Word of Mouth Marketing is Harder Than You Think

Word of mouth advertising is the best marketing you can get.

It’s the holy grail, the treasure chest from the sunken Spanish galleon, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

It’s also almost entirely out of your control.

Almost. We’ll get to that, but first let’s behold just how powerful it can be when it works.

George Lucas thought of Star Wars as a b-movie. He had no idea—nobody did—that it would be the game-changing hit that it was.

What kind of marketing did the film have? Not much. Hardly any at all, actually. But the relatively small audience over the opening weekend loved it so much they told all their friends about it, who then told all their friends. Everyone raved about it, on and on for weeks, months and even years.

The Empire Strikes Back was even better, and by the time the third film, Return of the Jedi, was released, die-hard fans camped in line on sidewalks outside movie theaters for days so they could buy tickets to the first showing.

Marketing for the newest film in the franchise, The Force Awakens, is everywhere. It’s all over Internet. But initially, Lucas had pretty much nothing but word of mouth going.

And he didn’t do anything aside from making one of the awesomest movies ever to get that marketing kickstarted.

You can’t force people to talk about your product any more than you can force people to buy it. That’s entirely up to them. You can execute the most brilliant marketing strategy with precision and get no word of mouth to go along with it whatsoever. Alternatively, it can all go viral while you’re in a coma.

Which makes it seem a little like winning the lottery. You need to have a great product, of course. A dud won’t go viral unless everyone is talking about how shockingly awful it is. (Imagine if Apple released an old school flip phone, for instance.)

You can try to make something as extraordinary as Star Wars, and you should, but Star Wars is a rarity. Even if you do make something equally great, there’s still not much you can do to convince people to tell their friends all about it.

If they love it and it’s portable like a smart phone, they’ll probably show it off to their friends anyway. If it’s not portable—let’s say it’s the fastest, quietest and most reliable laser printer in the history of laser printers—they might not say anything. They certainly won’t bust it out of their pockets at lunch.

Your customers and potential customers will either talk about you and your stuff or they won’t. It’s entirely up to them.

But aside from making spectacular products, you can also create share-worthy content. Millions of people are accustomed to clicking one or more “share” buttons when they find something they like on the web. And creating something readers enjoy enough to “share” with their friends is a whole lot easier than making the second coming of Star Wars.

So get to it.

Facebook Adds a “Reaction” Button

Facebook’s “like” button has always been insufficient, not just for marketers but for all of us.

How are you supposed to react to a post about your favorite team losing the Super Bowl, when your friend says that her mom is sick in the hospital, or a news item about a school shooting or a terrorist attack?

Nobody likes this stuff, but some of us click the “like” button anyway because we want to draw attention to the content and there’s nothing else to click.

So Facebook has decided to roll out a range of emotional reaction buttons. “Like” is still an option, but so is “love,” along with “sad,” “angry” and “wow.”

You might not see these buttons just yet because Facebook is rolling them out exclusively in Spain and Ireland before going global, but you’ll have access to them soon enough.

And so will your customers.

Your customers have always been able to express their displeasure on Facebook, but they’ve had to stop what they’re doing and actually write something. Now they can just click a button.

And the number of angry reactions will be tallied right there alongside the likes.

Feeling nervous yet?

Don’t. It’s all good.

You’re not going to anger your customers more than you already are just because they can register their disgruntlement by clicking a button. The difference is that you’re more likely to know they’re disgruntled, which means you’ll be more able to do something about it. You can’t fix problems you don’t know about, and you can’t placate angry customers if they silently stalk off in a huff.

Think of Facebook’s new range of reactions like a comment card. You do want to know what your customers really think, don’t you?

Just be careful not to make customer reactions your overriding concern.

“At the end of the day,” says Facebook product manager Richard Sim, “for a business we want you to post things that you know are going to drive business value for you, and optimizing for loves really isn’t the right business value for you.”

Google Will Know When You’re Lying

Google is making a list and checking it twice, and if you’re fudging your facts in your marketing—even if you’re doing it out of incompetence rather than malice—your search engine results are going to suffer.

At least that will be the case if a new algorithm is put into place.

Eight software developers at Google explained how it would work in a paper called Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources.

We extract a plurality of facts from many pages using information extraction techniques. We then jointly estimate the correctness of these facts and the accuracy of the sources using inference in a probabilistic model. Inference is an iterative process, since we believe a source is accurate if its facts are correct, and we believe the facts are correct if they are extracted from an accurate source. We leverage the redundancy of information on the web to break the symmetry. Furthermore, we show how to initialize our estimate of the accuracy of sources based on authoritative information, in order to ensure that this iterative process converges to a good solution.

It only gets more complicated from there, and you won’t fully understand it you’re not a math whiz, but the bottom line is pretty straightforward. Your web site will be scrutinized for the accuracy of its facts and the accuracy of its sources. If you come up short in the honesty department, your search engine rankings are going to crater.

As long as their algorithm works more or less correctly, Google will be doing everybody a favor. Conspiracy theory web sites won’t get as much traction. Nor will the web sites of companies that lie about their products and their competition.

Nor, for that matter, will the web sites of companies that are wrong on the details thanks simply to laziness.

Marketers who phone in their content solely for the sake of search engine optimization will have to up their game if they want to get noticed by Google and therefore potential customers, but they should have been upping their game a long time ago anyway. Customers want accurate and compelling information, not slapped together paragraphs crammed with keywords.
Gossip web sites, the authors say, are currently ranked very high for obvious reasons, but they’re not considered reliable, so they’re going to fall in the search engine rankings. Some less popular sites, on the other hand, are going to rise in the ranks because they’re more accurate.

That’s terrific news for marketers, isn’t it? As long as we do our jobs the way we’re supposed to be doing our jobs, we’ll have another way to get noticed and find potential customers.

The Masters of Content Marketing

According to the conventional wisdom, content marketing is only possible thanks to the Internet and the ability to publish material digitally. Businesses can now turn their corporate web sites into magazines. By publishing compelling relevant content, they can communicate with their customers at both a higher and deeper level than they can with conventional advertising, but before the Internet, this was impossible. Media space had to be rented from newspapers, magazines and television and radio stations.

But it’s not true. Content marketing has been with us for more than 100 years. And by looking back at its 19th century pioneers, instead of reinventing the wheel, today’s marketers can learn from those who mastered it before they were even born.

John Deere founded a magazine called The Furrow in 1895. He published articles about new agriculture technology and about how farmers could become more successful. The magazine was not a collection of ads for John Deere equipment, though it included those on the side. It was written by journalists and agriculture experts and aimed squarely at what farmers needed in Iowa and beyond.

120 years later, with 1.5 million subscribers in dozens of countries, it’s the most widely-circulated farming magazine in the world.

There’s also Saudi Aramco World, a gorgeous glossy print magazine about the peoples and cultures of the Middle East. It’s published by a multinational oil company based in Riyadh and Houston, but the magazine is not about directly about oil or energy. It’s about the place where much of the world’s oil and energy come from. It has been in circulation since 1949.

It’s hard to say how many customers Saudi Aramco has acquired thanks to an English-language magazine published in Texas. We all use energy resources from the Middle East, and no one will use more thanks to that magazine. It’s most likely not even a loss-leader. It’s a pet side project.

So why bring it up? Because it endures. It endures because it’s a serious magazine staffed with serious writers and editors that has earned a wide audience.

Just like John Deere’s The Furrow.

Also take a look at BenchMark magazine, an award-winning general interest engineering magazine published by Burns and McDonnell, an engineering firm based in Kansas City. Two years ago, it celebrated its 102nd birthday.

These three companies published their magazines—their content marketing—long before publishing was just a button, back when they had to use printing presses. They still use printing presses. The magazines are actual magazines. They aren’t just web sites. You can hold them in your hand.

They’re gorgeous. They’re relevant. They hold up next to “real” magazines like Newsweek and The Economist. Otherwise they would have died a long time ago.

The Internet and digital publishing certainly makes content marketing cheaper and easier, but it’s not new in the world. If you want to see how it’s done epically and correctly, start by studying the masters who’ve been knocking it out of the park for more than a century.

Meet the Universe Half Way

Author Chuck Wendig posts advice to aspiring and professional writers on his blog TerribleMinds.com that applies to professionals in virtually end field. (The language over there is a bit on the naughty side, so consider yourself warned.)

Meet the universe halfway and the universe will meet you in return. Explained more completely: there exist components of any career (but writing in particular) that are well beyond your grasp. You cannot control everything. Some of it is just left to fate. But, you still have to put in the work. You won’t get struck by lightning if you don’t run out [in] the storm. You must maximize your chances. You do this by meeting the universe halfway. You do this by working.

That is excellent advice indeed for writers. It also works for painters, dancers, graphic designers, musicians and actors. It’s excellent advice for doctors and lawyers. It’s excellent advice for entrepreneurs. It’s excellent advice for just about anybody who wants to accomplish just about anything.

Including business leaders. And marketers.

There are some things that you just can’t control. They’re in the lap of the gods.

You can’t force customers to buy your products. You can’t force readers to share your social media posts. You can’t force a single person to bookmark your business site or add anything to their shopping cart.

You certainly can’t force Wall Street to respond favorably to your quarterly earnings report.

You can’t stop Apple from building a better smart phone or Microsoft from designing a better word processor. And if you’re Apple, you can’t stop Samsung from building a competitive smart phone, and if you’re Microsoft you can’t stop OpenOffice from creating a new version of the word processor it gives away for free on the Internet.

You can’t do any of those things.

But you can work your tail off and constantly strive to improve. And the universe (or the market, or the Internet, or the high tech industry, or whatever) really does have a way of responding to consistently applied competent effort over time.

Afraid that no one is even reading your copywriting, let alone following your calls to action? Bummed out that your business doesn’t have enough Facebook followers? Keep producing relevant engaging content that consists of more than just ads for your business, and do it week after week, month after month, and year after year. If you’re constantly getting better, the people who need to notice eventually will.

Worried that your marketing strategy feels too much like groping in the dark? Yeah, well, so does everyone else’s. It’s no different if you’re starting a business, writing a novel, or hoping to invent the bestest mouse trap ever in your basement. Break your strategy apart. Test it. Refine it. And break it apart and test it again. Never stop improving by increments and you’ll get somewhere.

Frustrated that the competition is eating your lunch this year? Throw everything you have, including the kitchen sink, into eating your competition for dinner next year and the year after that.

There are no guarantees in any endeavor, but if you meet the universe halfway with competence and persistence over time, your efforts eventually will be noticed, and they’ll be rewarded.