Word of Mouth is a bit of a primal thing. We cant help and talk about things that make us go wow or things that niggle and irritate us. It’s what we humans are programmed to do.

Word of Mouth Marketing is the art of getting people to fall in love with you, your brand or your business. To get them to revere and respect you so that they recommend you — for free.

Of course when they really do not like you, or you treat them with contempt, ignore their pain and generally not care, they will also share that for free.

A Series of Planned Events

In days gone past, word of mouth marketing could be left to a hope, a prayer that it happened for the good. Not any more.

Word of mouth marketing is a planned series of events that is designed to get people to talk about you, to rave about you.

It is a process that uses the newest strategies and tactics with the human behaviour. It triggers feelings and passions. It stimulates conversations that flows between channels and weaves in and out the online and offline worlds.

The Six Step Structure That Thrills

Word of Mouth marketing is the art and science of getting people thrilled and turned on by what you are doing so that they have no choice but to rave about you. To do this well takes six steps:

1. Know who your fans are, who is talking about you
2. See and feel their passions and emotional drivers
3. Design an experience that stimulates these drivers and passions
4. Activate the right tools to accelerate the conversations
5. Step up and being part of the conversation
6. Tracking, reviewing and redesigning

Becoming Familiar with The Unfamiliar

These six steps are not as structured as the traditional media methodologies, and are unfamiliar to many marketers and business owners. Yet they are common sense. They are the future of marketing. And I think the biggest challenge for most marketers is not these steps but becoming familiar with the unfamiliar.

The trigger to word of mouth marketing is the customer experience. It is the root of all word of mouth marketing and defines how people feel about you. And what people feel about you defines what they have to say.

This makes the overall customer experience pretty important. You can not leave it to chance. It is the one thing that you can control when it comes to today’s marketing and word of mouth.

But What Is The Customer Experience

When we sit back and remember things, we sit back and remember how we felt. We do not think about the logic of the conversation or the experience. Yet its is easy to sit and write this. How do we make our customers love us?

How do you create a customer experience that really engages our customer and blows their socks off?

A Broader Customer Experience Definition

To generalise about the customer experience is too broad. There are many parts to it and is as complex as the people you are dealing with. Well, to try and add some for of clarity I have broken down the customer experience into 4 elements that you can control: [Read more...]

As a form of word of mouth marketing it does not get better. Your customer’s physically tattooing their bodies with your logo.

Yet how do you get the employees to feel this passion? How excited do the staff get and how do you go about bringing them into this movement that you want your brand to stand for?

There is no doubt that this is a huge job. And it goes way beyond the marketing director and any word of mouth marketing strategy. It is as much an organisational development process as it is a brand and marketing process.

The 3 Step To Creating A Tattoo Brand

Having given this a lot of thought and research over the years I think you can break it down into three things.

1. High Product and Service Differentiation.

To many products are “me to” products that lack any form of differentiation whatsoever. Your product and / or service needs to be mind blowing, to blow the socks of your customers. If you look at the tattoo brands they do this. Think of Apple and Harley Davidson. They stand out from the crowd based on how good they are. They stand on their own and word of mouth marketing is a natural outcome.

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You don’t talk about boring things, share boring things, let alone notice them. Why? Well boring is boring. Who cares.

You look for things in your life that make you happy. That make you feel loved and connected. Well, at least this is the goal of most people. It’s what makes us human.

And this is why we talk. We share the experiences we have in life to connect, to be accepted and to be part of the group. There is nothing new to this idea. The cave man did and now you do it. The only real difference is that you are not a caveman.

We LOVE to GOSSIP!

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We All get how powerful Word of Mouth Marketing. But exactly what is it and how do we implement it?

Here we break down the premise of what word of mouth marketing is all about and how to get yours working a lot better.

It is really cool. Marketing is now inundated with shiny new technology that we can use for social marketing. While we all love this and try and get our heads around it, marketers often get stuck on how to apply. The idea of social marketing is very different from traditional above the line media.

And while this shiny new technology is wonderful, just setting up a FaceBook page, Twitter account or LinkedIn profile is not enough. There has to be a compelling reason for your customers get involved, hooked up and actively participating.

But how do you get that right? To add some insight into this process, I have created a slide share presentation that will give you a short summary and a more detailed video presentation. They will help you contextulise this and make your social marketing more relevant to your customer.

If you have any questions please just drop me a note.

If you have any examples of your own I would love to hear about them in the comment section below.