Word of mouth 101: how to unlock the most powerful form of marketing
If you can get people talking, your revenue will accelerate exponentially.
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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
This is about sparking a word-of-mouth marketing fire.
(Metaphorically, of course.)
Most marketers know the power of word-of-mouth marketing. But how you maximize marketing dollars, and unlock exponential growth at decreasing levels of CAC, is by laser-focusing on Super-Geos. The purpose is to spend enough money in these areas of demand density so that word-of-mouth marketing tips.
So, we’re sharing how to apply WOM marketing in a way that exponentially scales.
Word Of Mouth Is, And Will Forever Be, The Most Powerful Form Of Marketing
As we shared in our mini-book Category Science 101, word-of-mouth marketing is all about talking.
Unfortunately, the way most entrepreneurs, executives, and creators think about word of mouth is by “reaching as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible.”
Conventional wisdom assumes the more people who hear your message, the more people will spread your message. But this just isn’t true. When this strategy fails, most marketing experts think the problem was “the creative” or the “ad buys” or any number of other traditional marketing levers.
What they fail to consider is that their marketing did not create viral lift, with a decreasing CAC, because they did not put the right words in the right mouths.
WOM is really about putting the right words (POV) in the right mouths (Supers) in the right places (Super-Geos).
The people who are most likely to want to talk about your product, service, platform, or idea (category) are people who are obsessed with that kind of thing.
They’re Superconsumers.
And they’re not doing word-of-mouth marketing because some company hypnotized them into it. They’re talking about the product, and more importantly the category, because they heard the Point Of View, internalized it, tried it, experienced a transformation of some kind, and are now over-the-moon excited to help other people experience the same transformation they did.
But not all WOM marketing is the same. So let’s walk through the different levels: