At Huddlemind we are launching the first in a series of courses that we will run each month from now on called Huddles. The idea behind them is to make each course themed, interactive, unique and most of all incredibly useful to you.
The first of these courses is entitled “Word of Mouse”, and is all about how to successfully tell your brand / product story online. Over the last few years I have learned a lot through the campaigns I have run or helped out on, some did well, others not so well, and a few have been epic wins. I would like to share with you 5 things I have found help the most with Word of Mouse marketing.
- Be Patient: The best success stories in online marketing didn’t happen overnight. Word of Mouse takes time. The most memorable campaigns generally have very little traffic for many months, but with time and effort built up into often millions of unique visitors a day. If your thinking of trying to do great Digital Word of Mouth campaigns that last, don’t think in days and weeks, more think in months and years.
- Update & link regularly: No matter how incredible your website / mobisite etc is, if you don’t update it, eventually interest will dry up. To make something that sticks; define your brand story, try update content at least 3-4 times a week, and where possible, link / comment on relevant and similar content. This will not only help create a tribe but also be extremely useful for SEO by making your content rank higher with Google etc and in turn driving more relevant traffic.
- Don’t get dragged into pettiness: There will always be people in this world that just want to be negative all the time. If you find a person constantly being a player hater, just Keep it real. Don’t always delete negative comments, try to respond positively, if that doesn’t work, best thing to do is just ignore it, then like a school yard bully 99% of the time they just stop and go away.
- Be Yourself: Connect with your customers and tell your story in a true and authentic way. Consumers are wiser than ever and wont easily be fooled if your just consistently singing your own praises.Try to humanise the brand/product, focus on your tribe, not everybody. Interact with the people that listen to your story and try to build relationships with them. Interactivity helps create trust and loyalty, these two things alone will keep people coming back again and again for more.
- Listen: Possibly the most important thing for any brand whether they are online or not, also happens to be one of the easiest to manage. It’s essential for every brand to set up some simple online reputation monitors especially now given the amount of consumer generated content. Tools like Google Alerts and Twitter Search can track mentions of your brand or keywords online and notify you via email or RSS feed for free. There are also some great more in-depth customizable tools like BrandsEye that charge a small fee but provide hugely detailed results and analysis. The reason this is so important is that it allows you to quickly find any positive or negative comments and action them. In the case of a negative mention you will be surprised how quickly you can turn them around, often with just a simple response. It makes people feel acknowledged and appreciated, often turning them into your biggest brand advocates.
The first Huddle is taking place in Cape Town on the 11th of September. To find out more click here. For booking enquiries Email Sandy@huddlemind.com or call us on +27 21 433 0886
Thanks for all the helpful posts. They really helped me ! You just got a new subscriber now!