How to hack word-of-mouth marketing

Von Protonet Team. Veröffentlicht 10. April 2014.

Building a company is fun, but hard. There are numerous challenges teams (or single entrepreneurs) face when setting up a vision and a product. How to do the engineering? Where to locate the office? When to come out of stealth mode? How to hire? In Germany (where we are located) people are also extraordinary keen on numbers: CAC, CPL, CPO, ETC, LMAO – basically everything could be put into the context of numbers.

Everything? Really? There is a tool we use for the growth of our brand here at Protonet, it’s called word of mouth. Now lots of people are starting to laugh at these kinds of things, which is understandable: if everything can be checked, why would I as a marketing manager or CEO put an emphasis on something I can’t monitor? There’s a great ad from Adobe, which suggests to basically never doing anything that doesn’t show in the numbers.

What we have done now is that we have found a way to let people talk in a good way about our product, not by chance but on purpose. And you might have guessed right: it’s because we didn’t listen to our numbers. Or to put it straight: we saw the numbers, discussed them and intentionally decided not to let them rule our business. Why the hell would we do that?

A short story: a couple of weeks ago we talked to a huge computer company that is interested in selling our product. Within the meeting we explained what we are doing and how we could profit from each other. At some point we came to the communication strategy and were asked: “How do you manage to let your B2B product seem like it is a hero, a rock star?”.

You see where this is leading to: we try to impersonate and consumerize our B2B product. Guess why we call it a Personal Server? It makes our business emotional – and when people get emotional about something and attach some kind of feeling to it that’s when they start sharing those feelings. It actually doesn’t matter if they are angry or happy (but they better be happy with a good product).

The Neocortex (the part of the brain that crunches the numbers) is not subject to emotions and responsible for basically everything that’s rational. Before you can get to this part of the brain you must go through the one that tells you if something is dangerous or compelling. We also wrote about this logic in our post “5 tips for building a pitchdeck that gets you the investor meeting”.

So with leaning to the emotional part of our product, we have managed to even excite people that have never even used our service. They may have heard of it from a customer, an employee or even a competitor who builds similar things.

What we want to be known for is building epic products with epic impact on the user. As everybody knows, epicness is born by paying attention to detail – and details are costly. It starts with the choice of the local manufacturing partners or how we use environmental friendly materials or how we treat our customers if they call our office every day (yes, we love talking to every single customer). All these decisions are made with looking at numbers and cost effectiveness. But again: it’s usually not the money that decides what we will do. We believe that we will be successful if we offer something that brings big joy and massive relief to the user.

Figures and facts are always a great way to reflect the direction you are heading, but there is more to business than improving numbers. Ever heard of the Net Promoter Score? It subtracts the percentage of people who will refer your brand by the percentage of people who will not refer your brand, leaving the ones out that “don’t care”. Again this is an approach to put word of mouth into the context of numbers, but as you could feel with yourself in the last four lines, it get’s you kind of cold.

To wrap it up: look at the data to check your general direction but only make it one of your variables on your way to building something epic. Unless you’re a big data company.