People will talk — here’s how to make them say what we want

Talk Triggers, a guide to creating successful word of mouth

Published in

Marketing And Growth Hacking

8 min readJan 25, 2019

Every marketer dreams of a career worthy of paparazzi. As they enter the busy corporate world, they bring along thousands of ideals and a passionate drive as to how to they can catapult the company’s potential.

They have ears only for stories, and their minds are infatuated with brands that hide years of efforts behind an overnight campaign.

In other words, although new marketers believe they can implement everything they want to and that everything they apply will be a runaway PR stunt, most marketers come crashing down on reality sooner or later. Nursing their bruises, they learn to accept that marketing is nothing like the courses they mastered or the books they inhaled.

Because no one can define success in marketing. What works for one company can be the end of another. And all that destroyed another brand could work in favour of yet another one.

It’s a funny dance of life. Regardless of all the common denominators, the sales funnel, marketing funnel, the SQL and MQL, content strategies and digital advertising campaigns, there’s always something that trumps every marketer.

Something that you can’t point the finger at. It’s a unique something that differentiates brands from each other. And the reason you can never nail it down is that it’s beyond any marketer’s control.

It’s the customers and what they think about a brand.

Ah. If only we can control that, we’ll all be marketing prodigies. But alas, you see, the world doesn’t work that way. If we try too hard to influence what our customers think of us, via nagging surveys, pop up advertisements, and referral programs that result in nothingness, we only infuriate them further, helping them move further away from our reach.

How then can we make customers love us without asking like a deranged lover?

By giving them something they’ll love.

Something they will want to tell others.

Something that they find so brilliant and game-changing that they will choose us over our competitor.

Something so moving that they’ll bring their friends along even without our asking them to.

A Talk Trigger.

Make no mistake. It’s not a marketing gimmick. Or an advertisement. It’s not a clever tagline or a seasonal discounted offer.

A talk trigger is a talk-worthy aspect of a business. It comes from the root of the organisation, from the CEO, and extends all the way to the tip, the customer service representative.

The key—it’s an organisational element.

One marketer can’t create and implement a talk trigger; we need an entire team of marketers, customer support agents, and sales representatives, and managerial stakeholders working together to make a talk trigger work.
What’s so great about the Cheesecake Factory? For those who’ve never been, it’s the iconic centre-piece of The Big Bang Theory series. For those who’ve experienced the restaurant, however, The Cheesecake Factory is a factory of cheesecakes. Their 100+ page menu is legendary. And no one ‘s eaten there who hasn’t mentioned, at least once, the widespread of buttery deliciousness on offer.

That is the talk trigger of The Cheesecake Factory. It’s in their menu.
Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin outline many more examples in their book, Talk Triggers. For the few of us who didn’t even know that WOM refers to Word of Mouth, as well as for those who know their jargons, this book serves as a complete guide on how to generate customers through word of mouth.
This made me think about other businesses that have talkable triggers. My first thought was Coca Cola and their not-so-recent stunt of creating bottles that you could only open with another bottle.

But hey, that’s Coca Cola. They can do anything and make people talk.
A talk trigger isn’t a marketing stunt, remember. It’s a more subtle aspect that lives throughout the product/business. It’s not a seasonal campaign that only Coca Cola can afford.

It’s still a smashing talk trigger. But I needed more. As a marketer, I didn’t like not being able to identify examples outside of what the authors narrated.

Then I thought of a little, fantastic coffee shop I was at in Portland. They have great coffee roasted in-house, brewed in front of you, and served in delicate glassware. But that’s not new. Lots of artisan coffee houses in the US are oh so fancy. But Cup & Bar had something else. And I wouldn’t have noticed unless my host mentioned it to me. She even told me that it’s one of the “special things” about the place.

Bingo.

So what’s so special about Cup & Bar?

They have a line up of bike stands on one of their walls.
They have a digital map of the seating area, with moving points indicating moving people inside the coffee house.

What’s more, they have a roaster, a coffee shop, and a chocolate factory-all in one spacious once-a-warehouse.

All of these are great talk triggers. Not only do people go there for the coffee served with chocolate shavings, but they tell each other about it too.

That’s what makes Cup & Bar such a great success. And it’s not a seasonal offer-it’s ingrained and is part of their culture.

The more you think about it, the easier it is to identify talk triggers in businesses around us. As the book outlines, a talk trigger should be:

Remarkable
Relevant
Reasonable
Repeatable

Those are the four criteria for a talk trigger.

What would you do if a restaurant you’re at gave you two servings of French fries when you order one?

I’d be surprised they’re so generous with their hand-cut fries; amazed that they can afford to do it for every customer regardless of the day or time; thrilled at how thoughtful the gesture is, well, because, you can never have too much fries, and so much in love with the restaurant that I’d tell my friends about it.

Now, that’s how a talk trigger works. And every bit of that crispy trigger fits the criteria, too.

Five Guys Burgers is a real restaurant.

Ok, so we know what a talk-worthy trigger is, but how do we go about creating one for our business?

First, we need to identify the Why—we’re not doing this as a marketing stunt, but, instead, we want to offer the most value we to customers.

From there, it’s a six-step process:

Gather internal insights
Get close to your customers
Create candidate triggers
Test and measure
Expand and turn on
Amplify your trigger

And then — move on, create the next trigger.

Gather internal insights

Word of mouth stems from the bottom all the way through to the top of an organisation. And so no one team takes responsibility for creating and maintaining a successful word of mouth campaign. That’s why we need insights from every team-sales, support, marketing, and everyone else who has a touchpoint with customers. The first step in gathering information is getting everyone together in a room (or on a call), and hearing each other out.

Get close to your customers

How do we know what will surprise our customers? That’s a tough question to answer because we often don’t know our customers as much as we think. Sure, we know what they want-for about every issue and UI change, they complain via email and on social media. We know what features they want and what will satisfy them, but we have no idea what will astonish them enough to gloat in glee.

To know that, though, we need to listen closer. Why do our customers use our service today? If we ask ourselves what makes them return to us and to rely on us, we’ll understand better what they can’t do without. And when we know that, we’ll be able to identify possibilities to surprise them.

Create candidate triggers

Competition is good. It makes us strive harder and challenge ourselves to do better than we did yesterday. That’s why we should come up with more than one trigger idea. It may seem as if the first brain flash is the game changer, but the more options we explore, the more we realise that the first draft is just that-a first draft with room for considerable progress.

Once we’ve got a bunch of ideas, the next step is pretty straightforward—

Test and measure

Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin suggest that we’ve hit the jackpot if at least 10 percent of all customer conversations revolve around that talk trigger. In the long run, 25 percent of everything our customers say should constitute our talk trigger. That’s how we measure, and if we’re falling short, we should start creating more candidate triggers.

Expand and turn on

The testing phase involves one of the most important people for our business — customers. The next step, however, is to on board other essential people — stakeholders, employees, and the enterprise (SEE, as the authors call it). It’s important that our partners, vendors, franchise managers, fellow employees, and the entire management is as excited and prepared to execute the talk trigger. After all, there’s no advocacy stronger than the conviction of a developer who believes in their work or the word of a marketer who loves the product.

Amplify your trigger

Once everything is set up well on the inside, it’s time to scatter the word. Through the website, social media, email newsletters, sales and support interactions, brochures, invitations, and other outreach programmes, we should tell the world the story they’ll want to share.

And then, we give our selves a break we deserve. Sit back and sip that soda. Remember, though, no trigger lasts forever.

And when it’s run its course, we start over and create our next talk trigger.
Well, folk, that’s the crux of Talk Triggers caramelised with my experience as a marketer. It’s an easy read, and it’ll make you think twice about what you’re doing at your current job. If it does, it’s done half its job.

The other half, the book achieves by its share cards. If you buy the book, you’ll see that in the last page is a tear-apart sheet with quotes you can give your peers when you tell them about this great marketing guide you picked up the other day.

Because, hey, almost 20 percent of all purchases happen because someone told someone they liked a product.

I liked this book. Perhaps you will too.

Additional resources: https://www.talktriggers.com/resources