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.