How to get your customers to buy your business cards: Lessons from Disney World

Imagine having thousands of your happy customers proudly putting their good money down to buy your business cards.

What do you think all those raving fans marketing your business would do for your business?

Hi, it’s Richard again, and the reason that I haven’t blogged in over a week is that my family and I just returned home from our vacation at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

We went for the fun, excitement and memories. Which we received many.

But I also came back with an arm-full of great business tips that I learned on my vacation. I know according to my Merriam-Webster Dictionary, vacation means, “a period of rest from work”, but in my line of work I find it very difficult to shut it down (my observation and curiosity radar). Especially when I was experiencing some fantastic examples of how to “Wow” customers. 

So here is the first one:

In the beginning of this blog I started talking about having thousands of your raving fan customers buying your business cards. Well that is exactly what happens every day at Walt Disney World. In fact, when their “Guests” (Disney’s term for customers) purchase T-shirts, Sweatshirts, Shorts, Towels, Golf Shirts, Jackets, Hats, Ears (Mickey Mouse or others), Jewelery, stuffed characters, cookware, key chains, etc. with one or more of the Disney characters or logos on it, you are indeed purchasing one of their business cards.

And not only did  purchase them for ourselves, but we also decided to buy gift “business cards” for our friends and family that couldn’t join us on our adventure.

And since we had such a fantastic time with lots of stories to tell about our experience, we have become good will ambassadors for Disney (which is another way of saying unpaid salespeople).

Imagine what this kind of marketing would do for your business?

Now I am not saying that you have to stop what you are doing and get into the theme park business (which is only part of the Walt Disney Company’s business), in order to get people to buy your business cards.

What I am saying is that in order for you to develop Raving Fans, you need to:

1) Develop an exceptional customer experience: This way they will want to share their story with others.

2) Create vehicle for them to use in order tell their story: One of Disney’s vehicles for this is through merchandise, yours could be through corporate videos, books, referral programs or packaging of your products to name a few ideas.

But make sure you can deliver on #1 before you set up #2, otherwise the story your customers will be telling will not be the story you want them to tell.

So, there you have it the first business tip that I witnessed in my trip to Walt Disney World. (Hey does this mean that I can now write off the cost of this vacation as a business trip?) Stay tuned because I have a lot more to come.