[Welcome back to our Word of Mouth Marketing Lessons newsletter. This is text from the great issue all of our email subscribers just received. Sign yourself up using this handy form.]
What do you want people to talk about when they talk about your business? It’s a simple question that’s sometimes hard to answer. But if you get a little creative, you can find a word of mouth topic that works for you.
Here are three ways to do it:
1. Keep an eye on social media
2. Use your data
3. Do some Amazon research
1. Keep an eye on social media
UPS recently shared a story of a four-year-old boy who wanted to be just like his family’s regular UPS driver, “Mr. Ernie.” The company surprised him with a little brown truck and route of his own, and the video from it has about 2.3 million views. Where did they find such a great story? Someone told them about it on Facebook, UPS looked into it, and then made the most of it. By nature, the stuff your customers share on social media is stuff they think is WOM-worthy. All you have to do is amplify it.
2. Use your data
You probably collect a lot of data on your customers: what they buy, what they search for on your site, the posts they share from your blog. All of this data is a great place to start when you’re looking for stuff to talk about. For example, ProBlogger published their “Most Popular Posts of 2014,” and this year, Spotify gave users infographics on their most-listened to music. You don’t always have to come up with a completely new word of mouth topic. Chances are you already have some interesting numbers to share with your customers.
3. Do some Amazon research
Pat Flynn, the guy behind “Smart Passive Income,” told us about his clever way of finding stuff to write about: Go to Amazon.com, search for your niche topic, and check out the most popular books on that topic in the results. If you can preview the first few pages, take a look at the table of contents. That gives you a good outline of things to dive into. Even better, take a look at the “People Also Bought” section of your product. You can learn a lot about how your customers are using your stuff and the kinds of word of mouth topics that interest them by looking at what they’re buying with your product.
