How to build word-of-mouth into a marketing channel
A simple tactic to get people talking about your product and company
I first wrote about word of mouth last year when I argued that marketing is not an engineering function.
That time, I quoted from Pankaj Mishra’s interview with Rahul Vohra, the founder and CEO of Superhuman. It’s worth going over again.
This is Vohra speaking.
I was very fortunate when I sold Rapportive to LinkedIn because I got to work for the Head of Growth for LinkedIn, Elliot Shmukler. He was the man who had scaled LinkedIn from about 25 million members to north of 250 million members.
In our first one on one, I sat down with him, super-excited, and said to him: Elliot, teach me everything you know about virality.
He said: There’s no point trying to optimise for viral loops and viral hooks within the product. You are not going to get it past a viral factor of 1.But what about LinkedIn, what about Facebook, I asked.
Take any feature in LinkedIn, even the most viral one - the address book, it did not sustain a viral factor of more than 0.4. Even Facebook in its heyday did not sustain a viral factor of more than 0.7, he replied.
But that doesn’t seem to match reality, I said.
Well, he said, that’s because what’s actually driving the virality, of LinkedIn, of Facebook, and frankly, of any mass market consumer brand, is real world word of mouth. It’s not address book imports, it’s not people you may know. It’s when people tell other people about the product.
This is coming from one of the most respected in the business. So we have to listen.
But, and this is the question I’m trying to answer, is that if even the most viral consumer products in the world depended on this kind of word-of-mouth and buzz, can we marketers engineer that? Is it possible to build up momentum without the perfect storms of media + virality + everyone-is-using-it loops of massive consumer products like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn?
I think it is.
Here’s a conversation I found helpful when thinking about this.
Peep Laja is talking to Devin Bramhall, CEO of Animalz, one of the best content marketing agencies in the world.
Watch.
Did you hear Peep’s question?
He’s saying he’s never used their services, doesn’t even read their blog posts, but somehow he still believes that Animalz is the best content marketing agency in the world. And he believes that because that’s what he’s been hearing everyone say.
And then he asks the question: what have they been doing to make him believe that?
Devin’s answer is simple: They created great, targeted content, and made sure they were well known in a niche.
But that’s not all of it, is there?
A clue is in the way Devin speaks about Animalz: She’s able to position her company as the anti-Hubspot in a minute flat, also telling you that they are experts. She’s telling a story about the company, and she’s skilled at it, convincing everyone else to say the same thing (I shared this here!), creating an unbroken chain of opinion: Animalz is the best in the world.
It is this kind of storytelling, repeated over and over again that has made folks, including Peep, believe that Animalz is the best content marketing agency in the world.
Yesterday, I was speaking to a very successful repeat entrepreneur who’s building a new company in the hiring space. He had been trying to educate prospects that hiring had changed, and they needed a new model: the one he had. But it wasn’t landing well.
Until last week.
When another well known founder spoke about the very same hiring problem on social media, there was an immediate rush of interest in what he was building. He had been speaking about the very same thing for months, but when the signals started coming from elsewhere, he started getting calls.
How could he reverse-engineer this, was his question.
My suggestion was that he amplify what had happened inadvertently. Just like the founder had spoken about the problem on social media, could he gather 10 or 15 founders from his network, and craft messages for them so they could also talk about the same problem? And once they did, could he seed discussions from some of his other friends, making sure there’s a conversation and more people pay attention? And could he keep doing that in different ways for 2 - 3 months?
At the end of the quarter, could he write a blog post with screenshots of all these discussions, and positioning what he had built as a solution?
Well yes, he said, he could. And off he went.
Can you do the equivalent when you want a certain message out?
Sure you can.
It’s not easy, though. It will take time, planning, an enormous amount of relationship management, and constant, consistent following up (people are busy!). It will need manpower. But the result is going to incredibly powerful, especially in brand building and demand creation.
What you can also augment that with is great content, like Animalz did. If you have blogs and opinion pieces that you can plug into this conversation, you can drive attention to them too, creating a flywheel.
This may not make you the next Facebook, but it can certainly get you started.
PS - In July, I wrote about three amazing startups and how they are upping the marketing game for all of us. These essays were part of my series on what I call India's super cool startups.
1. First was on CRED, and how it's building a brand that's impossible to ignore.
2. Second was on Rocketlane, and how it built a marketing machine before it even had a product.
3. Third was on Reslash, and how they used forums and social media to land some top tech press.
I had planned this as a one-month series. But I've since realised there are more such stories to be told, and (evidently) a lot of interest in learning about them too. So the series will continue, interspersed among other dispatches.
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