"Word of Mouth" Marketing

Suraj D
July 24, 2023

Word of Mouth Marketing is the single most powerful marketing tool, after all.

Although you don't have complete control over it, you can still run various small, low-cost experiments to try to help your customers spread the word about your company and offerings.

Here’s the Great Example from Nick Huber:-

This is what my wife and I spent our free time doing 9 years ago on this day.
I wore holes in 3 pairs of jeans writing 2000+ ads just like this on the streets of Boston.
Marketing budget was $200 in chalk.
It worked. We got 2,000 customers first year and $500k of revenue.
— Nick Huber (@sweatystartup)
12:29 PM • Jul 18, 2023

Continued

We'd find the locations where all the freshmen walked every day on the way to class and put 4-5 ads. BU, NEU, Tufts, Harvard, MIT, Brandeis. I'd go from school to school and paint the campuses. It was a real bummer when it rained.

We came out of nowhere and blindsided the competitors. Too many customers to handle honestly. The chalk ads shifted from customer ads to employment ads towards the end of April. "$15 per hour + tips, flexible schedule, storagesquad dot com/apply"

Notice my wife has sponges in her hands. We learned that if you rub it with a damp sponge the chalk doesn't blow away and you can get another few days out of it. Our competitors took too much time drawing elaborate ads. We pumped out the simple ones and it worked way better.

I could do 30 ads in high traffic areas in a few hours. 1/2 of our customers noted "sidewalk chalk" as how they heard about us and the rest noted "friend". I bet I made north of $500 an hour when I was out there doing that. Sometimes you gotta do the stuff that doesn't scale.

Nick Huber