Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign

Word of mouth marketing campaign design and management sound simple until you try to make them happen. A word of mouth marketing campaign that works requires strategic forethought, diligent execution, accurate monitoring , and a little bit of luck

While there’s nothing to be done on the luck part, here are some tips about how to do the parts you can do something about.

Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign – Strategy

1. Start small- You know 50 people who all know 50 other people in your industry. Do a test run where you tell those 50 people about something in a way that’s engaging, includes a call to action, and has a result you can measure. See what happens. Rather than starting by trying to get the word out to hundreds or thousands of people, utilize your known world- after all, that’s what word of mouth is based on.

2. Define your goals- Word of mouth marketing without a goal is just people talking. Know what you want them to talk about and what success will look like. It will give you a finish line and keep you from getting overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of possible conversations.

3. Be flexible- People are not numbers or robots. With any word of mouth marketing campaign, be it online or at an event, the social interactions involved are dynamic and will change up on you- prepare for that with back up messaging, flexible timetables, and extra people (if it’s offline).

Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign – Execution

1. Do what you know – Lots of people are talking about “how do you make a video go viral?” or “how do I get on the twitter trending topic list?” If you look at what ends up getting passed around the video loops or what ends up on the trending list, it’s not marketing campaigns. It’s scandal, it’s humor, or it’s something emotional. In short, it’s something interesting.

2. If it’s not working- change- This one seems easy, right? Wrong. You just put all that time into the strategizing and now it’s not working. You don’t stop, as that just invalidates everything you have been doing and leaves those who do respond hanging, and you don’t just keep doing what you’re doing because it’s not going to give you what you want. You adjust, you change, you adapt. If people aren’t ReTweeting your blog post, change up the title and add in a few of the most ReTweeted words. If people aren’t stopping to talk to you on the street, change up your lead line to something shorter or more flashy or make it a question. Keep adjusting until you find something that works.

Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign – Monitoring

1. Online monitoring- Do it. If you’re doing word of mouth marketing on the web, you have to measure your reach and monitor what ends up being said. If you really want to monitor right, hire a monitoring service like Radian6 or Buzz Metrics. For a good overall look at services, read  Social Media Monitoring Tools: Lessons From My Own Search at MurrayNewlands.com.

2. Offline measurement- There’s no way for sure to know who reads those flyers you are handing out or how many people are hearing the messaging your ambassadors are talking about at the event- but you can figure out where, when and how to get your message to the most people. In WOM, we call that Impressions. Maximize your impressions by monitoring as you execute and adjusting when necessary.

3. Learn- You monitor, in the end, so you can show off your results, but once you’ve done that it’s time to learn. Study your numbers and compare them to other word of mouth campaigns you’ve done or know about, or case studies you can find all over the web. Trends will emerge- guaranteed.

Word of mouth marketing campaign design and management are, in the end, about taking a creative approach to the oldest form of communication in the world.

If you’ve done strategy, execution or monitoring on a word of mouth marketing campaign recently, leave a comment about the one thing that worked that you will for sure do net time- perhaps we an generate a list of best practices for the next post. Until then, happy campaigning!

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