I have been reading this great book on word of mouth marketing titled (did you expect it to be titled something differently?) “Word of Mouth Marketing” by Andy Sernovitz. It is a fantastic read so far, he lays out some fairly basic ideas that you can implement immediately and at no to low cost and start improving how your brand is received in the public’s eyes. It is the low to no cost that caught me by surprise, I just assumed that marketing meant tons of time, a whole boat load of money and teams of marketers to get out there and promote your brand.

I was recently talking to a guy that heads up a startup here locally, and he was telling me how they are spending ungodly amounts of money on each user just simply to get them to sign up. I mean the cost of customer acquisition on the whole was through the roof, and technically this was just the cost to get a user to sign up to use their product, not the cost of retaining the customer. After I had a moment to think about it, the number did not surprise me that much, I mean it was part of marketing and marketing costs a ton, at least that was my general thought.

According to Andy though, that does not have to be the case. Word of Mouth Marketing can be very inexpensive and actually much more successful if implemented properly. Andy has devised four rules to follow for WoMM, and if you can manage to follow these rules, you should be able to see the magic of WoMM working for you. So what are these rules you ask (once you read them you are going to be like, that is so simple, how can that possibly work)? Well here they are:

1. Be interesting
2. Make people happy
3. Earn trust and respect
4. Make it easy

Seems easy enough and makes total sense. Put your users to work for you, but you have to make it worth their while and you have to be transparent with them to gain their respect. Who would have known that it did not cost you your first born child to build market awareness and have a marketing team at your disposal that live and breath your product?