You’re lying awake at night, with a ringing wailing sounding in your head. You’ve got a little tike who seems to need constant attention. You thought you could never love something – and want to hand over the tough stuff to someone else – so much. No, we’re not talking about kids here. We’re talking about your business baby. The one keeping you up at night and taking all your energy and attention. In this blog post, you’re going to get to grips with why you need to make your customers care, how to get them to be emotionally invested in your business and the 5 golden rules for turning strangers into babysitter material.
It’s clear to you that your business baby needs some extra love. The challenge? Asking for love is HARD and uncomfortable for most business owners. Your skin might even be crawling a little at the thought. Besides, shouldn’t people love it automatically, it’s a real cutie, after all?
You need your customers to care about your business as much as you do because your business is all about THEM. Their battle with their personal villain is at the heart of what you do. By helping them to see this, your customers will step up as guardians and ambassadors for your brand – they may even get out the “brag book” with all of their friends to show off the incredible thing you made.
But how do you get strangers to step up and volunteer as fairy godparents to your business? How do we turn your customers from people who watch your baby from afar, to one of those angels who offer to babysit?
You need a strong brand that wraps your customers in a warm hug and makes them part of the family. A story that they want to play a key role in. That they are personally invested in. Then they can become your business’ fairy godparents; taking the pressure off of you and helping your baby thrive.
If someone asked you to name a brand you care about, you’d probably struggle. We don’t tend to think of brands as something we care about. But I’m sure there would be a brand that if they stopped making products, stopped producing content, and disappear from existence you’d probably be pretty upset about it. That’s a level of care we have for brands. A sense of something missing from our lives without them. You could probably name a few of those brands right now. So, how do brands make us care about them?
No, we don’t mean you need to be adding them on Insta or inviting them out for a drink. We do mean: understand who your customer is and why they need your product.
Who or what is the villain of their bedtime story?
What do they dream their life could be?
Where do you enter their story?
When you tap into this, put your customer at the heart of your brand story and make them feel seen, you’ll secure yourself fans for life. Your customers simply want to feel understood.
Whether it’s a pop up shop, an engaging website or a social media page, your customers need to feel like they’re part of something. Make them part of your community or family and they’ll be customers for life.
It’s hard for anyone to connect with a brand if there’s no human element in it. The most human thing of all is your brand story – and that will facilitate the strongest connections. When you are loud and proud about your values you show your authenticity and helps your customers to care as your brand wears a human face.
As a Founder, you probably find it hard to step back, look at your business baby from a distance and focus on nurturing the care in others that you feel for your business, it was immediate for you, perhaps others won’t understand the fruits of your labour like you…
It’s essential that you do some reflecting, to make sure you stay connected to the business you were passionate about building, and the mission that you were embarking on.
Just like with any friendship or human connection, you need to continually nurture the blossoming relationship you have with your customer, so that it continues to flourish. They’ll be more likely to develop a lasting connection with you and love your business baby (almost) as much as you do if you keep showing up consistently, helping them defeat their personal villains.
You’ve created your business with love, watched it come into the world, take its first wobbly baby steps and (hopefully) start to thrive. You’re understandably proud of it, want to continue to watch it grow, and feel protective of its future.
But there’s one major difference between your business and a baby. The latter only needs YOUR love to thrive – but the former needs everyone else to love it to continue to grow. We’ve established through this blog post that it IS possible for your customers to care about your brand as much as you do, that by making your customers love your business baby, you relieve some of the pressure you are carrying as a business owner and you develop life-long fans of your business. These are 5 golden rules you won’t be forgetting in a hurry if you’re excited about turning your customers into fairy godparents for your business.
Make Us Care is here to help you build your brand, so that you can build a brand that your customers care about as much as you do. We care – let’s chat.