I see program and membership founders asking their members to constantly post testimonials or share about the experience on social. And honestly, it’s not the word-of-mouth growth strategy people think it is.

In this episode, I share why forced testimonials can actually hurt trust and why your best marketing shouldn’t feel like an obligation for your members. Instead, I walk through a simple mindset shift and a real example from the Beyond Connections program, where we created a 10-day connection challenge that re-engaged past members, sparked organic sharing, and drove real buzz without asking for it. If you want more word of mouth growth, it starts with creating an experience worth talking about.

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I would love if program and membership founders stopped asking their members to post on social about their programmer membership.

I know that sounds kind of counterintuitive, but let me explain.

So I had this one client who was, I mean, look, their marketing was great.

Like they brought people into their program, it was working really well.

And it was because they had a ton of testimonials on social media.

But the reason they had a ton of testimonials on social media was because they made it part of the program requirement.

It was like, finish your module and post a video online about what you learned and like your testimonial for the week.

And every, anybody that did it for all of the weeks, they gamified it like they would get a prize.

But I would argue that that doesn't really add value to the member experience.

Okay, we're going to come back to that in a second.

So another instance, I have a client that has a program that and then a community experience.

And we're constantly hounding every graduate that's ever been through the program, hey, we're enrolling another cohort.

Please post about the program.

Please post about the program.

Please post about the program.

Here is all the program details.

This is like everything you need to know about the upcoming cohort dates.

Invite your friends.

Whatever we did, we did create like a referral affiliate program.

And that's different.

I'll talk about that later.

But we're constantly saying like, hey, this is like, we're building this community together.

We need you to invite your friends.

Please invite your friends.

Please invite your friends.

And here's my hot take on this.

If your program is incredible, if you are delivering an incredible experience, your people will tell their friends, like, if they, if they know people in their life that they're like, you need this thing.

If they're having an incredible experience, they're going to go tell that person, hey, you need this thing.

Or their people in their lives are going to notice them, their differences in them and say like, hey, what are you doing differently?

It seems like you're absolutely crushing it.

It seems like you're doing really well.

It seems like you've, you know, your, your health isn't, is doing so much better, whatever the topic, right?

They're going to say like, hey, I'm noticing you, this shift in you, what's going on?

Tell me about that.

And then they're going to talk about, so if you're delivering an incredible customer experience, then the buzz, the word of mouth marketing engine will happen.

It will happen.

But if you're not.

And you're like forcing this forced testimonial experience that eventually dries up.

It really hurts the trust factor.

And it just feels kind of gross, right?

And so I wanted to flip this on its head.

And with one of our current programs we run the day to day ops of we were like, how can we get, you know, we're trying to fill our next cohort of the program?

And we were like, how can we get our people talking more on social media about the program, but not how can we ask them to do it, but like, how can we create an incredible experience that re engages everybody that has ever been through this program and get them to do this experience together, do something together that that's going to like have this amazing effect of people sharing, but only because they want to.

So instead of saying how can I ask my members to share more testimonials?

Or how can I ask.

And I'm not saying don't ever ask for testimonials, okay?

Like that, that is valuable and important.

And I ask clients for testimonials all the time.

I'm not knocking that.

But asking them to share constantly on social about it, it just, it doesn't feel good.

And people are like, well, why am I sharing?

Like, what is in it for me?

What is the value there?

So instead of thinking about that, what I want everybody to sort of like pivot their mindset to is how can I create a value add experience for my members that is going to generate buzz on social that's going to create this flywheel and there's going to be like so much good and serendipity in this experience that the members are going to get so much value that they don't even notice that like it's driving their marketing.

Right.

And even if they do, they're like grateful for it and excited about it.

So if you've been around for a minute, you've heard me talk about the program Beyond Connection, which is Keith Ferrazi's program.

He wrote the book Never Eat Alone, and we run the day to day ops of his program, which is an eight week program that runs every few months.

So we're filling our next cohort, like I mentioned, and we're looking at like, how do we also re engage our members that, you know, took the program a while ago?

So we're currently running the seventh cohort and we wanted to re engage people that were part of cohort 1, 2, 3, 4, right.

And they're actually pretty active in the community.

We've done a lot of work to keep the engagement up, but we wanted to provide some sort of exciting experience beyond just like the workshops and calls that we do in the community.

We wanted to really like bring people together again.

So we decided to run a 10 day connection challenge.

So this entire program is about building more connection, meaningful relationships in your life.

So connection is like the whole purpose.

Right.

And so people will be really excited about this 10 day connection challenge.

So what we did is we said for five days we are going to do a reflection exercise and we're going to post it on LinkedIn and you're going to make two connections per day, like that's it.

So we're asking members to reflect on a prompt, we're providing them post on LinkedIn and we're encouraging them to make two connections every day.

So we ran a kickoff call to kick this off.

And by the way, we had 75 people decide to participate.

We announced it less than a week before we started because we decided to move quickly on this and experiment with it.

And that's like almost a sixth of the community that joined in the past year and a half.

And so we're really engaging a lot of people and there's people from every single cohort that are participating.

So Danielle, my teammate and I, we ran this kickoff call and on the kickoff call, people were skeptical because they, you know, get asked a lot to share on social about this program and they said, you know what, what's the business opportunity here?

Obviously, like, you guys are trying to get more signups.

And I was like, look, do we want more members talking about the community on social media?

Yes, of course.

But more importantly, we want you guys to come together to reconne, to engage those that haven't jumped in in months.

And we want you to experience the serendipity of putting yourself out there five days in a row.

Because so many of our community members are trying to create LinkedIn presences, having more connection in their life, but they're not putting themselves out there.

And so we created this container to do so.

And we're not saying like post on LinkedIn about what Beyond Connections meant to you, but we're asking them to reflect on some of the lessons they learned in our program and, and then apply those and share those stories on social.

What I love about this is that we're really asking people to step outside their comfort zones.

We're giving them like five days of focused energy that is going to provide this positive experience in their life, their career and their business.

Especially if they're bought in, right?

Like if they joined this challenge and they're excited for it, they're doing it alongside each other, they're engaging with each other, they're making connections.

And at the end of this week, in a program and a community where they're trying to build more connection in their life, they have made a conscious effort to make 10 connections in one week, which is incredible.

So all of this to say I wholeheartedly believe when you focus on providing an incredible experience for your current members and you create value driven engagement, you create an experience that fosters this kind of like word of mouth growth, then you're going to number one, that's going to lead to great retention because you're keeping people engaged that could have, you know, been disengaged and now they're coming back in and it's going to lead to the growth that you want.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for growth is to just provide an incredible experience to the people that already paid you.

Okay, that's it for today.

If you want to create more buzz online for your community members and you haven't done anything to like, bring them together in a new and unique way in a while, think about hosting a challenge.

It's a great way to engage people that have disengaged.

Um, it's one of my favorite favorite re engagement strategies and annual memberships.

Like, I love like a quarterly challenge, so give it a shot.

It doesn't have to be 10 days, 5 days, 20 days, like, you know, even try a three day challenge.

It can be a really great motivator to get your members jumping in and, and, you know, reconnecting and doing the work.

All right, that's it for today.

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