Is Word of Mouth Marketing More Effective?

Is Word of Mouth Marketing More Effective?

Sean: You seem to have done all the entire spectrum through – organically. Where you could get that data and that story, and just give it to the press and they would publish it without shaking hands for, you know, some deal with them or no ads ran.

I wonder, word of mouth marketing is arguably still the best form of marketing that any company would have.

That is kind of what you did right there for you. But when you look at a lot of companies, even the big ones, they don’t have a word-of-mouth marketing strategy. They would have an advertising strategy. They would have a big idea strategy. They’d have an SEO strategy, which we both are very fond of, but not – no real word of mouth strategy.

Vince: Sometimes the word of mouth strategy is hidden in other layers.

So there’s a couple of core strategies we use in – like when I’m dealing with agencies in large corporates, particularly initially some small companies as well. There’s a couple of methodologies we use. One of them is any advertising that we’re doing, particularly TV commercials and things like that.

There is this, this holy grail that we want to achieve and that holy grail is getting people to change their language. And I’ll give a good example of this. I don’t know if you, like, we had this in New Zealand. I don’t know if it’s in any other country, but we had a Continental Cup of soups, right? So it was a cup of soup brand and Continental had these ads that used to run.

“Got three-thirtyitis? It must be time for continental.” And three-thirtyitis wasn’t a real thing. It was just their way of describing the afternoon slump that everybody in corporate world would feel. So you’re in your job when it comes to about 3:30 and you’re like, “oh, I don’t want to do my job. I just want to go home. I’m tired now.”

 And it’s because you’ve got that slump that happens after lunch. You’ve had a big feed, all these kinds of things. So they owned this message. They owned this concept called three-thirty itis. So that became something that became a word of mouth because everyone started using that language. But to achieve that, by the way, is incredibly rare and incredibly hard.

This was the holy grail. It’s actually very difficult. The other way that I do encourage everyone to do it and corporates do it. And they kind of hide the word of mouth within this, as the whole concept of a friend gets a free campaign. And you’ll see this with some of those deals that corporate strand, where they’re like you know like power company is a good example this.

Some power companies over here go, “Hey, invite your friends. And for everyone that signs up, you get $50. Oh, you both get $50 off your power bill” or something. So they’re using you as their marketing engine. You’re out there telling people, “Hey, come and sign up with me. You’ll get 50 bucks. I’ll get 50 bucks and we’ll both have our power in the new company.”

So that’s an aspect of word of mouth that can be cultivated by brands rather than relying on people out there. It’s like testimonials, like every entrepreneur says to me, oh, it’s really hard to get testimonials. And it’s hard if you just go to someone, can you give me a testimonial? Because what you’ve basically said to them is, you know, do you like what I do?

Yes. I like what you do. Would you recommend me? Yes, I’d recommend you. Great. Can you run a testimonial? Cause that means I now need to think of what to say, what format you wanted then do you want it a specific word count? It means I’ve got to take the time to think about it. We’ve got to take the time to put it down on paper or on the computer or whatever.

And then I’ve all these other conflicting priorities it’s just too hard. I’m not going to do it. So I get people to hack that process. Don’t do that. Don’t go and say, can you give me a testimonial go, Hey, can I just talk to you about your experience with me? Sure. What was life like before you engaged with me?

Like, what was, you know, you’re like, what were you doing? What was your company and what was the biggest challenge? And they say, blah, blah, blah. Like if they’re coming to me, they go, “oh Vince I was completely overwhelmed with marketing, or I wasn’t generating enough leads. And I was kind of freaking out whether or not be in business or as generating those leads, but actually, I couldn’t convert the leads and I’m just sort of that lost.”

Okay, well what was it like working with me? Oh my goodness. It’s like totally empowered. I felt I’ve never felt more confident. I’ve never felt more alive, blah blah. I’m using real quotes here by the way, this is not just me being narcissistic. Actually, these are real quotes of my clients were in fact, one of them totally pivoted in business.

After. What I taught her through. She goes, I just felt so empowered that I actually wanted to change what I was doing to focus on this aspect. Okay. And what is the outcome? Well, I’ve got companies that have doubled their revenue, triple their revenue. I’ve got companies that have found a whole new niche or a whole new income stream and those kinds of things.

So I took this interview with them. I recorded the whole thing, and I then turned that into a testimonial and went back to them going, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate that. I’ve just, if you don’t mind, I’m just taking some core aspects of what you said and your words. And I put them together as a bit of a testimonial. Would you be comfortable with me using this?”

 And of course, they want to recommend you. So of course, they do. But also you’ve made it so they don’t have to do any work. They just had a conversation with you. So really, really simple. So that’s the aspect of word of mouth as well as using their quotes and their kind of experience to actually market to other people.

So all of these things are done. Like companies actually do it. They just don’t realize what they’re doing or they don’t call it word of mouth

Sean: Yup, they either don’t recognize it, or they’re too busy doing other things to pay attention to it.

Vince: Honestly, Sean. There are large corporates. I know that just – like I remember I was in Singapore at the Facebook campus there, so Facebook headquarters in Singapore. And I remember sitting down and they’re going to kill me for saying this, but I don’t care. I remember sitting down with them and Cigna, they were like, yeah, yeah, we want to test this new functionality or we’re saying, Hey, this would be a really good thing to test now.

Like yeah, our recommendation is just to a small test and learn campaign. If you just spent like $2 million, then what we could do is we could test this and see that I’m going, hold on, hold on. $2 million is not a test and learn campaign people like, yes, Coca-Cola can probably afford that. That’s actually half of my year’s budget, like forget about it, you know I’m saying?

So yeah. So a lot of these companies just throw money at a solution or just go, I’m just going to throw it against ads. I’m gonna put a TV commercial out there. I’m going to put up Facebook ads, Google ads. All these kinds of things without actually taking the time to understand what really works, what converts, what is resonating with their target market, and how to build a better product and a better service.

Sean: Right, right. And talking about budgets, if there are startup companies out there and they haven’t done any marketing yet, or at least not intentionally, what would be your advice for them on where and how to start?

Vince: I think the first thing to do before anything else marketing-wise, is talk to your customers or your potential customers.

And by that, I mean, you, you can do this a number of different ways. There’s a concept I created called coffee line tests. And this came from one of my previous startups. In fact, one of my early ones failed miserably, but it wasn’t the coffee line test that made it fail. But I remember we started with this thing called Startup Weekend.

So basically a whole weekend, you come together. A whole pile of people goes to like a hundred and I think there were about 114 and our intake as one of the first ones we have around here in Wellington. In fact, it was the first one we ever ran. So we’ve got 114 people together and you would pitch ideas there, and I pitched an idea and they would choose 12 of these ideas to progress further.

So mine was one of those 12, so I’m like, cool. So all these people come to you and they’re like, we want to be part of your company. So we’re a developer, I’m a designer, I’m a hustler. I’m a, whatever, you know, they’ll come to you and you form this company and you go right now in this weekend, this long weekend, we are going to have to build this business.

So we had to really hustle down hard. So I thought the first thing I need to do is validate my product. So I ran out on the street with a clipboard and a pen and thought this is going to be easy, man. I’m just going to go out there and I’m going to ask people’s opinion on this. I also discovered that when you go out on the street with a clipboard and a pen and try to interrupt people from going from point A to point B, they think you’re a crazy street preacher. Or they think you’re asking for money for their charity so they will not give you their time. And in fact, I learned a whole pile of new swear words.

So I was really disappointed and thought, oh man, this sucks. I can’t interrupt people. I need somewhere where there’s captivity. I need some way where I can actually talk to people and they would give me their time and give me some valuable feedback.

So I thought, I have to think about this more, but I needed coffee. So I went to this cafe, I’m standing in line in the coffee shop going right. Okay. I was in line for about five minutes waiting to pay, to place my order. And I’m thinking where on earth, I’m going to find a captive audience and then place my order.

And the place is really busy. And then I’m waiting there for another five minutes for my coffee. I was walking out of the store going, I really need to keep what – wait a minute. I just spent 10 minutes in a coffee shop, stuck there. Not able to do anything while I waited for a coffee. So we started this thing going all right.

Well, if we’re direct to consumers and we’re dealing with consumers out there, why don’t we go up to a coffee shop that has a high turnover and high traffic, mostly for people buying coffee to go? Why don’t we go in there? We say to the manager, “this is what we’re going to do. Me and my friend here, my colleague are going to basically give you our credit card.”

And we’re going to buy the coffees for certain people in the line. So we’ll make the orders for them. They’ll come over and we’ll interview them and they’ll give some feedback. The managers of the coffee shops always say, yes go, it’s coffees. And when you’re talking to somebody on the line and you say, Hey, look, we’d love to buy your coffee for you.

If you give us some of your time. So you go over there and chat to my mate, I’ll actually stand in line, make the order for you and bring it over to you. And that’s always a resounding yes from people they come over and you get to talk to them, get them to tell you stories, get them to tell you about times where they’ve dealt with similar companies to yours or similar products or offering to yours, get them to talk through what they felt at the time when they were dealing with that.

What was the thing that made them hesitate? What was the thing that made them convert? What were the things that they were thinking? Where were they? Like paint a picture, get in the door, this recalls all of this. And from that you are going to get so many insights. You’re going to get so much information that it’s going to make your marketing really easy. Because tied up in there as a concept called the verbatims and what this is.

They are going to give you all of the words that you need to be able to market back to them. And they’ll give you a good example of this. So we take a whole pile of things for granted sometimes. In fact, even myself, I teach this stuff, I’m a giant SEO nerd, like you are Sean, like we’re both way too passionate about SEO. Anyway, but I remember talking to those two little old ladies in Melbourne and they’ve got their website up and running and it was growing really, really quickly.

And I’m like, we’re going to take it to the next level. So one of your problems is you’ve got an SEO issue, right? So you’re not getting found on Google upfront. So you know, you’re on like page four or five, so I’m going to do an SEO audit and I’m going to put a place, a strategy to get you up the search. So basically get you on the front page.

And I just remember them looking at me so blankly and they were like that’s “we don’t care about any of this.” And I was like, what? And they go, “we just want to be found in Google.” And I just realized I broke my own cardinal role. I use all of my terminology, my understanding, who, what I know and what I think to market to these people rather than actually using the terms that they did. So I quickly flipped the script on it and said, okay, “how about this?”

And they go, yep. “So you’re not getting found in Google, are you?” I said, how about I find out why you’re not getting found in Google? And they said, yes, please. And I said, and then “I’ll get you found on Google.” “Oh, take our money.” You get the words to market back to them directly from their mouth. That is the most valuable. The number one priority that every entrepreneur that’s starting out should have is to get in front of those people as much and as frequently, and as often as you possibly can.

Sean: That is fantastic. Hey Vince, I enjoyed this recording so much. I’ve gotten so many stories and I would love to actually take some of those stories and use them in some of my talks here.

And before I let you go, I just am wondering if people wanted to find you and get in touch with you, where is the best place to do that?

Vince: I made that super easy, just go to chasingtheinsights.com. It’s the home of my book. It’s the home of my podcast. It’s also where you’ll find two very valuable things you need to do.

One of them is all the links to my social. So just go and connect with me everywhere because I, unless you’re a spammer, I accept everybody. So if you’re spam, but please don’t connect with me. But also it’s where you’ll find a link to a free strategy call. And this is something I offered to everybody. If you’re overwhelmed with marketing you freaking out, you’re not generating the leads you want. You really just need some kind of guidance and direction. That’s what I’m here for. So go and click on the link, book it, and I will give you the clarity that you need.

Sean: All right. Fantastic. And if you guys are wondering where those links are, you can find that in the leadershipstack.com, we will have that on the show notes.

Just look for the episode with Vince Warnock, Warnock being spelled W A R N O C K. Look for that episode, we’ll have all his links there. I hope you guys learned a ton from Vince today about marketing, especially the part where he talks about the word of mouth marketing, having the Facebook lives going on with those two quote unquote, little old ladies that he has.

Vince: I’m such a dead man now.

Sean: They’re now going to hunt down for this podcast and so, yeah, I learned a ton, Vince, thank you so much we are better for it.

Vince: Awesome. Thank you so much, Sean.