Word of Mouth Agency
A business you can start with just your mouth (and maybe a website)
Here’s an idea for all the creative types out there.
Think of the last product (over $100) you bought or a recent movie/series you watched.
How did you find out about it?
If you’re like most people, there’s a really good chance someone else told you about it–either in person or online.
88% of consumers say that they trust recommendations from other people they know above all other marketing channels.
64% of marketers say that word-of-mouth marketing is more effective than any other tactic.
So, if word-of-mouth is the most effective form of marketing, how much time do companies spend deliberately trying to make word-of-mouth spread easily? From my experience, almost zero.
Why?
Because it’s hard.
And that’s the opportunity.
Word-of-mouth
Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) has been around since…well…words.
It’s the earliest and most natural form of marketing. We are social creatures and instinctively want to know what works or doesn’t work for others.
Word-of-mouth got a lot of exposure in the mid 2000s when books like “Word-of-Mouth Marketing” by Andy Sernovitz and “Made to Stick” by Dan and Chip Heath came out.
“Word-of-Mouth Marketing” is the business book I’ve easily read the most frequently over the last 20 years. I’ve given dozens of copies away.
In the book, Andy explores the various reasons why word-of-mouth is so powerful and teaches how to get it to spread. He shares things like:
The 4 rules of word-of-mouth marketing
Be interesting and worth talking about
Make your customers happy
Earn the trust and respect you want
Make it easy for people to talk about you
And the Five T’s of word-of-mouth marketing
Talkers
Topics
Tools
Tactics
Tracking
If you’re interested in this topic at all, you should totally get the book as there’s no way I can do it justice here.
WOMM Agency
You’ve heard of marketing agencies specializing in social, digital, traditional, SEO, advertising, analytics, and growth. But, have you ever heard of a marketing agency that specializes in word-of-mouth? If it’s the most effective form of marketing, why not? They exist, but they are rare.
They are rare because word-of-mouth is hard to achieve and harder to measure than, say, digital. It typically involves deep involvement in the company as it’s hard to achieve word-of-mouth if a company isn’t interesting, doesn’t take care of their customers, or earn their trust.
But, if they do, it’s totally possible to make it easy for people to talk about them.
And that’s exactly what a WOMM Agency could deliver on.
Here’s how I would structure it if I were pursuing it.
Structure
I would sell an up front “WOM Discovery” session in which I would spend two days on site with marketing and product team members. In this session, I would lead the team through the discovery of the 5 T’s of word-of-mouth. We would take inventory of what’s been tried, what’s working, and ideate around what could be done. The deliverable of the discovery session would be a roadmap of tactics and experiments that could be tried and tested.
From the discovery, they could either implement themselves or hire us to implement them.
Note: From my experience in conducting discovery sessions for Maestro, there is a 0% chance that they would dare to implement themselves after you’ve spent two days blowing their minds and architecting the plan before their eyes. #agencyhacks
For implementation, I would charge a monthly retainer for us to implement the tactics/experiments that we’ve architected in the discovery session. These tactics/experiments would be rated and ranked on a rubric to show us which ones had the most impact with the least effort.
I say tactics and experiments because effort should be taken to break things down into their atomic parts. Tactics are for initiatives that you already have data on and would fit the “duh” category–like watermarking a video when shared to social. Experiments are for things that are more speculative and are designed to allow you to gather data to know if you should make a larger investment. Successful experiments lead to tactics. Failed experiments either create a new hypothesis or are killed quickly.
Each tactic/experiment would have a description, hypothesis, and measurement criteria. They would also have an effort expressed in # of weeks to implement. Some might be several weeks. Some might be 0.5 weeks. I would meet with the client bi-weekly to plan a 2 week sprint.
After implemented, we would set a date to measure the impact (based on the measurement criteria). Some experiments might be able to be measured quickly, while others would take weeks or months to have enough data. We would discuss results in our bi-weekly planning meetings.
Bi-Weekly Planning Meeting Agenda:
Review results of any tactics/experiments that are ready/able to be measured.
Discuss and grade any new ideas of tactics/experiments that have come up since the last meeting.
Rank tactics/experiments by score (score=impact-effort).
Client selects the tactics/experiments for the next sprint.
Coordinate efforts and resources needed to implement for next sprint.
I would guess the average tactic/experiment would take a week to implement.
Imagine how much impact you could have on a company if you were able to implement 52 word-of-mouth tactics/experiments in a year. Seems like there would be a high willingness to pay for such a service.
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OK, that’s enough to make you dangerous.
If you’re a creative person and have a mouth, this could be your next venture.
Oh, and you should totally launch it in a way that spreads word-of-mouth. Duh ;)