As part of your small business marketing, are you using the subliminal marketing strategy of creating a following?

Followers will create an identity for themselves based on the ideals that you or your product offers. It is very important that you build a powerful ideal with which they can connect.

Create a focus on showing people how to develop an identity that includes your ideals and products. Show them how that identity makes them better, more powerful, more complete.

Followers want exclusive access to things that the general public doesn’t get. This level of access can be as simple as getting advance notice of certain things or can be as detailed as being invited into focus groups or design meetings.

They’ll spread the word about your product or services more profitably because they’ll give your idea or product a unique and individual recommendation which is worth everything when it comes to making a buying decision.

Here are a few subliminal marketing methods for use in your small business marketing in creating a following:

• Create an ideal that is bigger than you and bigger than the product. Have a worldview that people can get behind. These ideas should also include an element of excitement and fun. Make them big ideas that don’t feel too hard to carry out. The reason that many non-profits have a hard time getting big followings is that the worldview, even if good, is too much work and there’s not enough “feel good” to make it appealing.

• Create your first event and make it very public to your users. Your event should honor and elevate your users as the real heroes of the event. Put it on your website, talk about it in the media. Let people who weren’t a part of it know what it was like and what they missed. Let them know how they can become a part of what you are doing next. Encourage and support leadership that springs up from the group, help them help the group grow.

• Educate your followers. Once the group starts to gain momentum it is important to educate your followers. Give them more information about products, the company, what is coming next. Share information about how others are using or benefiting from the product or service. Ask them to share their stories, make their stories key to the education of future members where appropriate.

• Make it fun. Create more activities, events, ideas that make being a part of the group fun. Show them more and more ways that their activity is actually living the lifestyle that you promote. The more engaged they become the deeper their commitment.

• Document their success. Have people take pictures, video etc., of their gatherings or their uses of the product. Publicize those. Use social proof to make other people desirous of the experience that their peers are having.

• Tell them what they should be experiencing. Give people clues about their success in embracing the ideals and products that you promote. Tell them how they’ll know that they’ve been successful. Connect them with others who are true believers so that they can be further inculcated with the spirit of the worldview.

• Give them a means of connecting to others. Show them how to get their friends involved. They should especially focus on people who are not already involved or even using the products, because they are valuable recruits. You can offer free product samples, trials, exclusive memberships based on relationships or any other number of inducements that can be offered by the followers to their friends.