Ted Wright - Revenue success sans advertising - Word of Mouth marketing - S3 Ep13

Brain-hurt scale = 5/10. Great products sell themselves and advertising is just the price you pay for a bad product right?

Word of Mouth Marketing or WOM. Is it even a channel? Can you really grow without spending money on advertising? Can you enhance the natural rate of WOM?

The TL:DR answer is Yes. Yes and Yes. 

Right now, budgets are getting crimped and the heat is on for high-cash burn marketing channels. And there’s nothing higher cash-burn than advertising.

So how do you grow a brand and sell your product without advertising? 

Everyone knows the most powerful growth-driver is word-of-mouth. It’s especially critical for higher-involvement, more complex, higher priced products/services which require a lot of trust. There are lots of products and services which we don’t exactly purchase after seeing a few ads. Especially if your brand is less known. 

For finance, invasive medical, real estate, estate planning, and accounting...this is especially the case. 

WOM hits at the core of great marketing. In fact, it’s a great barometer of organic growth as well as the degree of product-market fit you have.

But is it fixed? Is it just a the result of upstream activity? Can we use it as a growth channel? Is there even a playbook to make it work?

Ted Wright, former Booze Allen consultant, ex-Delta Airlines global brand manager, Lecturer at Wharton, Founder and CEO of WOM marketing agency Fizz spills the beans. 

In this episode, you’ll learn how important it is to go back to basics. Understand your core offering. Identify those who are most likely to recommend your product to others and then, put in place a program to enhance this natural process.

But there’s 3 factors necessary before this holy grail of marketing will work.

And there’s 3 product categories where it’s almost impossible.

We also delve into a bit of attribution and channel strategy. Especially the problems with spending money on channels which claim to contribute to sales, but don’t. Something which can be easily overlooked when presented with a good-looking MMM report or a fancy digital attribution dashboard.

In this episode, you'll find out:

- how New Zealand sauvignon blanc became something from nothing.

- which two simple Viagra ads originally catapulted the drug into popular culture

- what the difference is between WOM and referrals, advocates, super fans and influencers

- why getting your story right so critical

- the difference between truth vs authenticity in your brand story

- why brands who pay Kim Kardashian for social exposure almost never use her again

- the parallels between WOM and Einstein's comments on dark matter

- what rasterization is

- why you should follow Steakumms on social media

And finally, Find out why, word of mouth is this podcast’s most powerful growth channel.

All these questions and more will be answered in this interview.

Just remember to tell at least one other person about this episode or Ted is going to mark me down!