We all love those success stories about entrepreneurs whose businesses spring to life from their garages, or brands like Tinder, the dating app, that soar to fame through little more than word-of-mouth.
But nothing is quite so random. The truth behind these seemingly magical fairy tales of success is that there is always a potent marketing strategy that works just as hard as the trailblazing entrepreneur. While word-of-mouth can grow a business from a start-up to a promising growth-stage business, this is often the point where many entrepreneur-led businesses become “stuck”.
Word-of-mouth will only take you so far.
Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) is an incredible tool, but as a sole marketing strategy, it only gets you so far. Often, when our clients first come to us for strategic advice, is when they realise that despite their business growth, nobody actually knows it’s happening. Nobody knows about their new products or their latest innovations, or that their business is on the fast track to becoming an industry leader.
Relying on WOMM means your marketing is in the hands of strangers. So, the question is: can you truly trust them to present accurate, timely information about your business and expertise? Can you trust them with your hard-won credibility? Your company’s image? Do you want your business cycles to depend on how many people just happen to be talking about your company at any given time?
Because that’s exactly what you’re doing when word-of-mouth is the sole driving force of your marketing strategy.
Even Tinder, whose initial growth is entirely attributed to word-of-mouth, was incredibly strategic in its approach. It isolated a very specific demographic (college students) and leveraged these highly social opportunities of a very specific environment (the college campus).
In this exact setting, Tinder co-founder and Vice President of Marketing, Whitney Wolfe, would host presentations, and once all the sorority girls had installed the dating app, she’d then hit the fraternities so that when they, in turn, downloaded the app, they’d see “all these cute girls they knew”.
So, whether it’s Tinder, Red Bull, or Netflix; when you look behind any word-of-mouth success story, you’ll find a very strategic – and a very robust – marketing plan of action.
Word-of-mouth can spread misinformation.
While it’s one thing to create a marketing strategy around WOMM for a simple dating app, it’s quite another to rely on word-of-mouth when your products or services are complex and difficult to explain.
Business-to-business (B2B) brands, or brands operating in highly specialised industries such as the insurance, investment, and engineering fields for example, are amongst the brands that most need to lean into an ecosystem of highly specialised skills and knowledge for their marketing. Believe us when we say that it takes a very specific marketing skill to be able to turn a complex message into a “light bulb” moment of understanding in the mind of a consumer.
This clarity of messaging in marketing the complex product is almost always integrated with strong visual elements that either reinforce or advance your brand values and counteract any possible misinformation spread from word-of-mouth sources.
At the very least, this visual element is an intuitively designed website. Because even if your word-of-mouth marketing conveys the right message to the right people, your potential new clients are still going to Google you anyway – and if you don’t “exist” online, you lose the sale.
In short, if you want to take your business to the next level, you need to go beyond WOMM.
Successfully scaling a business demands nothing less than a very precise, highly targeted plan of action.
This might surprise you, but when we speak to CEOs who are scaling their businesses, the marketing “problems” they approach us with are rarely what they thought they were. Even if you started your business with a clear strategy, that strategy needs to evolve as your business evolves.
That’s why we believe that it’s never a good idea to rely on guesswork. It’s important to establish your marketing needs based on hard research and global best practices to build and refine your brand’s narrative, visual identity, and digital strategy in a way that carves the beeline toward your business objectives.
No matter what your needs are; there are several fundamental elements that you should always demand from your marketing.
Firstly, demand an insights-driven strategy. Marketing is not a guessing game. Demand consistency. Your strategy should be so airtight, so comprehensive, current, and relevant, that it informs and directs every marketing execution to perfection. Demand results. While not every marketing activity can be measured directly, your overall strategy must effectively shift the dial in your business.
Robust marketing trumps simple word-of-mouth. Every time.
Relying on the hope that a handful of strangers out there are saying the right things about your business to the right people at the right time – and that they’re saying it often enough to convert those people into customers – might work for a side hustle, but when you mean business, you need to stay ahead of the curve.
You need the agility to harness industry developments and consumer changes as powerful opportunities. You need tailored solutions. You need frequency, next-level visibility, and full control over the quality and accuracy of your information.
It’s the difference between their perception of your brand and its true story. It’s the difference between you chasing after people and customers approaching you instead. It’s the difference between watching paint dry and making things happen.
That is the power of marketing.
To transform your word-of-mouth momentum into sustained business growth with a strategic and results-driven approach,
contact Brightside Marketing today and let us help you tell your brand’s true story.
