[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.]
The tools you need to pull off word of mouth marketing are all around you. You don’t have to invent something new or buy a bunch of stuff. You just have to get creative with what you’re already doing.
Here are three word of mouth tools we usually overlook:
1. Hold music
2. Press releases
3. Out-of-office messages
1. Hold music
Hold music is the worst. If you think about it, its only purpose is to make a consistent noise to let you know you’re still on the line. And so most companies treat it like that — just noise. But UberConference saw their hold music as an opportunity to make people laugh. Their Creative Director and co-founder, who’s pretty good with a guitar, wrote a song with lyrics about waiting for a conference call and made it their default hold music. People love it so much that UberConference says they get tweets about it every day.
2. Press releases
We know what you’re thinking — a press release isn’t an underused word of mouth tool. In fact, sometimes it’s the only word of mouth tool companies use. But what if instead of cramming in PR bits and stodgy product messages, companies wrote press releases that blew people away? Tesla did it with one that went against the usual conventions. No obligatory quotes from VPs, no boring paragraphs about what the company does, and nothing about how “incredible” or “amazing” their car is — just facts that spoke for themselves. Things like, “At least four additional fully loaded Model S vehicles could be placed on top of an owner’s car without the roof caving in.” If you’re going to use a press release as a word of mouth tool, make sure what you’re saying is something people will actually talk about.
3. Out-of-office messages
Every day, millions of people set their inbox to send automated messages when they’re away from the office. And most people don’t think much about it. But LostNMissing and Y&R Bravo created Auto-Helply.com, which helps people put a missing person in their area’s information at the bottom of their auto-response. That puts missing person information into one of the easiest word of mouth tools to share: email.
