Word of mouth, social networks and the snowball effect
Sometimes if you're lucky, or work with a great agency your brand might start the next great digital marketing wave that unleashes shock, awe and admiration from your market vertical and your audience. In between those great ideas it is likely (or hoped dependent on how far your brand has progressed), that your digital strategy will provide a series of good ideas that engage with your audience. The trouble is an idea by itself is only one step, if no one knows about it the idea will live in isolation achieving very little. So how do you get that idea out there and in front of your audience?
Word of Mouth
Word of Mouth is one of traditional PR greatest tools; if you can get people talking about your latest idea and your brand in a positive sense it’s free advertising, free enhanced brand awareness which hopefully will lead to increased KPI conversions and increased ROI. Social networks are ideally geared to WOM marketing, but they are not a panacea even when combined with a good idea to achieve wide scale brand awareness and uptake.
When putting campaigns through social media we all hope for the "snowball effect", this is described in part in our recent white paper on planning digital strategy, but put simply if person X engages with the idea and we (using Facebook as an example), post on their wall that they have done so. If person X has 200 friends then we hope given the likely correlation of interests amongst their peer / friend group we will find 10% with the same common interest, so another 20 people engage with the campaign, for these the same 200 friends and the hoped 10% unique user uptake. The theory goes that after three steps including the originator there are 8001 people now engaging with the campaign.
Of course if this happened on every occasion we could probably all pack up now, jobs done and retire to somewhere sunny with small chance of hurricanes and white sandy beaches. The truth is to get that snowball effect in operation takes a lot of work and there are a lot of challenges and problems to overcome. Things like closed networks where person X may know 200 people, but 150 of those are shared; suddenly our respectable 8001 engagements has come down to 126, about 1.5% of the hoped for audience.
Also there is the matter of connecting directly with person X in the first place? Are you already talking to them, in which case they and their friends might already be engaging with your brand, limiting the worth against your digital strategy aims. Alternatively you may wish to adopt an aggressive seeding approach through PPC / CPM, or even display advertising through sources outside of social networks. Regardless of approach, and relying on standard clichés it is important to acknowledge that 80% of the work and capital required to make a campaign a success must be invested in the initial stages of a campaign, otherwise it is unlikely to get off the ground.
Quick Wins
I doubt that any companies have unlimited budgets and time anymore to below are a list of quick wins to help your campaign get started and hopefully trigger that snowball effect:
- Push, and push early to your existing audience
- Engage your internal communications to keep your staff aware and to get them to promote the campaign the minute the campaign launches (after all they are key stakeholders in the success of the brand)
- Capture engagement early and look to build, do not try to get the whole kit and caboodle of ROI in one step because your drop-offs will be pyrrhic
- Enable where possible multi-channel approaches to avoid closed networks and WOM tapering out
- Avoid repetitive talk that makes the audience switch off
- Take engagement as the rule internally, externally with your agency and build your campaign as a team where everyone is a stakeholder in success
This blog post was written by Dan Mortimer.
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