Creating Word of Mouth Marketing

I’ve been doing lots of reading and researching as I’m in the process of writing a marketing book that integrates traditional and social media for small businesses.

It occurred to me that with social media tools we are all now publishers of media.  The problem that most businesses encounter is that they’ve been habituated to publish one message…buy now, buy now, buy now.  With diminishing returns on the Buy Now model, marketers  are shifting their focus & energy to building their own communities, much like traditional media companies have already done.  Once a business/brand has an audience, they move from being just a publisher to becoming a broadcaster that can monetize their community by providing value.

Traditional Media programmers & curators have a unique prospective that I think is important to learn from.  If you were to broadcast to the JACKFM  audience  “listen now, listen now, listen now” we’d lose listeners quickly.  I think we do an exceptional job at providing our listeners lots of great reasons to stay tuned in ie. great music mix, contests, M&E connectivitiy etc.  I suspect that one of the most difficult components of their job figuring out how to grow or maintain their audience/community.

I believe that in the very near future, many businesses will also recognize that they have the same job…to curate, share & distribute content in a way that’s relevant & interesting to their customers.  When companies start to do this (and some already are) they will realize how different it is to provide value rather than demand sales.   Those that have, understand that in order to  engage their customers they need to encourage their ‘followers’ to share their experience with their friends, thereby creating word of mouth marketing.