Customer Journey: Are You Missing These 10 Keys to Word-of-Mouth Marketing? With Jay Baer | 41

Episode Title: Customer Journey: Are You Missing These 10 Keys to Word-of-Mouth Marketing? With Jay Baer

SEGMENT 1: How to create a winning word-of-mouth strategy that drives business outcomes?

Jay Baer, one of the foremost authorities on word-of-mouth globally, shares 10 secrets to winning word-of-mouth marketing.
Here are 10 golden word-of-mouth marketing rules we distilled from our conversation with Jay Baer.

1. Good CX is not the same as a great ‘talk trigger’. Competency doesn’t create conversations.
Removing friction, being omni-channel - all these things are basic expectations – but all this does is prevent churn. It doesn’t create stories. Many marketers assume creating a good – or even adequate - CX is a talking point by itself.

2. Look beyond the core CX of your product or service for your perfect talk trigger.
If your core business is running a restaurant, then using ‘great tasting food’ as the talk trigger will probably be an uphill task - unless you are truly, exceptionally better than others. Look for the talk trigger beyond the basic CX to unlock conversations.

3. Keep it simple. Make ONE unconventional choice that customers don’t expect and delight them with it when they least expect it. Jay shares several examples of Brands that pick ‘one thing that could work as a talk trigger’.

4. Follow the 4 rules (which all happen to start with R) of a good talk trigger for it to work as a catalyst for conversations:

- Must be remarkable, a story worth telling – no one talks about perfectly adequate experiences.
- Must be repeatable – think ‘one-time PR stunt’ versus something that perseveres over time, across a wide section of customers.
- Must be reasonable – as Jay puts it, keep it “big enough to be ‘talkable’, small enough to be trusted.”
- Must be relevant - when possible, it should make sense in the context of who you are as a Brand. Keep it authentic and in-character.

5. Be flexible: for large enterprises, customer personas and expectations may vary by product line or geography, so be prepared to make variations as needed

6. Follow the process: according to Jay, the worst way to find your talk trigger is to get in a room and ‘brainstorm’ with your key crew!
Here are the steps he recommends:

- Build a journey map your customer(s)
- Interview customers – long standing, new and lost - to find what they ‘expect’ from you
- Create an ‘expectations matrix’ to identify what people expect and when – but also to find what people DON’T expect
- Test and measure the ‘talkability’ of a few promising ideas before rolling it out
- Know before-hand that the idea is scalable.

7. Amplify the trigger the right way: use technology like social media to gently remind customers about the trigger from time to time: but remember to nudge – don’t bludgeon. In Jay’s words, “Never turn the talk trigger into an advertisement.”

8. Measure effectiveness: here’s the 2-steps Jay suggests for measuring talk trigger effectiveness:
- Listen to the conversations: monitor the social chatter/ feedback/ reviews and customer service call logs
- Interview customers for aided and unaided recall/ mention of the trigger

9. Social media and word-of-mouth are not the same thing: triggering customer conversations on social media is convenient but not the whole story.

10. Don’t use word-of-mouth, or MarTech - or anything – to control, manipulate or own customers! Word-of-mouth is truly one of the last preserves of pure marketing based on delight and engagement.

SEGMENT 2: The Tin Foil Hat Section starring David Raab
We talk about the trend of ‘Privacy as a Value Proposition’ - listen in as we discuss why privacy is a good talk trigger today and why companies like Facebook will soon make that redundant.

SEGMENT 3: The Voice of Reason Section (also starring David Raab)
David reminds us that CCPA is nearing- with just 7 months to go, not all of us are prepared.