Word Of Mouth Marketing

CLIFF NOTE CONVERSATIONS Book Reviews with Travis Jones

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

CLIFF NOTE CONVERSATIONS Book Reviews with Travis Jones

Andy Sernovitz

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING

It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling real estate, jelly, or jet engines. People will ask other people about you before they decide to buy from you. We turn to people we trust first—friends, family, coworkers, and other people like us—when starting to look for something to buy. Not ads, not brochures, not phone books. So what is word of mouth marketing? In this book, I define it as, “Giving people a reason to talk about your stuff, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.”

In the end, marketing is pretty easy: If people like your stuff, and if they trust you, they will tell their friends to do business with you. Learn to make customers really, really happy. It doesn’t take much more than that. Understand this concept, devote yourself to it, and you will be a successful word of mouth marketer.

Do you remember the ALS ice bucket challenge? It was launched to create awareness about the Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis also known as Lou Gehrig disease. The challenge itself was simple. You shoot a video in which you pour a bucket full of ice cold water on yourself.

Then you nominate three more people to take up the challenge and then, you also proceed to donate at least $10 towards ALS research and awareness.

The really intriguing part of it was, nobody was actively running it. Once the campaign started rolling, it just picked up on word of mouth. People used various social media channels to tag and challenge their friends and the campaign spread like wildfire.

Some of you may actually think that the success of the campaign was due to the various social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The truth is a little more nuanced. While Twitter and Facebook did play a part, the psychological and social aspects were a lot more important. When you are called out in front of the entire community to contribute in a meaningful way to a worthy cause, you are not really likely to refuse are you? It gives you a chance to improve your social status as well as give you a tangible way of doing something really good. To top it all, the challenge itself was fun. The result? The ALS ice bucket challenge went wildly viral and at its peak, it had many celebrities participating in it.

The challenge was so successful that by 2015, it had raised $115 million for the ALS Association.

Word of mouth marketing is nothing new. But it is really becoming a force to be reckoned with in this age of the internet. If you are running any kind of business, people will talk about you. You simply cannot stop that conversation from happening. But you can join in, participate and actively control the message that is going out about your business. So how do you do it? Andy Sernovitz has you covered.

Let’s start from the top.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

3

»

GET PEOPLE TALKING

Here’s the definition of word of mouth marketing: 1 - Giving people a reason to talk about your stuff 2 - Making it easier for that conversation to take place Even simpler: It’s everything you can do to get people talking.

People are going to talk about your business whether you like it or not. You may not have a social media presence but your fans will talk about you on Facebook. You may be a brick and mortar business with zero internet presence, and you will still get tweeted about. And above all, people will use traditional, old fashioned, face to face talking and tell their friends.

Word of mouth has existed for a long time now.

Word of mouth marketing is taking that public opinion and shaping it in your favour.

Word of mouth marketing is when you treat this as any other form of marketing with clearly achievable goals and clearly measurable results.

Word of mouth marketing is about joining this conversation, which is already taking place, and contributing frutifully to it.

To do this, Andy Sernovitz sets down four rules of word of mouth marketing.

Let’s take a look at these rules.

Rule #1: Be Interesting A boring company is a dead company. You may spend thousands of dollars on advertising but if you don’t give people something to talk about, your message will slowly fade away into the background and die a lonely death. So here is the action step that you can take before spending a dime on advertising. Before you take any business decision, you need to ask yourself this question. Let’s let Andy explain it: Before you run an ad, before you launch a product, before you put something new on the menu, ask the magic question: Would anyone tell a friend about this?

Rule #2: Make It Easy To make people talk about your business, you have to make it easy for them. You can do this by creating a simple and catchy message for them to pass along. For example, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, he did not talk about processors or memory or software. Instead he introduced pink and purple computers to the world. People just wouldn’t stop talking about the colourful machines and that was a masterclass in word of mouth marketing.

You have to make your idea easy to spread.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

4

Rule #3: Make People Happy This is so basic that we should not even be talking about it. But we often forget this fundamental fact of business and marketing. Your customers are the ones who are doing the word of mouth marketing for you. And if they are not happy, if they are not being treated well, you will only get word of mouth condemnation. This core business practice is what drives people to talk to their friends about you. When you build great products, provide awesome service, treat your customers right, that’s when the word of mouth happens very organically. This is the basic principle of word of mouth marketing.

Rule #4: Earn Trust and Respect There is an old piece of internet wisdom which says, “There is no business ethics.

There is only ethics.”

If you cannot be ethical in business alone and be totally unethical in your personal life.

You cannot be an angel at home and the devil at work. When you follow a certain ethical way of living and doing business, you earn trust and respect. That is the basis of any admiration that your audience may have for you. When a business leader keeps his commitments, treats other people honourably, he builds an army of devoted fans around him. These fans in turn feel compelled to spread the word about the leader who they trust.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

5

»

DEEP STUFF: Big Six Ideas

Now let’s dig into the deep stuff. These are the six big ideas that you really need to internalize to be successful in this age of word of mouth marketing.

1 - Consumers Are in Control—Get Used to It 2 - Marketing Is What You Do, NOT What You Say 3 - The Permanent Record 4 - Honesty Is the Essence of Word of Mouth 5 - The Math of Customer Satisfaction 6 - Word of Mouth Marketing Makes More Money

Let’s look at one of these in a little more detail.

Consumers Are In Control - Get Used To It While traditional marketing was just playing the game with a rigid set of rules, word of mouth marketing came along and changed the game itself. It is a complete paradigm shift and companies are struggling badly to even understand the new reality. Think about it. You launch a new product and then hire an “influencer” to write a glowing review in his blog.

But when you go online and google your product, you find that there have been five negative reviews on amazon, two bloggers who have completely ripped apart your product and a bunch of angry rants on various forums. To add insult to injury, a teenage Youtube star has done a feature by feature video comparison of your product with your closest competitor and concluded that your product sucks.

And while your so called “influencer” is being read by a lot of people, the word of mouth nature of this whole discussion is ensuring that the damage to your product is ongoing and out of control.

You cannot buy good opinions anymore. Consumers are in control like never before and the sooner we understand this, the better it is for us.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why the customer is so powerful nowadays.

Mass Participation: We Are Reviewing Like Crazy From the first time Amazon asked you to write a review, from the first time eBay let you rate a seller, we became a community of armchair critics.

Think about it. From your barber, to your paediatrician, to your local hamburger joint, everybody has asked you for an online review. And all it takes is one missed deadline, one damaged product, one demotivated sales person and you’ve had it.

From big name sellers like Amazon to Ebay to small time bloggers to video sharing sites like Youtube, customer reviews are everywhere.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

6

There are influencers who order products and make videos of them unboxing it. Stop and think about it for a minute.

Before the product is even used, before the buyer even tests it out for a couple of weeks, he is actually reviewing his initial impressions based on just the unpacking of the product.

There is an entire ecosystem of product reviews which are happening online and offline and this is something which the customer often does it better than any paid reviewer that you may hire.

Mass Dissemination: What We Say Goes Everywhere Now, to this review ecosystem, you add the power of the internet, and we have a tsunami of information flow. Good news travels fast and bad news travels at warp speed. Add to that the fact that we are online 24 hours nowadays on our cellphones and you have a situation where word of mouth moves at almost the speed of thought. Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube make sure that opinions can go viral before you even realize what’s happening. And if we include the offline conversations which are happening all the time, we have an unbelievably complex information flow happening.

The balance of power has totally shifted in favour of the ordinary guy next door and the big name marketing agencies have to really up their game if they want to keep up.

The biggest takeaway from this section? Your consumers are really the ones to keep happy.

They are the ones who can raise you up to high heavens and they are the ones who can bring you crashing down. All the SEO, advertising, marketing and discounts won’t save you from an unhappy customer.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

7

»

WORD OF MOUTH MANIFESTO

Before we get into the real meat of the book, let’s just take a look at the Word of mouth manifesto as written down by the author. This manifesto will be your compass for every single action that you take when you are trying to spread the word about your business.

Every time you are stuck at something, this manifesto will help you to take the go-no go decision.

1 - Ethics come first.

2 - Happy customers are your best advertising. Make people happy.

3 - Marketing is easy. Earn the respect and recommendation of your customers.

They will do your marketing for you, for free.

4 - Great service starts great conversations.

5 - Marketing is what you do, not what you say.

6 - Negative word of mouth is an opportunity. Listen and learn.

7 - People are already talking. Your only option is to join the conversation.

8 - Be interesting or be invisible.

9 - If it’s not worth talking about, it’s not worth doing.

10 - Make the story of your company a good one.

11 - It’s more fun to work at a company that people want to talk about.

12 - Use the power of word of mouth to make businesses treat people better.

13 - Honest marketing makes more money.

The idea here is that, you don’t really need a huge marketing budget to generate the buzz around your product. Your customer will do it for you for free. The idea here is to give the customer a solid reason to talk about you.

And as the author says, it is more of a shift in the mindset rather than a radical transformation of your entire marketing plan.

Whatever business you’re in, ask yourself these questions when you’re looking at a customer: When she walks out the door, what have I given her to talk about?

How will he remember to tell his friends?

Could I have made it easier for her to talk to more people about me?

Was anything about his experience remarkable?

There are hundreds of other ways to get people talking, but you only need one good one to change your business forever. A silly something, a special moment, service with a smile. Anything worth talking about. Marketing doesn’t get any easier than this.

With that step, we are now getting into the core, action part of the book. Andy Sernovitz says that there are five T’s in action in every word of mouth marketing campaign. Key to a good word of mouth strategy is to balance all of these 5 T’s.

The key thing here, before you plan anything is to keep it simple. Complex word of mouth projects also work well but they tend to be limited in their scope. Simple plans on the other hand work for pretty much every business scenario. Let’s look at sme of these 5 T’s in more detail.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

8

»

TALKERS: Who Will Tell Their Friends about you

The medium of marketing in word of mouth marketing is real people. Call them “influencers”, “gurus” or “independent reviewers”, these are the people who will carry your message. You need to identify the people who are going to carry your message. Then you need to reach out to them regularly. You need to keep making it easy for them to spread your message. That includes finding topics for them to talk about and making it easy for them to talk about you positively.

So how and where do we find these talkers? Andy Sernovitz identifies the most common categories of people where you can find your talkers. Let’s look at some of them.

Happy Customers Your satisfied customers are your first and best category of talkers. This is true for multiple reasons. One thing is that since they are happy about your product, they can talk about you honestly without faking their enthusiasm. That authenticity is really important in word of mouth marketing. Second aspect is that, when a satisfied customer recommends you to a friend, and his friend also buys from you, it boosts up the social standing of the talker.

Here is the catch though. Every happy customer will not necessarily talk about you. To identify these talkers, you need to go out of your way to look for clues about the customers who are willing to spread the word about you. If you have a customer who takes a greater than normal interest in you, then he is a major asset. If you have a customer that regularly posts about you in forums, mails you with suggestions, or signs up for your newsletter, then he is worth nurturing.

Eager Employees Pride in one’s work is a major motivator. Let’s say you have an employee who takes a lot of pride in the work that you are doing and the awesome product that you are building. Don’t you think he will feel like talking about it? Not every employee will be willing to talk about his company but the ones who do are worth encouraging. These will be the guys with bumper stickers on their cars. These will be the guys who will wear the company T-shirt with a lot of pride. Here also, there is an authenticity which is really hard to fake.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

9

Fans and Hobbyists Fans and hobbyists are often the most dedicated marketers for your products. Think about it. Hobbyists are often passionately dedicated to their specific interests. Just check out any DIY site on the web and you can see the sheer passion, pride and involvement these folks bring to the table. It doesn’t even matter if they are not experts in their fields. Their dedication to learn is itself a great thing.

Now, when you build something which can help them follow their passion, you get a passionate fan. And this is not even restricted to people who have bought from you. This may even include people who probably cannot afford your product but still talk about buying from you someday. An iPhone 6 owner may not be able to afford an iPhone X but that does not stop him from raving about it. These guys can be your most potent ambassadors.

Now let’s look at one of the important aspects of keeping your talkers, well, talking.

Feed Your Talkers Talkers live on a diet of information. Keep them fed to keep them talking. The word of mouth stops when there is nothing to talk about.

Your talkers need the fuel to keep going. An empty fuel tank will mean a stalled car. How you reach them with this information is a different aspect altogether. The important thing here is to keep your talkers well supplied with stuff for them to actually talk about. It could be anything.

EXCLUSIVE INFORMATION - Let’s say you are about to launch something new. Can you give your specially cultivated team of talkers a sneak preview one day ahead of the launch? The buzz this will generate will take your launch to a whole new level.

INSIDE INFORMATION - Celebrities do this all the time. Cell phone companies do this all the time Can you share some inside gossip or product spec? This could take the form of a well planned “leak”. Nothing builds the talkers “street cred” than having access to some inside scoop. Which in turn will lead to more eyes on your product. Win-win for everybody.

Make them look like the experts - After every Marvel or DC franchise movie trailers come out, a bunch of fans post Youtube videos analysing the trailers and point out hidden “easter eggs” in these trailers. This makes them look like absolute experts and dedicated fans. Can you pull off something similar with your products? Maybe talk about the non-obvious hidden features in your products to a bunch of your talkers and let them go to town with them?

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

10

»

TOPICS: What Will They Talk About

All word of mouth starts with a topic of conversation. People won’t talk about you if you don’t give them something to say.

So you have got a bunch of dedicated talkers to talk about you. You now step back and wait for the traffic. And what do you get? Crickets!

Your word of mouth strategy does not end with finding the people to talk about you. That’s only the start. Now, you need to give them something to talk about. First and foremost, the topics that you generate, should be worth talking about. Bland and boring statements, generic press releases are not exactly “buzzworthy”.

Topics worth talking about are often unexpected. This unexpected nature alone makes them worthy of interest. They usually fall outside the realm of traditional marketing. The author gives us the example of the online gift store, RedEnvelope. As gift catalogues go, it has nothing to separate it from its competitors. But, when you order a gift from RedEnvelope, it is delivered in an elaborate gift wrapped package with a huge bow. Many times, the people talk about the wrapping more than the gift itself. That is a topic worth talking about.

Now let’s look at some common ways of generating topics that your talkers will like to spread.

Special Sales This is one method which cuts across businesses. Anybody can do it. Launch a special sale and people will talk about it. It is organic. It does not require a lot of business expertise.

Just create a special sale. Put the word out and you will have a buzz going.

A sale is simple to do. It is also going to generate only a temporary burst of conversation.

You can make the most of this brief window by coming up with an unusual offer. By offering crazy add-ons or crafting a message creatively, you can generate a lot of sales.

Let’s look at an example There was a massive shortage of onions in North India in 2014 due to a crop failure. Prices were soaring. Then, one winter clothing store offered a sale of fleece lined jackets. And get this - they offered a kilogram of onions to you free if you bought two jackets. There is absolutely no connection between a winter jacket and onions.

But by creatively crafting their offer, the shop came up with a great buzzworthy topic. And the word of mouth buzz about this sale was so strong, that people were lining up to shop at this store and causing traffic jams on that street as a result. This is guerrilla word of mouth marketing at its best.

Extraordinary Customer Service “They treat me well” is an awfully powerful word of mouth topic. Nice guys, in this case, finish first.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

11

A delighted customer is worth an entire marketing campaign all by himself. And great customer service is a fantastic way to create a team of delighted customers. You have already done a lot of marketing to generate every single one of your sales. What’s the point of it, if the returns on your investment stop just at the sale?

A great customer service experience will not only ensure a repeat customer, it will also make that customer a loyal fan and a great envoy for your business. Think about it. Let’s say you have a bad leak in your bathroom. You call your local plumbing company. Not only do they send a plumber immediately and get the leak fixed, the plumber also takes ten minutes and checks your entire house for any other potential drips and leaks. Wouldn’t you talk about the “free” checkup you got from the plumbing company.

One of the most straightforward and universal topic of generating a great word of mouth publicity ias to have a great customer service process in place.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

12

»

TAKING PART: How Can You Join The Conversation

Word of mouth is a dialogue. Someone says something about you, and you answer. If you don’t, it rarely goes any further. Your job is to be part of the conversation, and make it come alive. As you know by now, people are talking about you. Wouldn’t you rather have them talking with you?

This is one of the most obvious points and yet we miss this. When people are talking about you, wouldn’t you want to be a part of the conversation as well? And yet, many companies do word of mouth marketing in an open loop. They do everything else really well. They identify their talkers. The nurture them well. They keep feeding them good topics. But after that they don’t really bother to participate in a conversation that is essentially about themselves. And later when the talk actually does not go in the direction that they hoped for, they feel confused and frustrated.

And it is so easy to do. If you have a forum where people talk about your product, you need to have a bunch of your own employees participating as well. They can listen to people, they can solve their problems, they can offer ideas and talk about the features of the products. It is like marketing without actually marketing.

So what are some obvious ways to contribute to a conversation?

Thank People Who Say Nice Things about You Whenever a blogger, a forum poster, a Youtube marketer says something positive about you, make a conscious effort to thank her. This will go a long way towards building a great reputation. On one hand it will likely convert that one time talker into a repeat talker.

Second aspect is that it is a fundamentally nice thing to do, and this generates its own buzz.

The reputation that this builds will bring in a lot more visitors to your business.

Fix Problems and Make People Happy It is very rare nowadays to find companies that proactively try to solve people’s problems.

If you do it right, people will go out of their way to talk about you. If a customer is posting publicly about an issue with your product, it is a golden chance for you to convert him to an active talker on your behalf. Talk to him, identify yourself as an employee of the company, apologize for the inconvenience and fix his problem. And you should be doing this in all your offline communications as well. The word of mouth credibility this builds will be huge.

As the author says, Anyone can make a mistake. How you deal with it determines what the word of mouth will be.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

13

Let’s close with a final lesson from Andy Sernovitz. It applies not just to word of mouth marketing, but to business in general.

Word of mouth marketing is about being good to people.

Real people will talk about you when they like you, your stuff, and the things that you do. The word of mouth that they create is far more powerful than all the advertising in the world. It’s a wonderful thing: Happy people grow your business.

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz

14

KEY TAKEAWAYS GET PEOPLE TALKING Word of mouth marketing is the most straightforward and inexpensive way of marketing that you can do for your business.

DEEP STUFF: Big Six Ideas People will talk about your business and you cannot control this conversation.

Instead, it is better to join in and actively participate and send out the right message.

TALKERS: Who Will Tell Their Friends about you These are the people who will talk about you . They could be your customers, employees or fans. Find them and encourage them to talk.

TOPICS: What Will They Talk About Your talkers need topics to talk about.

Feed your talkers with a diet of interesting topics to keep the conversation flowing.

TAKING PART: How Can You join the conversation Would you prefer the conversation about you to happen without you?

Jump in and contribute!

SIDE PANEL QUOTES GET PEOPLE TALKING It’s everything you can do to get people talking.

DEEP STUFF: Big Six Ideas Word of mouth marketing has always been your most important source of new business.

It’s always been your least expensive source of new customers. It’s time for your most effective marketing strategy to become official, to move out of the marketing orphanage.

It’s time to create a space for word of mouth marketing in your budget and business plan, set clear objectives, and measure the results.

TALKERS: Who Will Tell Their Friends about you All marketing has a medium. An advertisement’s medium is TV, newspapers, radio, or any other place that carries ads. Direct mail works through the post office. The medium of word of mouth marketing is real people.

TOPICS: What Will They Talk About Anything that catches attention is a topic. Anything that catches attention and then gets talked about is a fantastic topic.

TAKING PART: How Can You join the conversation Word of mouth is a dialogue. Someone says something about you, and you answer.

If you don’t, it rarely goes any further. Your job is to be part of the conversation, and make it come alive. As you know by now, people are talking about you. Wouldn’t you rather have them talking with you?

WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING Andy Sernovitz