Most effective way to generate and sustain word-of-mouth?

What’s the most effective way to generate and sustain word-of-mouth advertising for your business?

Provide immediate, consistent, relief for your customer’s pain.

Think about the last time you were in serious pain. That experience was ...very painful. It left an impression on you. Pain does that.

And then you felt relief.

What did you do? You told people. You told a lot of people. You were almost giddy, right? You continued to tell them a week later or a year later.

But it only became a story you wanted to share and your people wanted to hear when you discovered a pain-relief solution. Then the story was meaningful to their lives. And your status rose, a bit, with your helpful solution.

We're all busy. That includes your customers. We're busy looking for immediate solutions to nagging challenges, annoyances, fears, setbacks, roadblocks...survival. We can't begin to bring meaning to our lives, pursue our passions, live our dreams...until we find immediate relief for these.

Delivering an immediate solution, immediate relief, inserts your business into their lives in a meaningful way. Make meaning makes word-of-mouth. We share what's meaningful to us. Relieving pain and removing obstacles is meaningful.

Making meaning, sustaining word-of-mouth advertising, is about neither bells nor whistles, colors or fonts, cartoons or videos, forward-to-a-friend options or even social media. These are gimmicks.

Gimmicks have nothing to do with meaning in our lives or relieving pain. Gimmicks are meaningful to those who make money selling them. See. That’s the point.

These gimmicks can only help spread stories. Your business can create one of two stories:

Story 1. That’s your customer’s pain that remains unrelieved or made worse by your company.

Story 2. That’s your customer’s pain that found immediate relief when that customer found your company's solution. 

Provide immediate relief, consistent, relief for your customer’s pain...and it’s only natural their story will be told. Over and over their story will be told.

You will have a role in that story. But, it’s a bit role. You’re not the star. The customer is the star in their own stories. Immediate relief to their pain brings them immediately back to the starring role in their own story. All of us like that, being the star in our own stories.

You want word-of-mouth? Here's 3 steps:

1. Find the most pressing pain for which your customers need immediate relief.

2. Provide for its immediate relief.

3. Repeat. Repeat for them. Repeat for their friends. Repeat for their friends friends.

Keep doing it and they’ll keep sharing with their friends that one scene in their story where you steal that one scene.

Then you'll have a story where you are the star. And that story is how you came to be known as a source of immediate relief for your customer's pain, and their friend's pain...and their friend's friend...and their cousin Eddie, too. Your customers will share their story, now your story, with everyone.