Ep 295: Is Word of Mouth Marketing More Effective?

Sean: I wonder, word of mouth marketing is arguably still the best form of marketing that any company would have.

That is kind of what you did right there for you. But when you look at a lot of companies, even the big ones, they don't have a word-of-mouth marketing strategy. They would have an advertising strategy. They would have a big idea strategy. They'd have an SEO strategy, which we both are very fond of, but not - no real word of mouth strategy.

Vince: Sometimes the word of mouth strategy is hidden in other layers.

So there's a couple of core strategies we use in - like when I'm dealing with agencies in large corporates, particularly initially some small companies as well. There's a couple of methodologies we use. One of them is any advertising that we're doing, particularly TV commercials and things like that.

There is this, this holy grail that we want to achieve and that holy grail is getting people to change their language. And I'll give a good example of this. I don't know if you, like, we had this in New Zealand. I don't know if it's in any other country, but we had a Continental Cup of soups, right? So it was a cup of soup brand and Continental had these ads that used to run.

"Got three-thirtyitis? It must be time for continental." And three-thirtyitis wasn't a real thing. It was just their way of describing the afternoon slump that everybody in the corporate world would feel. So you're in your job when it comes to about 3:30 and you're like, "oh, I don't want to do my job. I just want to go home. I'm tired now."

 And it's because you've got that slump that happens after lunch. You've had a big feed, all these kinds of things. So they owned this message. They owned this concept called three-thirty itis. So that became something that became a word of mouth because everyone started using that language. But to achieve that, by the way, is incredibly rare and incredibly hard.

This was the holy grail. It's actually very difficult. The other way that I do encourage everyone to do it and corporates do it. And they kind of hide the word of mouth within this, as the whole concept of a friend gets a free campaign. And you'll see this with some of those deals that corporate strand, where they're like you know like power company is a good example this.

Some power companies over here go, "Hey, invite your friends. And for everyone that signs up, you get $50. Oh, you both get $50 off your power bill" or something. So they're using you as their marketing engine. You're out there telling people, "Hey, come and sign up with me. You'll get 50 bucks. I'll get 50 bucks and we'll both have our power in the new company."

So that's an aspect of word of mouth that can be cultivated by brands rather than relying on people out there.

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