Delivering The Great Experience – Make Them Eager For More!
Everyone wants, needs and demands an exceptional experience. You can plan and provide all the aspects of a Great Experience and make people eager for more! A great experience is precious. It’s what every event, marketing campaign, product, service or communication has to deliver, for one simple reason:
We actively search for the best experiences and reject the companies and people who let us down. As much as relevant content is critical to pleasing an audience, a great experience is even more valuable because people remember it.
It is the one thing that lasts.
Experiences are Uniquely Human
The fact is that every business experience, good or bad, begins and ends with simple person-to-person contact. In the face of today’s global, hi-tech economy, it’s easy to forget this important point: People don’t do business with a logo or a company – they do business with YOU.
No One Likes Cold & Impersonal
This is why social media has sucker-punched almost every large company on the planet. While most corporations squeeze every transaction out of their websites, offices, IT and staff, a bunch of ordinary people dare to actually communicate with each other, form communities to share common interests and tell each other about products, companies and experiences they liked or didn’t.
Can you imagine the dismay in the corporate boardrooms when they face the realization that a peer review written by a total stranger on TripAdvisor carries more influence than a multi-million dollar advertising campaign?
Experience Success
It doesn’t matter what it says on your business card – we are all in the experience business. You are delivering an experience to the people around you every day, whether you realize it or not. Whether you are offering an event, product or service, your ultimate goal should be to make meaningful contact with the most important people and motivate them to do what you’d like them to do. When it works, your organization achieves goals, overcomes obstacles, increases revenue, profitability and market share. But there’s a catch.
Experiences aren’t passive. They’re a combination of what happened, how we reacted and how we remember it. According to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, there are actually two experiences for every meeting, presentation, workshop, meal, or party … everything related to an event. There is what we are experiencing as it happens … and the memory of the experience after it’s over.
The memory is what lasts. Everything about the experience might be perfect, and then something spoils it at the very end. That’s all that’s remembered. It’s like your memory is a storyteller and you need a happy ending. So, how do you create one?
A 360-Degree Experience
A Great Experience isn’t an accident. It’s the result of a deliberate strategy built on a few key ideas.
Here’s one: A Great Experience is a 360-degree experience. Everything that touches the customer, client or audience creates it. In other words, all these people don’t come to you for products, services, events, workshops and conferences. They come because they like the experience they receive from you and your people. All those other things are just the boxes we use to package a Great Experience.
How They Feel Is More Important Than What They Did
Despite what most of us believe – locations, venues, name badges and agendas don’t create experiences. Experiences are created by how people discover information, share it and connect with each another. Attendees think of events in terms of how they felt about the speakers, the people the met and what they talked about and, above all, the insights they gained.
That was one of the conclusions from my blog article The Mad Men Guide to Networking Events. When people come to an event, they actually want five things.
• A comfortable environment
• Relevant, valuable content
• Interesting people to talk with
• Something to talk about
• And enough time to do it
Managing The Great Experience
You can plan and provide all the aspects of a Great Experience and make people eager for more! Stop thinking of yourself as managing an event, a marketing program or a communications plan. Instead, imagine you are managing the audience’s experience. Here’s how you do it.
#1. Execute by putting yourself in their shoes. Flesh out your content with unexpected color, sound and action that bring it to life. Let people do and discover instead of just watch and listen.
#2. Understand what each person really wants and expects. Don’t assume they all want the same things.
#3. Design for diversity of interests, priorities, motivations and even physical ability.
#4. Move away from the top-down/inside out communication model. The audience is only marginally interested in what you want to say. They are acutely interested in what they want to hear and do.
#5. Question all the old, accepted rules. People don’t come just for the location – choosing Las Vegas or Orlando doesn’t guarantee success. “Swag bags” are fun, but people don’t equate a great experience with stuff they have to tote around. Technology is no substitute for content, either. Boring on an iPad is still boring.
#6. Define an experience that builds interest, value and personal interaction, and make it a priority.
It’s tougher than it sounds, but it is essential to put the needs and priorities of the people you rely upon for success – first. Make sure you understand what they want and expect. Then, make a genuine attempt to do your best and deliver it. If you do that the majority of the time, you’ll deliver a Great Experience. Plus, those customers, clients and audience members will be constantly delighted and look forward to the next experience with you.
“The most valuable experience is the next one.”
A Wise Man
The Next Experience
I’m reminded of a story about a crusty, old Washington, D.C., cab driver. Every day, he drove tourists past the National Archives Building where the words “The Past is Prologue” are carved in stone over the door. His passengers would often ask, “What does that mean?” The cabbie would always reply, “It means you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
Design, manage and provide all the aspects of a Great Experience and you will be able to say the same thing.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
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