SPI 880: The ONE & ONLY Marketing Strategy that Matters

SPI 880: The ONE & ONLY Marketing Strategy that Matters

Pat Flynn: Today, I wanna tell you about the only marketing strategy that matters. Yes, there are a million different things you can do to grow your brand, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been doing this for a while, you have a new product, you wanna get it out there. Yes, of course you could do ads and things like that to amplify your messaging, to get your product in front of more people.

But there’s one thing that’s gonna help you win more than anything, and that is word of mouth. And word of mouth is a strategy that we all know. We want word of mouth. It’s ideal for it to happen. People like Seth Godin have written about this, talking about the purple cow that you might see on a freeway.

You stop and you talk about it because it’s a purple cow. Every other cow is brown or white or black. But you see a purple cow. You talk about it. But we haven’t really gone deep into how to do this, and let me tell you a story. Recently, I just came back from Tampa Bay, Florida, and I had held an event there for 5,000 plus attendees.

It’s sold out. We also had 800 vendor tables completely sold out. The event was a massive success, and it’s our first year after three years being profitable, in fact, which is really great. But here’s the kicker. $0 were spent for marketing. $0. It was all done through word of mouth and it was word of mouth through attendees who have come back and have brought more people.

It’s word of mouth through people talking about their experiences on social media and sharing it and introducing the event and the product to more people. And it’s the creators who we feature at the event who on their own will create videos, share content at Card Party or about card party when they get back or when they’re about to go and they bring their fans along with them.

And in this age of paid ads and influencer marketing, how does word of mouth happen? Right? It’s not just a nice to have anymore. It is exactly what we want to shoot for. It’s the only marketing that truly works. Traditional marketing, I mean, it’s not dead. I hate saying things are dead. I just did a video on YouTube saying, SEO is dead.

And obviously it’s not dead, but it’s on its last breath, that’s for sure. And the same with traditional marketing, right? Ads, banner, blindness, ad blockers, skip buttons. I mean, people are actively trying to avoid marketing. I mean, there’s ad blockers and you skip those ads on YouTube and you know, there are ads being shown to you when you are searching, when you are on websites that you don’t even pay attention to anymore because you’ve just seen it so much, right?

People are bombarded with 5,000 plus marketing messages every single day. Trusting brands is not as easy as it once used to be. With so much noise out there, so much AI related things. How do we know what’s real? The algorithms have changed, right? Paid reach is declining. Organic reach is nearly dead. And the paradox is that the more we market, the less people listen.

And the key word being, the more we, you and I, the ones who have the product, the ones who own the product, this is why word of mouth reigns supreme. It is the trust factor that comes along with it, right? There’s research, Nielsen research. 92% of people trust recommendations from people they know. And think about this in your own life, in your own experiences, the things that you purchase, the things that you go and do, and watch and see.

I was recommended K-pop Demon Hunters, and oh my gosh, it was the best thing ever. I probably wouldn’t have watched that Netflix show or that Netflix movie if I just randomly came across that, or if there was an ad display, the name didn’t do it for me. But. With so many people talking about it. I watched it and it was great, and now here I am talking about it.

Have you seen K-Pop Demon Hunters? It’s actually amazing. It’s a great story, and the music is to die for. Think about this. When it comes to the movies that you watch, the books that you read, the things to get involved with, it’s likely coming from other people. When you buy on Amazon. You always look at the reviews unless you already have experience with that product.

You look at the reviews, you see even other people who are strangers, who you don’t even know who they are, and you trust their recommendations more than marketing messages from the company, you’re more likely to read the reviews to make a decision versus reading the description of a product in an Amazon product page.

It’s pretty crazy when you think about it. Paid ads. They just feel fake. Friend recommendations feel real. And it just is human psychology. Now at this point, with all the noise out there, we look for social proof. We look for others to determine what is valuable. We are a group think type of species, right?

If you go to the mall and everybody’s looking up at the sky, I mean, you’re going to do it even without even thinking. You want to know what everybody else is doing. The social proof psychology is real. And what’s cool about word of mouth, and again, we’ll get into the strategies of how to do that and where that comes from, but it’s so powerful once you get it to work.

One person, because of word of mouth, maybe tells 10 people who then tells 10 more, right? It can exponentially grow over time, and word of mouth also brings pre-qualified people into your ecosystem, right? Engaged audiences, not people who you’ve had to interrupt to get their attention, but rather somebody who vouches for you, who speaks highly of what it is that you have is doing the talking for you and is more likely to be listened to than you are.

This is exactly what I talk about in my book, Superfans, the idea that when you have super fans. Who naturally become your marketing messaging team for you. They’re bringing in new active members of the community already, not cold members who start at the bottom, where, if you remember the pyramid that I draw in  Superfans, the bottom of the pyramid is your casual audience.

People who’ve just found you right. They skip that. If they’re coming in from a recommendation, they come into the active audience segment already and perhaps even already feel like they’re a part of the community because they already know somebody who is a part of the community, right? It’s amazing.

There’s also this idea of longevity with word of mouth, right? Paid ads. When you stop paying for ads or when your budget runs out, you’re done. But word of mouth continues indefinitely. So in addition to Card Party, which I told you about earlier. Even my first business was built without paid advertising.

It was built through word of mouth, and word of mouth doesn’t only mean people talking in person, it’s people sharing online. And this is exactly what happened with Green Exam Academy, right? Green Exam Academy was my first business to help architects pass the LEED exam. And again, I didn’t have a budget.

I had just gotten laid off. I wasn’t gonna spend money on anything but building a website. And that’s exactly what I did. But however, because of what I did, people started talking about it. I started to find my website being shared on official architecture forums, on green exam building websites and all these other things.

It was there. People were spreading the word, and of course people would take the exam and pass thanks to my help, and they would tell their coworkers, they would tell their friends. They would then share it in their little forums that they were a part of that I might not even ever get access to. You’re able to get access to more places and more people through word of mouth. With SPI, our community and the millions of dollars that have been earned, have been earned primarily through word of mouth. And yes, we do grow an email list, and that’s an important part of our strategy as well. But we’ve hardly ever paid for advertising. We did it once and we stopped immediately because we were just attracting not great people. And my account got hacked and the agency that we were working with got my account banned for life from Facebook.

Thanks guys. That’s great. I’m not gonna mention any names, but I’m still a little bitter about that. But I wouldn’t have used the Facebook ads platform anyway after that because word of mouth is driving, community is driving revenue. And with Deep Pocket Monster, same thing. I mean, yes, we’re using algorithms and stuff on YouTube, but people find them and they share them.

In fact, people have shared them so often that I’ll see in person when I meet people at card shops and events. They’ll say, oh, my buddy introduced me to you. Oh my, my friend got me into your channel. Oh, my friend showed me your shorts, my shorts channel, not my shorts that I’m wearing. Right? So let’s change gears.

Let’s shift into the psychology of sharing. ’cause that’s what word of mouth is, right? People sharing stuff with other people. One person can share with 10, and those 10 people can share with 10, and those a hundred people can share with. 10 each, and it just continues to expand and it doesn’t take much to get to the point where people can start sharing these things.

Right? So let’s start with the social currency principle, and that is by sharing something useful, valuable, interesting, entertainment based, something that’ll make a person laugh, something that’s worthwhile, people share things that make them look good. When it comes down to it, most people share things online because it makes them look good in front of their audience. That’s just how it is. And yes, it makes them feel good. It makes them more authoritative. Sure. But it just increases their status. Right? When you become the person to share it, you become an authority. That’s just truth, right? It’s just like if you ever come to California and you start talking about In-N-Out Burger, your buddy’s gonna go, oh, let me take you to In-N-Out Burger because I need to show you the secret menu and I wanna share this thing that you’ve never heard before because you’re from the Midwest or the East Coast and it’s a secret menu at In-N-Out, right?

And it makes them feel good. It gives them status. They know something that others don’t. And so they share, right? This insider knowledge, the exclusive parts of it, or even early access breaking news, right? That’s what’s all over TikTok, especially in the political space, breaking news. They’re sharing information, but what does that do for them?

It positions them as somebody of value. Now, there’s also the component in terms of social currency of identity expression, right? People share things that reflect who they are. They wanna attract more people like them and or draw a line in the sand and say, this is what I’m about. So this is why people share, right?

Because it enhances their status. They’re giving people insider knowledge, which builds authority. And it’s an expression of identity. But it’s not just the social currency reasons why people share. People share because they’re triggered to share. In some way, shape, or form, right? People share things when they are highly aroused, when there’s some excitement, when there’s a surprise or maybe anger.

Those things drive more sharing than calm emotions. This is why, and it’s part of the problem of social media, why most of social media and the things you see in the things that end up on your algorithm, especially on platforms like X are so negative because that anger, that surprise, that riling up causes sharing and it just causes these negative emotions to amplify.

There’s the idea of the peak end rule. What is that? Well, people remember and share the most intense moment in how something ended. As soon as something ends, a relationship ends, a movie ends, something ends, and they’re in a heightened state of emotion, that’s a moment when a person is more likely to share. When something ends.

So again, keep all these things in mind as we start talking about how you’re going to utilize these strategies and these principles for your business, for what it is that you create and when even that one alone. Think about it, when an event ends, that is the best time to ask for a share because people are often excited.

There’s a heightened level of emotion during that time. They don’t want it to end. They’re gonna start feeling the blues after going home. This is what we do at Card Party. We see a lot of creators then start creating content right after the event and start sharing it because they wanna continue how they felt right after the show ended.

Of course there’s the idea of story worthy moments. This is kind of obvious. It’s the one that gets talked about the most. This idea of like, just create something worth sharing. Create something interesting. Most people are creating boring facts based related things when it comes to their content. How is that interesting?

There’s so much content already. I wrote a whole book about just how much information there is if you’re just sharing the same information as everybody else, why would people share it? They might already have that information or just don’t care to share it because again, they’re not providing value to other people who probably already have access to that information.

This is where story comes into play. This is where the emotions that come along with that, the way you wrap that information, the way it unfolds, the way it makes people feel. As I often say, if you can move people, you will move people. Or people will move, they will share. They will be very likely to start pushing things around based on the story you tell them.

Versus just the facts. Less of a reason why people share today than before, but still something worth pointing out is this sort of practical utility. In some cases, there are still information and information alone that is share worthy. If there is, for example, recently the Switch 2 came out and there was a lot of information going around about how to make sure that you don’t get your data deleted when you transfer from one Switch to another.

Because it’s new. There is this information that wasn’t available before, so there’s still utility there and people share those things. And again, enabling people to share it because it is helpful, because it paints them in a good position is great. And if you can create those things that are worth sharing and useful to people’s audiences, then fantastic.

It’s a great way to reverse engineer what a person might share, who is in their audience and what would be useful for them. Create that. Find the people who are influencers, authorities in that space, who may share it, and they’re gonna be more likely to share it. People are also likely to share it if they look good in it as well.

This is why featuring other people and creating pieces of content that feature other people’s content can oftentimes yield higher sharing opportunities or higher word of mouth because they are featured. A strategy that I teach in our podcasting course, Power Up Podcasting, utilizes Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups using this strategy.

So I’m just gonna share it with you now just to show you how powerful word of mouth can be. So the goal is to get your podcast, to get more subscribers, to get listened to, but just going into forums is not gonna work for you if you just go into forums and say, Hey guys, listen to my podcast, even if it is the most valuable podcast in the world, you’re still gonna get the cold shoulder, you’re gonna still get the band hammer because you’re coming into a space and you’re kind of just spamming, even if it’s great content. So how do you utilize a group and this idea of word of mouth and sharing in a Facebook group, in a forum, in a LinkedIn group?

Well, this is how you do it. You reach out to the admin of that group or the founder of that group, which you can find them on LinkedIn and Facebook without even joining those groups, although I would join those groups and, and become a part of the conversation first. But you can find out who the moderators and the admins are.

Reach out to them, invite them on your podcast. Ask them one question. If you were fly fishing for the, if we’re talking about fly fishing groups, I dunno why. I’m just thinking about that. I do really wanna go fly fishing though. It’s so much fun. Anyway, if you’re a fly fishing podcaster, right? You reach out to a fly fishing group and you say, Hey, I have one question for you on feature your group on my upcoming podcast.

It’s just gonna take a minute. And the question is, what’s one thing you wish you knew before you started fly fishing that would’ve saved you a lot of money or time? Boom money question. You get these answers right, and you try to get them to share it with their voice, whether through a Google Voice or a dm, or even a tool like Speak Pipe, where you can send people a link and they’ll just kind of record their voice, sort of like a voicemail.

You can take that MP three, put it into this podcast. Imagine a podcast episode. Top community owners share the one thing they wish they knew before they started fly fishing. Now there’s 15 tips in there from 15 different groups. What are the chances? That some of those, if not all of those group owners, when you share that their podcast featuring them is live, that they’re likely to share it in that group.

The chances are very, very likely because you’ve made them the hero of the story. You’ve painted them in a picture of authority. And they wanna look good in front of their audience that they’re building. So this strategy, some of my podcasting students are using alone, just this strategy alone, to get tens of thousands of downloads in front of highly targeted audiences through Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups and other forms.

It is fantastic, and this sort of follow up strategy is maybe one of those tips was fantastic. You like the vibe of those group owners, so you follow up and say, Hey, I’d love to have you come on for a full interview. Why not start with that? Because you don’t know how they’re gonna be on the mic. So you kind of use this as a filtration process.

If a person’s bad on the microphone for one minute, it’s not gonna be terrible. You can always come back after that and fill in the gaps for them. But anyway. Do you see how we’re utilizing groups and utilizing people and psychology here to increase sharing? It’s amazing. So another way to think about this is to create word of mouth worthy experiences, like creating these moments, not just having them happen randomly, but creating these moments, designing them.

So let’s talk about first the experience design framework. So there’s a few things to think about when it comes to your audiences. Whether they’re followers, subscribers, customers, whatever, their experiences and something worth sharing about that experience. Right? So number one, surprise and delight. I love surprise and delight.

When a person has an expectation going into something and you blow that expectation out of the water without them even knowing it’s coming, that becomes a moment that is very shareworthy. Sometimes I will say, I want to answer this really quick. Sometimes when you design these moments, you need to ask for the share, but you’re more able to, you in fact have permission to ask when you offer this kind of value, right?

Hey, by the way, if you wouldn’t mind sharing what just happened on social media, I’d love to hopefully get some more customers because your experience obviously has been really great, or something like that, right? So surprise and delight exceed expectations in unexpected ways. It is those small moments of surprise that can pay off big time.

And do it from a genuine perspective as well. Like, like, yes, the benefit of that, it’s gonna grow your brand, but start with value in mind and have that growing of your brand, be the byproduct of that. Create specific instances, right? Like if you have certain customers, especially higher level customers or repeat customers, how can you create a specific instance for them that they might want to retell?

How can you create a moment or one easy way to do this would be to kind of find out a little bit about, I’m just making this up on the spot, but imagine you have a, a customer who’s been a repeat customer and you know, they’re a huge F1 fan or something like that. You’re like, okay, cool. Well, F1’s gonna be in Vegas.

I got you a ticket as a thank you. Then all of a sudden they’re in Vegas. They have this incredible moment with their family or other F1 fanatic friend, and they share that on social media. I mean, number one, you’re gonna have this customer for life. That’s number one. But number two, they’re gonna do a lot of sharing for you, and they might even share it on social media.

And then you can take that even if they don’t have a lot of followers, and say, Hey. Just wanted to say thanks to one of our top customers who’s enjoying F1 right now? We love our customers, right? That’s a memorable moment, right? And you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to create a memorable moment.

Sometimes memorable moments are as simple as just a 10 minute conversation. If a person. Is a fan and wants to have that with you. A lot of shareable moments, we actually build that into Card Party. So I actually plan to stay four or five hours after the event. We throw up a what’s called a step and repeat, which has the logo of Card Party and sort of a pattern and a table where I can sign things and my team is there and we make the line go really, really fast so we can take a load of pictures and have just like a brief moment with as many people as possible who were unable to see me during the event.

But a few things happened because of that. Number one, we’re able to get a load of pictures and autographs done. People share those on social media immediately. Of course, that just without even trying, sells more tickets to the next year through those social channels. But number two, people see the line.

They know the event is over. They see me, they’re still there four hours later if they’re kind of walking by, what do they say? They say, oh my gosh, Pat’s in this for the right reasons, for the people. He’s there staying until the very end, until the last signature is signed, and that speaks highly and it’s often very much shared as well.

Right? That’s something a person can say, oh yeah, I saw Pat there. He was there for like four hours after and was signing autographs for people until the lights turned off. I’ve heard people say that before and people notice those things. People notice when you take a little bit of extra time and care.

So design those moments, right? Design those moments. One thing that you can do is if you’re not sure where a potential wow moment could be, I think a smart thing you could do is to audit the current experiences that your customers or subscribers or followers have, right? So, where, finding out in this customer journey that you are creating for your people, where are the potential wow moments?

A lot of times we build and it becomes sort of this Frankenstein model of whatever it is that we’re creating from email to nurture to, to customer and we don’t see the whole picture. We don’t zoom out to look at the whole experience ’cause we’ve just created a bunch of little ones that kind of connect with these different tools and different things.

So if you can zoom out for a second and ask yourself, where are the potential moments within this customer journey to insert a wow moment for these people? Asking yourself at the same time, with this audit for your customer experience, what’s preventing people from sharing, what is stopping them from doing?

So? This is why I, I think it was ClickFunnels. I don’t use ClickFunnels, but they have something called the Two Comma Club. And this is absolutely genius. And YouTube does the same thing. And I know this as a customer or user, I guess a creator at YouTube who, when I get my plaques, my silver plaques for a hundred thousand subs and more recently I now have two 1 million plaques, my gold plaques from YouTube.

I mean, I share the crap outta those things, right? Those are. Moments that YouTube creates for me to celebrate and to make it easy for me to celebrate, right? But ClickFunnels has this two comma club and they have like a little, when you reach two commas, which is seven figures, right? Because like one comma two comma club, I think there’s probably a three comma club as well.

Four would be what? A trillion. I don’t think there’s a four comma club, but. The Two Comma Club, which is a great name as well, just rolls off the tongue. You become sort of a member of the Two Comma Club and you feel proud of that. You have reached a new level. You then share this little plaque that ClickFunnels has for you with your name on it.

As now a new member of the Two Comma Club. It’s like, that’s amazing. So making it easier for people to share and celebrate and again, make themselves look good. What does that plaque do for me? It makes me look great when I share it on YouTube. Yes, I’m proud of the fact that I got to a million subscribers, but it also shows others that I’ve hit a million subscribers and it hopefully, yes, inspires them, but also proves that I know what I’m doing.

So again, a lot of psychology of sharing. So creating those unforgettable experiences, making sharing easier. And again, reward advocates. People who seem to share your stuff more often, who are the people who are spreading your stuff via word of mouth. You’re not gonna know everybody, but eventually you’ll find out, you’ll hear, oh yeah, it was so and so of, of course you could find it through backlinks and just seeing who retweets your stuff, who has a lot of followers. Yes, those are obvious ways to find out who is sharing your stuff. But through word of mouth, you’re gonna find that there’s gonna be certain people who might not even have a following at all, but just have a lot of influence over a small group of people.

They might be the ones who are catalysts for a lot of your growth. And when you find out who those people are, reward them, thank them, encourage them, help them provide even more value to them because they’re going to come back and provide more value to you. So that’s really important. So here are some common word of mouth mistakes to avoid.

So again, a lot of this will happen naturally, especially if you have a great product and you create these amazing moments, these heightened emotional experiences for your people. They will share. However, there are some mistakes. One of those mistakes being asking too early. Yes, you will have to ask for some of this.

Again, like I said, some of it will happen naturally. But an ask is okay, and you should build that in as well to your systems. However, asking too early is not gonna be great, right? If somebody purchased my podcasting course and the first lesson was, Hey, thanks for being here. Please share this on social media.

What is there to share? Like you’re a part of this thing and haven’t done anything yet, versus at the end, like we talked about earlier. At the end of the course when a person finally has their artwork up and their first podcast episodes are live. That’s the perfect time for them to start sharing where they got that or how they learned to do this and all those kinds of things, right?

So that’s number one. Number two, being forgettable. Creating just adequate but not remarkable experiences, right? The same stuff that everybody else is doing. If you just do the same thing everybody else is doing, you’re just gonna blend in. It’s not gonna be worth sharing. Why would people share stuff that is literally everywhere you share stuff.

That is unique. That is a purple cow like we talked about with Seth Godin’s book earlier. Another mistake, mistake number three, ignoring the advocates, not nurturing your biggest fans. This is something that’s really, really important and why the Superfans model is really great, because you should get to know exactly who those superfans are.

There’s not going to be a ton of them, but even just one or two can be a game changer. ’cause they can do so much for you. They can not only share your brand with others, whether or not they have a lot of followers or not, they can be an incredible testimonial. They can provide you the right feedback and constructive criticism that you need at the right time.

Your advocates are so important, so do not ignore them. Lean into them. Focusing on features. That is a mistake. That’s mistake number four. But features are great, Pat. Yes, they are. But why do those features exist? That’s what you wanna dive into, right? Talking about what you do instead of how you make people feel.

So the benefits and what that opens up for people and what that can do for them emotionally and in their life. Not just like, oh, now you’re gonna have more money in your bank account, or Now you’re gonna be able to catch more fish. Cool. No. How are you gonna make people feel? You’re gonna feel proud that you were able to tie on a hook yourself and catch your own fish.

That’s survival. You’re gonna feel amazing when you take that picture and share it on social media from a fish that you caught on the Snake River. Again, I’m just making this up on the spot, but focus on how you make people feel, not on just what you’re doing for them. And number five is just expecting immediate results.

Word of mouth takes time. However, as we’ve seen with books like James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Yeah, after a certain amount of time, that book hit a tipping point, and it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for 283 weeks or something insane because it just hit the right momentum and people started sharing it and it just amplified and amplified more and more people got access to it, and then more people amplified it.

Right? But it didn’t happen right away. It did not happen right away. So here is your call to action after listening to this episode and hopefully this inspires you and gets you to start thinking again more along the lines of Superfans. In the book that I wrote and the experiences that people have, this is sort of a fun callback to  Superfans.

‘Cause I know I’ve been talking about lean learning quite a bit. By the way, I did go to Barnes and Noble the other day and I found my book. It’s still there, and that’s amazing. And it still has been on the USA Today list for several weeks now, which is great. Maybe one day it’ll get back on the New York Times list.

We’ll see. But I’m just very proud of that work and very grateful and thankful for all of you who have supported it. So here is your call to action, your word of mouth challenge here at the end of this podcast episode, episode 880, which is insane. 120 until we hit 1000. So here it is. It’s a four week sort of challenge for you with relation to word of mouth.

Week number one, audit your current customer experience. Start there. Check your systems, read the emails, try to gauge where people are in the journey and exactly what their thinking and what their experiences are within that. Week two, identify one moment you can make more remarkable. How can you understand based on your audit, what the expectations are?

And then how might you be able to exceed them? Create something remarkable noteworthy, shareworthy number three, week three, implement the change and then measure the response. And it’s gonna take some time. Like I said, you need to be patient, but we want implementation to happen. And then week number four, ask your best customers. This may even in fact be the thing that you can do right now. In addition to the auditing your customer experience, I would actually move this to number one, ask your best customers if you have them or your most active subscribers, et cetera, what they tell others about you. I know that sounds weird, but when you frame it in the word of mouth, not, Hey, just tell me why I’m awesome.

Don’t start it like that. Ask your best customers how they talk about your brand to others. ’cause you wanna learn. You wanna understand better how you might be able to bring more people into the ecosystem. They’re gonna want to help you do that, your best customers. So in closing, the future belongs to the remarkable I will say.

And in this world of infinite choices, remarkable will always win. Business has always kind of gone this direction ever since 2010 when I started, but business is becoming more personal, not less. People buy because of how they feel. They buy because of memories, not just products. And while others are chasing algorithms, you can build something worth talking about.

And what’s funny about that is when you build something worth talking about, the algorithms will follow because these algorithms are continuously being built to help recommend things that we humans want to see. So create something worth talking about. The algorithm will follow. Keep up the good work.

Thank you so much for listening in and hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. We got some great episodes coming in here at the second half of the year as we head into August very soon. And wow, this summer’s almost over already. That’s insane. At least here in the West coast when school starts, kind of early August.

So wishing you all the best and we’ll see you the next one.