How to Create a Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy
If content isn’t an experience, what’s the point of creating the content? My good friend Jay Baer raised this question when my co-host Anna Hrach and I had him as a guest on the Content Experience Show podcast recently.
As we began chatting with Jay, we got to talking about experiences, and how content experience isn’t all that different from customer experience. At its core, content experience is about how we make our customers — and potential customers — feel when they interact with our content.
“The content experience is everything that happens to the audience during and after their consumption of that content. The content experience is the totality of the interaction.” — Jay Baer
He raised a good point in saying that if your audiences aren’t craving your content, and if the thing that you’re making isn’t your favorite version of that thing, why are you doing it at all? Content isn’t easy, he said, and it’s definitely not free.
In the episode, Jay talked a bit about the new book he’s writing, Talk Triggers, and explained that word of mouth is the most powerful (and perhaps the most cost effective) form of customer acquisition.
Here are some stats Jay shared from Engagement Labs that really drove this point home:
- 19% of all purchases in the United States are driven directly by word of mouth
- As much as 40% of all purchases are influenced by word of mouth
He went on to point out that those numbers are even higher in the B2B world. “It’s very, very rare that somebody makes a B2B purchase without checking with a friend,” Jay said.
When it comes to word of mouth marketing, we think it should be our customers rallying for us, right? But Jay explained that in order to make word of mouth work for your business, you’ve got to give your customers a story to tell.
“You’ve got to give yourself permission to do something different, and when you do that, that’s where word of mouth clones your customers.”
It wouldn’t be a chat with Jay Baer if we didn’t talk about Conex. Last year, Jay hosted a segment we call Content Feud, a play on the game show Family Feud, where we pinned the Practitioners against the Strategists for an ultimate marketing face-off. Some of the people who participated as contestants told us it was a career highlight! And when it comes to promoting Conex, those participants provide positive word of mouth marketing for us because of the great experiences they had.
I didn’t know this, but while recording this podcast I learned that Jay Baer was voted “most likely to a be game show host” in high school. I can totally see it, and before the Price is Right scoops him up, we’re happy to have him host Content Feud each summer in Toronto.
There’s a lot more I’d love to share here, but I’ll let you give the podcast a listen for yourself. I’d love to hear about how you use word of mouth marketing in your organization. What do you do differently that gives your customers something to talk about?
