[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.]
In this issue, we’ve got examples from companies with products people don’t usually talk about. Not because the products aren’t cool or useful or fun, but because they’re just not easy to explain. So they use games to make it fun — to help carry word of mouth about their stuff and inspire people to talk about them.
Here’s how they do it:
1. Create some competition
2. Make it easy to talk about
3. Educate people on your product
1. Create some competition
WhichTestWon is a company that teaches people about A/B testing, multivariate testing, and conversion rate optimization. And each week, they send a “Test of the Week” in their email newsletter, asking you to guess which test won in a split A/B test. It’s fun to test your gut on stuff like whether the green “Submit” button or the gray “Submit” button converted more customers, so it gets people to click through and read WhichTestWon’s analysis of the test. But more importantly, it gets people talking, forwarding the test to their co-workers to see if they can guess the answer, and sharing the results.
2. Make it easy to talk about
Simple Honest Work, a design studio in Chicago, made a card game out of helping a company define their brand. Like their name, the game is simple, and it creates an honest conversation about how their clients see themselves and how the studio can help them achieve that. There are countless books, blogs, classes, and conferences about branding. It’s a complex thing for companies to figure out, and for agencies like Simple Honest Work, it’s not the easiest word of mouth topic. The game creates a unique, easy-to-explain service for their customers to tell other people about — and as a bonus, the card game also serves as a physical word of mouth tool to put in their clients’ hands.
3. Educate people on your product
Trello is an online productivity tool that creates to-do lists in an organized, moveable way. You can use it to represent the progress of a project (like we do at WordofMouth.org), plan a grocery shopping list with multiple people, or organize types of movies you want to see by genre. Where did we come up with this list of examples? From playing a Trello game with their puppy mascot, Taco. The Trello game is like playing Breakout, except that each level is a different example of ways you can use the application. When you talk about your product and everything it can do, how are you holding your customers’ attention? And how are you giving them fun ways to share that information with other people?
