splash with limited-run campaigns, the biggest rewards are often the result of careful development over many months and possibly years. Joining forces with an industry publication to educate readers is unlikely to instantly transform your business.

One published article is rarely that intensely remarkable, but if you work with that publication to consistently create and share original, worthwhile content over a full year, your audiences will take notice. And they’ll take more notice if you deploy your other social media marketing best practices by following up engagement with comment activity and audience replies.

In the broadest marketing terms, bartered marketing is another expression of brand community. Communities thrive when leaders work together to build bigger things than they could ever build alone, but a small initiative can begin someplace small and still be meaningful.

The key word here is leader. You have to be willing to step to the front of the pack and initiate a dialogue with potential partners. Though the practice of bartered marketing isn’t new, many marketers are unwilling to leave their properties to begin something new and fresh with someone else. So take the time to nurture your brand and to nurture the new relationships your brand can build.

From here, circle up with your team and develop an inventory of brand assets. Next, generate a list of brands in your space that might make worthwhile partners. Where do you see potential synergy? Send their marketing team a note that says you love their work and you have this idea about how you might be able to help each other.

Something magical might happen after that.

What do you think? Does this inspire you to collaborate with another brand? What tips can you offer? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The $2.8 trillion global e-commerce is forecasted to reach nearly $4.9 trillion by 2021. While that should mean more revenue available for aspiring brands, e-commerce giants risk spoiling the party. Take Amazon, which currently holds over 49 percent of the U.S. e-commerce market, as well as global players like Jingdong, Alibaba, Walmart and others.

With shoppers becoming less loyal to brands, and the vast majority of online stores unable to compete with the price, selection and convenience of businesses with evolved logistics infrastructure, we could (and likely will) see more market share seized by these corporations.

This urgency to raise brand awareness, attract more customers and turn them into repeat buyers often pushes e-commerce stores to become too reliant on particular marketing strategies. This can be especially true with paid acquisition tactics.

But does that mean stores should stay away from paid strategies completely? Let’s discuss.

Should E-Commerce Stores Used Paid Acquisition?

Short answer? Yes! Full answer? It depends. Digital marketing’s wide range of strategies is both a blessing and a curse. It’s hard to find the right marketing channels that bring a return on investment without spending a lot of time and money trying different strategies. Because generally speaking, the potential of any marketing channel depends on the e-commerce store testing it out. Paid acquisition tactics are no different.

What exactly do I mean by paid acquisition?

Paid acquisition involves a company paying when their ads are clicked or when they earn a conversion through a premeditated means. The intentional means could be an SEM ad, a social media post or video, a banner ad on a website, a programmatic ad on a mobile phone — even an affiliate link on a blog that’s relevant to your niche.

The Case for Paid Acquisition Strategies

An overarching case for paid acquisition is that every brand has a sweet spot in a particular marketing channel, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find the winning equation right away. After all, something as juicy as a sustainable paid acquisition channel should be found only through calculated, ongoing experimentation and testing. Otherwise, a lot more e-commerce stores would succeed with less effort.  

Paid acquisition strategies do earn conversions for minimal time spent, However, getting traffic and/or conversions shouldn’t be enough to satisfy e-commerce stores. Any paid marketing channel needs to be scalable in both cost and performance, and ideally, give businesses quality leads that can turn into regular customers. If not, the channel isn’t worth focusing on or allocating substantial budget toward.  

The problem is, some paid strategies work enough to get brands dependent on the source of conversions while shrinking margins in the process. A prime example of this is search engine marketing (SEM). Consider how a small online store that sells furniture on an e-commerce platform like Shopify would navigate the waters. Bidding on SEM ads over time will likely lower the furniture store’s cost-per-acquisition gradually (CPA), but an independent e-commerce store’s budget can’t compete with a large retailer like Wayfair, for example.

However, a compelling paid ad on Instagram or Facebook could garner engagement at a modest cost. Likewise, building an affiliate program or leveraging an existing network is usually cost-effective and speaks to every stage of the buyer journey.

Why Brands Should Focus on Organic Acquisition Strategies Instead

The beauty of organic acquisition strategies isn’t that they’re free. Technically, every acquisition strategy is paid. Optimizing your site to rank well in search engines requires a person (or team) with expertise. The same is true for email marketing, social media management and content marketing. These initiatives are also made easier through the use of different software and tools, all of which typically cost money.

The real hallmark of organic strategies is that they continue to work long after the initial investment. They’re evergreen business drivers. Just don’t assume these strategies are more straightforward to pull off. SEO is an ongoing, nuanced process, but if you can outrank your competition, you’ll benefit from increased brand awareness and traffic on a daily basis. Likewise, creating engaging content on your blog, forming syndication partnerships with strategic brands and placing guest posts on well-trafficked sites will yield regular dividends that paid marketing could never produce without a bloated budget.

There’s also the fact that consumer trust is dwindling across the board. Research from Hubspot found that 69 percent of consumers do not trust advertisements, and 71 percent do not trust sponsored ads on social networks. Conversely, 81 percent trust friends and family over advice from a business. After friends and family, consumers usually seek online reviews, comparison guides and ‘best of’ lists to inform their buying decisions.

A final note before you gameplan how much of your budget to allocate toward paid acquisition methods: consider if what you’re doing is helping both in the short-term and long-term. If you’re burning energy and money only to have the performance of your paid campaign capped at a specific dollar amount, it’s worth taking a step back and prioritizing initiatives that’ll position your business for success down the road without sinking your marketing budget short term.

Wondering how social customer care improves your marketing results? Want tips for acquiring and retaining customers?

To explore why marketers should care about taking care of customers, I interview Shep Hyken.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Shep Hyken, a customer service and experience expert. He’s also a professional speaker and author of multiple books including The Amazement Revolution, Amaze Every Customer Every Time, and The Convenience Revolution. His course is called The Customer Focus, and he hosts The Amazing Business Radio Show podcast.

Shep explains how small- to medium-sized businesses can offer reactive and proactive customer care.

You’ll also discover how humor and convenience help both marketing and customer care.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

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Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

Social Customer Care

Shep’s Story

Shep got his start in customer care when he was about 12 years old. He had a business doing magic shows for birthday parties. After doing a show for a 6-year-old’s party, Shep’s parents offered his first lesson in customer service. His mom told him to write a thank-you note, and his dad suggested he call the family to ask what tricks they liked and improve his show based on their feedback.

When Shep was 16, he bought an old Jeep with a snow plow and started a plowing business. When his Jeep wouldn’t start at 4:00AM after a heavy snow, he couldn’t plow his customers’ driveways. He asked a friend with a newer truck and plow for help, and offered him all the money. That’s when Shep realized he was most interested in taking care of customers.

After college, Shep continued to develop his interest in customer service, and today he’s focused on helping his clients achieve amazing customer experiences. He teaches people common-sense approaches that simplify customer service and improve company culture. He also travels around the world delivering speeches, and his team includes trainers who deliver his material, as well.

Listen to the show to hear Shep discuss his experiences attending and speaking at Social Media Marketing World.

Why Customer Care Is Important to Marketers

Typically, marketers acquire the customer and then let someone else handle customer service. However, acquiring new customers costs more than keeping existing ones. As a marketer, you can benefit from these savings by giving existing customers a reason to share positive things about your company, product, or service.

In doing so, you create disciples, advocates, and evangelists who praise your company. Whether your business is B2B or B2C, people talk about the people they do business with, good and bad. The best marketing you can have is existing customers who tell others about their great experiences.

Using customer care to turn existing customers into brand advocates is different than using a promotion or incentive that gets people to share. When customer care becomes part of your marketing, you’re focused on making sure the customer is completely satisfied so they become return customers and want to tell everyone about your company.

A byproduct of providing this level of customer service is that your company stands out as different from the rest. Being different is great because your company is then no longer competing head-to-head with the same product or service. That’s a powerful place to be in the marketing world.

Listen to the show to hear how I work with my team to make Social Media Marketing World an exceptional experience.

What Is Social Customer Care?

Social customer care is the actual service customers have with companies through social media channels. You no longer have to pick up the phone and call a company. You can tweet to the company, connect with them on Facebook, instant message them, connect through LinkedIn, and so on.

The people who respond to these social media interactions are often the same people who would have picked up the phone. The interaction simply happens on a different channel. Increasingly, people are using their smartphones or mobile devices not for calls but for the apps companies create for connecting with customers. This trend has gotten stronger every year.

Listen to the show to hear Shep share more about the basics of social customer care.

Reactive Customer Care

Social customer care can be grouped into two subcategories: reactive versus proactive. With reactive customer care, someone might post a comment to a review site like TripAdvisor or Yelp, and the company responds. Usually, companies respond only to negative reviews or social media posts.

With reactive customer care, timing is important. The moment somebody posts a comment about your business on social media, especially if it’s negative, you need to respond in a matter of minutes, not hours or days. Shep works with FedEx, which has an unofficial goal of responding to customers within 20 minutes.

Once, Shep received exceptional customer service via Twitter within 10 minutes. During bad weather, his flight couldn’t land and was circling Dallas, where he had a connecting flight. When he saw that his connection was one of the few flights that wasn’t delayed, he used Twitter to contact American Airlines, and they responded that his spot was protected and thanked him for being a customer.

When your company provides great social customer service, you build a relationship not only with a customer, but also with everyone else who sees that interaction online. Shep mentions that in the book Hug Your Haters, Jay Baer says social customer service can be a spectator sport. When someone posts a negative comment, people notice how long the company takes to respond.

When you respond to a negative post, start by thanking the customer for letting you know and apologize for any trouble they’re having. Depending on the issue, you might need to move your communications to a direct message format to resolve the problem. If you have to move to a different channel, the telephone is ideal.

After the issue is resolved, go back online and thank the customer openly. You might say, “I’m glad we connected and resolved your issue. Thanks for letting us take care of you and thanks for doing business with us.” In a perfect world, the customer responds by thanking the company for taking good care of them (although this doesn’t happen often). That’s a great testimonial for your business.

You also need to react to positive reviews or comments. If somebody compliments your business, take a moment to say, “Thank you very much.” When people say nice things, their hope is that you notice and appreciate it. Responding is simply a nice thing to do.

To help you find these posts and respond in a timely manner, you can set up a Google Alert or use social listening software that scours the internet for mentions of your company. The moment your name or your company’s name is mentioned (good or bad), you’ll get an alert.

Listen to the show to hear my anecdote about social customer service that took more than a day.

Proactive Customer Care

With proactive customer service, you enhance the customer’s experience by sharing great content related to your industry. A restaurant might post a favorite recipe. As a speaker and customer service expert, Shep is constantly posting content about customer service. Whether you share blog posts, tweets, quotes, memes, or something else, this content is part of the customer experience.

Using social media to share important or timely messages is another way to offer proactive customer service. After developing a bad reputation for customer service, Comcast has tried to improve its reputation in part by alerting people when the cable goes out in a certain area. Comcast shares this message on multiple social media channels as well as email, text, and phone.

YouTube is a great channel for how-to videos and answering frequently asked questions. YouTube videos offer phenomenal SEO and marketing because they show you offer answers online and demonstrate great uses of your product. One reason Shep uses Salesforce is that both the company and its customers created YouTube videos that explain how to do exactly what he wanted to do.

Shep recommends turning your top 10-20 customer inquiries into a YouTube playlist on your channel. On his own YouTube channel, he addresses questions people ask all the time through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Each week, he shares a blog post and a YouTube video that explain how to address some aspect of customer service.

How-to videos are especially important for technical equipment or products that require assembly because they give customers a self-service option. When Shep bought a ping-pong table, all of the instructions were in German. After typing the manufacturer and model number into Google, he found a YouTube video that explained the whole setup process and saved him hours of work.

Self-service is important because customers often prefer getting immediate help with a video and fixing the issue themselves. It’s a better experience than calling and waiting 15-30 minutes for telephone assistance. A self-service option can also save your business money because you invest once in the online video instead of helping customers with the same question over and over again.

You don’t even need to invest much in creating your videos. You can use the camera on your smartphone. People will forgive mediocre video. Just make sure the audio quality is excellent.

LinkedIn and Facebook groups are another way to offer proactive customer service. Groups provide a social, interactive experience that’s also marketing. Your advocates will be a part of the group, and they love to support and interact with other customers. Groups also help people share ideas.

I note that having a group is super-smart because volunteers or moderators can answer people’s questions, but those questions can also become deeper conversations that reveal possible new features or ideas for your company. In social media marketing, Facebook seems to be a key platform for groups because people are showing up to engage there.

For Social Media Marketing World, we’ll have more than 100 Facebook groups customers can join based on their niche such as university professors, religious organizations, or consultants. With these groups, people can interact and connect around our product, but I also think these groups will provide some amazing insights.

Shep says the idea behind these groups highlights the way social customer service is an extended interaction with your customers. Social Media Marketing World isn’t just a two-and-a-half-day event. It’s months long, and the interaction happens both well before and long after the actual conference. Similarly, Shep provides support both before and after the speeches he gives for clients.

Apps can also provide a proactive and positive customer service experience. Shep offers a free app that features his latest blog posts and videos. If he’s offering a new product, he can create a page for it in the app. The app also allows him to share his speaking schedule. If the user allows it, the app can send a push notification when new content is available on the app.

Although creating an app used to cost thousands of dollars, Shep says it’s now easy and inexpensive to develop one yourself. He uses a service called GoodBarber, which costs as little as $30 per month. As social marketing strategies go, this price makes an app accessible to solopreneurs.

Listen to the show to hear my thoughts about answering common questions on your website.

Humor in Social Customer Care

When you’re creating videos, tweeting, or offering other forms of social customer care, think about ways to make it fun or add levity. Humor done well can endear your brand to customers and it can go viral. In fact, the success of Dollar Shave Club got a tremendous boost when the company made a humorous video that went viral.

Smart Car USA is another good example. Someone tweeted that a bird pooped on a Smart Car and totaled it. Smart Car USA responded with calculations about how many birds would need to poop on the car to damage it. The response included details about how much the poop would need to weigh to damage the car and how many pigeon, turkey, or emu poops you’d need to reach that weight.

Humor can also work against a company when it’s used to offer criticism. After United Airlines broke Dave Carroll’s guitar, he tried to get them to pay for the damages. When they wouldn’t respond to him, he wrote a song called United Breaks Guitars and posted it to YouTube. More than 18 million people have watched this video.

Listen to the show to hear more of Shep’s thoughts about the Dollar Shave Club video.

How Convenience Can Improve Customer Care

Shep wrote his latest book, The Convenience Revolution, after he realized he tended to continue working with companies when doing business with them was easy. Amazon one-click ordering and its Dash button are great examples of a total experience designed for convenience.

Uber tried to eliminate all of the friction of calling for a cab if you live in the suburbs. With a licensed taxi, you needed to call and didn’t know exactly when the taxi would show up or how much the ride would cost. With Uber, you use the app to request a ride and to see how far away the driver is. The app also tells the driver where you’re going and tells you how much the ride costs.

In the book, Shep identifies key ways to provide convenience.

Reducing Friction: Like Amazon and Uber, any company can look at the points where they interact with customers and ask whether they can make those interactions easier. Although reducing friction is an element of all of the principles, some companies make it their total value proposition.

Self-help solution: This allows customers to do their homework and take control of their needs. They don’t have to work with a salesperson.

Panera Bread has kiosks off to the side so you can avoid the line. Before, you picked up your food at the counter. With their new system, a pager on the table tells a server where to bring the food to you. With the new kiosks and pagers, customers can have a faster experience and interact with employees at the table where they can build a relationship.

This example reminds me of an airport convenience store with self-service registers. The only employee was a guy who stocked the shelves and handled questions. I thought that idea worked well in an airport where people want to get in and out quickly.

Shep adds that Amazon Go has designed a store where you don’t have to check out. After you set up an account, you scan as you come in and then take what you need. The store uses sensors and cameras so that you don’t have to stop. You simply walk out with your items.

Technology that creates a better experience: As discussed earlier, an app can create an easier, better experience.

Subscription model: Every company needs to start thinking about how to create a subscription model. After someone becomes a customer, a subscription is ongoing, recurring revenue. As long as you do what you promised to do and deliver a good product and good service, customers will stay with you.

Companies with subscription models include Netflix and Amazon. Many software companies offer subscriptions now, too. With Microsoft Office 365, you pay a monthly fee and always have the latest and greatest version of the software. Car manufacturers like Porsche, Volvo, Lincoln, and Cadillac also have a subscription that lets you switch models anytime you want.

Delivery: Ask if you can bring your product to the customer. Shep left a dealership where he’d been a customer for more than 20 years because another dealership offered to bring him his new car, and pick up his car and leave him a loaner when it needed service. Now, he doesn’t visit the dealership unless it’s time to buy a new car.

Listen to the show to hear Shep share more about car subscriptions.

Discovery of the Week

With Leo AR, you can create augmented reality movies on your iPhone or Android phone.

With augmented reality, you can add things to the movie that aren’t there in the real world and record as if they are. After you find a virtual animated item you like in the app, you tap it and then tap where you want it to appear in your movie. Your camera remembers where the objects are as you record. You can even touch or move these items, which include animals, signs, or smiley faces.

After you drop these objects into the video using the app, you can then use the app to record a video of yourself walking around and interacting with these animations. The app captures the sound in your video, too.

The Leo AR app is free and available for iPhone and Android.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how Leo AR app works for you.

Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

What do you think? What are your thoughts on social customer service? Please share your comments below.