Build Your Own Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy
By Ted Wright June 13, 2019
By Ted Wright
At its core, Word of Mouth marketing is about people organically sharing stories.
So how do we encourage people to share your brand story in a real, natural way?
Create a story worth talking about.
A good brand story is at the core of building a Word of Mouth Marketing strategy
This may surprise you, but your story needs to be worth sharing in order for the word to spread.
Word of Mouth Marketing can’t really be encouraged, it’s something that needs to happen on its own.
Your company can do something radical that gets people talking, but this will only have a short-term impact. Word of Mouth Marketing is a long-term marketing strategy, so it needs to be the brand story that sticks with people.
Now that we have that straight, let’s see what we can do to make sure your brand story is worth talking about.
Most brand stories that companies are putting out there often look more like mission statements than stories. Sorry. It’s true.
Brand stories shouldn’t be 1,500 words.
While this story may be interesting to the founding family of a company, it’s not going to be interesting nor relevant to anyone else.
How do we find a brand’s story?
Step number one is taking all of the data surrounding your brand. The data should cover every aspect of your brand from “Who buys our stuff?” and “Where do they buy it?” to which products sell best, who are our competitors, what are people saying about us, and so on.
Once you have the data, sort through it.
The data then needs to go through our handy 3 tier test – the heart of all Word of Mouth Marketing here at Fizz:
- Is this authentic?
- Is this interesting?
- Is this relevant?
You may be biased, considering it’s either your company, or the company you work for, so be hard on yourself here. Think about what’s going on outside the 4 walls of your company, and be able to bring whatever it is your selling into the real world.
This test will make sure you do that.
If you’ve found that your brand doesn’t pass through this test, it can then become a company goal – how do we decide what fits all of these things, to the most people possible?
Once we have our story figured out, the next step is getting it to move.
This is where influencers come in.
Not many people are going to talk about things that are only relevant to you and your business. For a story to get passed around, it has to be somehow connected to the lives of the people doing the talking.
At the end of the day, marketing is about selling more things to more people for more money. Building a good Word of Mouth Marketing strategy will help you do that.
Ted Wright is the founder of Fizz, the world’s leading word of mouth marketing (WOMM) agency. Ted is also an acclaimed WOMM keynote speaker and the author of Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth
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