Wouldn’t it be great to lean back and let your customers do the marketing for you?

In fact, it is likely that you are already leaning back, completely unaware of the positive and negative marketing your current customers are already doing.

My guess is that you’re highly interested in social media and investing a lot of time and resources into building your own social media profiles.

hat’s all good, but let’s not fool ourselves and think that allowing our fans and followers to like, comment or re-tweet our brand content is any giant revolution to marketing

So what’s my rant about? Stop running your Facebook page? No, not at all.

My rant is about forcing yourself to dig deeper – understand what your customers are saying about you, your products and your </acompetitors online and drive real business insights out of it

Your customers are already engaging in conversation about your brand online. Zai Dandois, for example, is a floorball player for Team Merahan Floorball club. He uses Twitter to express his intention to buy a Unihoc floorball stick.

Just to be clear, I’ve no affiliation with Unihoc, but I do play floorball and Unihoc do brilliant things on their own Facebook page in terms of producing compelling content and engaging with customers.

However, I’m not sure that they are aware of the hundreds of brand mentions across the web each month from existing and prospective customers.

Like Zai above, some customers are expressing clear intent to buy, whereas others are sharing pictures of their product post-purchase.

There’s a simple relationship between how big your business is and how many people that will talk about you online, though there are also some obvious variations between industries.

It is important for brands to encourage the positive conversation and respond quickly to the negative, enabling customers to help you with marketing.

And if my opinion is not convincing, here’s three reasons why you should make that shift:

1. According to Edelman’s Trustbarometer you will trust the opinions from “a person like yourself” more than an official spokesperson from a company.
2. The combined reach of all your customers is likely to be larger than that of your own social media channels.
3. Helping your customers to do marketing for you is highly scalable and cost efficient, as opposed to creating all the content yourself.

The best way to do this is by investing in a great social media monitoring platform and dig through the data to see what’s being said about your brand. Then, figure out what activities you can embark on to get more of your customers and prospects to say more of the good stuff.

The best suggestion I have? Make it easy for them to share whenever they are happy with your services; that could be as simple as a well placed ‘tweet this’ button.