How To Create A Viral Marketing Flywheel

Word of mouth marketing is, and forever will be the best kind of marketing.

How do you build parts of your course product service book into publicly shareable elements such that people are constantly telling their social media audiences about what it is you've provided to them?

This is such a valuable point for people who run physical good businesses. And I think a good golden rule is before you default to discounting for any reason, you should instead default to how do I bundle in free digital education, AKA a air because it's more valuable and it's not going to cost you anything.

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is this is going to be much shorter than an hour because we are once again hyped up on espresso and caffeine. A couple quick logistics before we dive into our episode today, talking all about referral programs and affiliates. If you're listening to this on YouTube, someone messaged me and said they didn't know that we had this available on Spotify, on itunes, on all podcast players. So if you are more of an on the go listener and you want to hear Espresso Hour on your commutes, at the gym, on your walks, you can go to espressohour.com and you'll find a link to all the podcast players. We're on Spotify. We're on itunes. And if you're listening on Spotify and itunes, you want to watch this on video, you can go to YouTube as well. So, Cole, what's going on, bro?

I'm ready. I think lately our episodes have been a little longer than 30 minutes, probably because we went for that extra shot of espresso.

Right? I think we want to keep it around 30 minutes. Some topics we'll do 50 and if, if we just get down a rabbit hole that we really want to go on. But thanks to everyone who is submitting timestamps in every single video as a comment or in a Twitter thread, you're being entered into our giveaway of one free spot aboard our next Ship 30 cohort. Every single video. We're going to announce the winner at the end of this video. So make sure you watch all the way till the end. And if you want to be entered into the giveaway to win a seat on board the next cohort, leave a comment with your top three takeaways with timestamps or write a Twitter thread with your biggest takeaways and tag us and we'll pick that up as well. All right, today's topic, we're going to Talk all about referrals, how we think about maximizing referrals from current students. In ship 30, we had Brian Feroldi reach out and thanks for listening, Brian, if you're listening to this one, interested in it. And that's kind of how we're coming up with topics right now, is people reaching out and saying, hey, like this last episode, could you talk about X, Y and Z? So if you have any potential topics that you'd like us to cover, make sure you reach out. But where do you want to start with this? Cole?

Probably defining for people the difference between referral and affiliates, because I think different strategies are for each.

Okay. Yeah. So the way I think about it, and I don't think this is like an official definition by any means, but I think about referrals as someone who's a current customer who brings on board another customer or another student or something like that. And I think affiliates are more people who have audiences that are in a related niche or something like that, who then market ship 30 for the goal of earning income. I think about referrals less of, hey, I'm earning an income. I'm just like telling people about ship 30. And because I want them to join and I think affiliates are more, hey, I'm looking to monetize some of this attention I've gathered. Do you guys have an affiliate program so we can talk a little bit about our approach to both. But why don't we start with kind of referrals and the way we maximize those? What do you think?

Yeah, so I think a good POV to start with is that word of mouth marketing is and forever will be the best kind of marketing there. There is no other kind of marketing as effective as that. And I remember when I first moved to LA and I met this tech entrepreneur and angel investor. I asked him how he picked his deals and he said one of the requirements that I look for is that 50% of the people who buy that product or use that service tell a friend about it. So that's a very like just a good metric to pay attention to. Even if it's like a Tequila brand, you know, like literally anything. Is it, is it so good that when you experience it, 50% of the people who do go and tell a friend about it. And that is both a great lens as an investor, but it's an even better lens as a founder because that's the goal, is you should create something that everyone wants to talk about.

Yeah. Alex Hormozi has a great framework on this of if you could only get new customers from your current customers, how would that change how you approached your business or how you treated them? And it's such a great lens because you'd probably do 50 things differently if you were less focused on marketing and more focused on creating a product that did the marketing for you. And so we've kept that lens in mind with all of our new features. Whenever we're adding something to ship 30, it's like, is this going to make an experience that people want to tell their friends even more and more about? And when we're removing things, we look at parts of the course of the program or the community that no one's that in love with and it's not helping them tell more people about it. So yeah, it's kind of that double sided lens.

A small tangent here that's really important is this, is this is why languaging is so crucial. Because if you don't give your customers the language that you want them to use to talk about you, then there is no compounding effect. And what a lot of people like to do is they go, well, I don't want to give them the language. I want the customer to come up with how they feel and how they want to describe what I'm doing. And as a result, if 10 people experience your product and all 10 people have a different definition of it, there's no compounding. Like how is that supposed to spread? Because you have 10 different people pushing forward 10 different narratives. And in reality what you want is you want to, you want to strategically put the words in your customer's mouth so that when they go talk about it, they're all repeating the same words, which is what unlocks the compounding. So for example, in everything we do, we repeat, start writing online, start writing online, start writing online over and over and over again. You know, or we say you want to become not a legacy writer, a digital writer. Not a legacy writer, a digital writer. And if you notice when people talk about ship 30, they use that same language over and over and over again, which makes it easy for that to get exposed to net new people who might be interested in it.

Are there any other examples you can think of of like businesses that do a good job with that? I'm trying to think about some, either E commerce or something like that that does a good job of telling people how to describe the product, like a Dropbox or something that's spread very well via word of mouth because I think that could be even more tactical. Examples.

Notice how for the first two years of every video Alex Hormozi made, he said, and I have nothing to sell you. Like, there's a reason why he repeated that over and over and over again, right? Because then when someone would watch the YouTube video, they'd be like, oh, he's not like other business guru types of people. He's not trying to sell me anything, he's just giving me information. Like, I guarantee you, like tons of people described him that way. Or like for years, Elon said a Tesla is the most fun thing you could buy. He wasn't like, tesla's the best car. He's like, tesla's the most fun thing you could buy. And so when people would talk about Tesla cars, they'd be like, they wouldn't talk about it like it was a car. They'd be like, it's the most fun thing you can buy. The car dances and plays music and makes farting sounds. You know, like, it's really interesting to observe, especially the founder, when the founder creates or describes something a certain way and they do it over and over and over again. That's the thing that gets internalized by, by people.

So I think that's the first takeaway as you think about any kind of natural referral is give your customers or students a way to concisely describe it to a friend. So what does it do? How did it help them? And then just reinforce that kind of internally. I think the biggest one within ship 30 is that we have a naturally built in flywheel of people who are in the course telling everyone about the fact that they're in it and how much they're enjoying it because of the public nature of it. So yeah, ship 30 is a little bit unique in that of anyone who's in it is publishing. That's almost like a billboard. It's like someone getting a nice haircut and people go, where'd you get that haircut? It's like the barber up the street. Barbers have a similar kind of public facing billboard built in referral program. And so obviously the number one way for your product to have that natural referral is results. Because people will see the results and then ask them how they get those results and then they'll tell them naturally. So it goes back to creating good product. But I think more tactically you can think about how do you build parts of your course product service book into like publicly shareable elements such that people are constantly telling their social media audiences about what it is you've provided to them.

What ship 30 does is very natural. And I've had so many people point that out to me or say that to me. Dickie, I'm sure you have to. Where people are like, it's genius. I mean, participating in Ship 30 tells other people about Ship 30 because you're publishing your content in public. But I do think that that's a great challenge question for every founder or creator to ask themselves is how could you do a similar? Experience it in public. Because the nature of any referral, it requires the person to willingly talk about it. And obviously the goal is to make it so exciting and so valuable and so enjoyable that people want to. But ship 30 really unlocked sort of a level above that, which is if you can just experience the product in public, experience the learning in public, ship the asset in public, your mere participation is educating other people on it. And so I do think it's an interesting challenge question for everyone to ask themselves of. Maybe what's something that you're doing behind closed doors? Like, a lot of people run communities where they're like, submit your assignment inside this closed slack channel or inside this closed community. And how could you instead create a public version of that so that when someone participates and uses your product or participates in your course or uses your service, they are signaling to other people that they are engaging with it as well?

That's a good idea. I could see a lot of that submission assignment or like public Twitter spaces where occasionally you do your office hours or your community live session in public, or encourage other people to host like group events in public. Things like that. That's a great challenge question.

Yeah. And just a little like, pro tip is you can even bake it in with your pricing. You know, you could be like, like say you're doing a service for someone. You go, you know, the service is five grand a month. Or because I get free marketing out of it, you can, we'll give it to you for three grand a month. But every time we do it, we get to talk about it and share it. Or like we do our work live with you, that's a webinar that other people can attend. You know, or if you have a community, it's like it's 500 bucks to join the community. Or for 250 bucks a month, we give you all the same things, but we record our sessions with you and everyone else can sit in on it. You know, you can bake in that sort of virality or that public participation and trading maybe some of the cash for. And I get to do something with.

It and another tactical thing we've done from the very beginning was right when someone joins, they're excited. They want to tell people. We give them an incentive of kind of our bonus vault because our course doesn't start for a month, two months on average, usually, where if they share on Twitter that they just joined, we send them a bunch of bonus resources. And so to tide them over between the start of when they sign up and when they actually join, we send them kind of some of our best stuff, all like in an email sequence. And to unlock that, all you have to do is tell someone that you joined. Right. So naturally, just incentivizes both sides.

This is such a valuable point for people who run physical good businesses or E commerce companies or anything, because the biggest challenge of E commerce is that you are dealing with, with physical goods with real costs to warehousing them, shipping them, creating them. Right. And so if you're an E comm company and you hear the idea of you should give something away for free, the first thing you think of is how much that's going to cost you. You know, and there's so much to be learned from like digital education businesses, especially if you're a physical goods business, in that you should create digital education assets because it's air and you can give those away to, to incentivize some of the referrals or early signups or other incentives. Right. Like Dicky. There's no reason why. The same way when someone signs up for ship 30 and we go, we're going to give away digital air, which is valuable, it's education, but it's air. Right. And then people go unlock that and tell other people about Ship 30. There's no reason why if you're a CPG company, you can't do the same thing. It's just instead of giving away the physical product, you give away the education, the digital education on the product or on the industry.

Hmm. I like that. Because where most people go, and this kind of goes nicely into the second point is if you're an E commerce store, I think the common one is share and we'll send you a discount for like your next purchase or something like that. And that probably works. And I'm not going to pretend to act like I know better than an E commerce company who's probably doing billions of dollars, but I think there's an opportunity where people might not necessarily want the discount on the next purchase because they just bought something. But if you could have some kind of bundle with whatever they just bought As a free bonus for forwarding an email to a friend or sharing it on social media. It's an easy, easy application.

Quick example that I literally just ran into. I was looking at, know those really cool ice baths you can buy for your house? But it was like this big long, like white tank and you can just put it in your backyard or something. They had a really cool website and I was on their site and literally within the first 15 seconds, you know, like I scrolled and then I kind of was about to scroll away and click and they go, do you want a discount? And I'm always so surprised. Like, everyone always defaults to. The first incentive is a discount, whether it's buy my product or you bought the product. Like, now go tell someone about it. Here's a discount code. You know, everyone always just defaults to discount, discount. And I was sitting there looking at the site and I was like, you would have gotten my email immediately if you had said to me, do you want to know the seven biggest health benefits of cold plunging? Every day? Type in your email and over the next seven days we're going to educate you on this. Or if it was like, hey, by the way, if you buy this cold plunge in the next 30 days or whatever it is, we're going to pair it with our mini course on the health benefits of cold plunging. Mistakes people make when taking care of their cold plunge at home. Like, different cool accessories you can pair with your cold plunge in order to maximize your health. Like, there's so much education that you can give people. And I think a good golden rule is before you default to discounting for any reason, you should instead default to how do I bundle in free digital education, AKA air? Because it's more valuable and it's not going to cost you anything.

I hope E commerce companies somehow stumble onto this episode because I experienced the same thing. I was shopping for shorts the other day, like, looking at a couple of different brands and I had no clue if I wanted to buy brand X, brand Y, brand Z. But every time I popped open the page it was like, 20% off, give us your email. 10% off, give us your email. I'm like, I don't even know if I want what you have. So why am I going to sell you my attention for something I'm not even sure I want? So they could even have some kind of like education on the products themselves, right? Here's our three different lines and we're going to tell you about each of them. So, so many different ways. And you could apply this to E commerce, you could probably apply this to services, courses, everything.

Yeah. I mean, just so a rapid fire, quick thing. If you're shopping for shorts, wouldn't it be, especially as a guy, most guys have no idea about fashion or fashion sense, wouldn't it be helpful to know, here's what T shirts you should pair with your shorts, or here's what shorts you should wear for which occasion. Really helpful. Or if you're going shopping for a watch, here's how to find the right watch based on what you're wearing. Here's how to find the right watch based on occasion. Like, there's so much education that people need. And I notice how many founders are so locked in on the here's what I'm selling. And they have almost no awareness on. Here are the thing. Here are the questions that the person I'm selling to has and how can I bundle in that free education where they're not just getting a product, they're getting a mini masterclass on this thing too. And if you think about referral, like, the easiest thing that we do with referrals is just, hey, if you want to unlock this vault of here's all this free education, we're just bundling and rebundling, go tell people that you're doing ship 30, right? So part of the benefit is like, you don't have to discount as much. You can incentivize people to talk about what you're doing and you're educating them on why they should want to buy whatever it is that you're selling in the first place. It's just you're not marketing, you're educating.

Hmm. Another small tactical thing I think we've noticed is when you have a course asking people to sign up for your either affiliate program right away, I think is it's like a fine line because people don't even know you know what it is you do that much. And there's also something of like, if you're trying to tell someone to bring a friend and you position it to them as like, hey, you can earn more income if you bring a friend, like, I'll send you, you get an extra discount. People, I think, are always on the fence of like shilling their affiliate stuff to their friends. And so we opt for a different version of that where right when someone buys the second email they get from us is a unique code that is 50% off to join that they can just forward to a friend. And so imagine, I think, what the incentives are for someone to share it with their friend, they get the status of hey, I'm giving you the discount because I went and joined already, I think you'd be a great fit. And so rather than the incentive being I'm going to get income that could potentially like, you know, come off the wrong way to my friends, this is pure altruistic. I can't remember where I saw it was like altruistic referral programs where you're just giving stuff to them to give to their friends and so they gain status rather than income. I thought was kind of a neat takeaway that anyone can apply. So right when someone purchases, it's like, hey, this course, this community, this service, everything is better with a friend. If you're able to send this to them, go for it. Like CC me on the email. And where you can go above and beyond in this is get them to CCU on the email. And when they do send a one minute loom of like, hey, we'd love to have you. Here's what we do, here's why this will help, et cetera. There's tons of little tactical things you can go to say, how do I turn every customer into 2 and 2 to 4, 4 to 8? And that's what that word of mouth referral starts to compound with.

That's a great point. There's a little like cherry you can put on the top two. I think we did this for our Christmas campaign this past year, but we basically told people who had already taken ship 30 which the important nuances the person should engage with the product first. Like you can't just have them buy and then be like now go tell other people to buy it too if they haven't really engaged with it, you know. But the cherry that you can do on top, and we did this around Christmas was if you had taken ship 30 and you want to give your friend or family member a discount, here you go. And if they decide to sign up, have them DM us or email us and we'll give them like the VIP treatment, you know, and, and basically all we did was just sort of, you know, greet them by name and put them in a separate channel, you know, and we're just like, hey, you're part of the VIP group, you know, and that's a really easy way of again making that person feel like they are giving their family member or friend special access. And we can all think of opportunity, like times when we've gotten to experience this in our lives as well. And the more that you can create that feeling, the more Likely someone is to go, well, yeah, I don't just want to talk about it for your sake. I want to talk about it because I want to give my friend or family member this unique experience that they wouldn't be able to get otherwise.

And we did one more thing on that was we let them gift a spot in the next Ship 30 cohort around Christmas time. So not only could you send 50% off to a friend, but you could buy a seat for 50% off and give it to them for free as part of that. And I think almost 15 to 17% of our January cohort were gifts bought by current Ship 30 students. Bringing a friend and saying, hey, this was so awesome. I want to give this to you for free and I'll buy it for half price.

So, yeah, gifting in and of itself is and can be a whole strategy, you know, like there and. And again, I always like asking the question of what education is required in order to do this. And even with something like gifting, you know, it's not enough to just go gift this to your friend or family member. You have to educate them on, here's how to gift it, here's why it would make for such a great gift. You know, here's the best way to talk about it. If you are going to give it as a gift, you have to always sort of take ownership over what. What do I need to educate the person on or educate the person to do in order for this to happen.

And that takes us perfectly to the third point we were talking about earlier, which is if you are creating an affiliate referral, we call it an ambassador program for your course and community. I think the number one way to do it is to have tiers where with each additional referral, new things are unlocked and those things do not have to be financial. So for a while we've done financial incentives, but I think we've found out more and more that people prefer additional education, additional resources, additional access, or additional status from that. And when you gamify it and turn it into a leaderboard with different tiers, it encourages just constant referral. Right? Because people think, hey, I can level up to the next one. That means I'm going to tell more people. And we find that it aligns incentives nicely with the people of who are joining ship 30 who then go on to build big audiences. We then have them in our ambassador program because people are probably asking them all the time, hey, how'd you start? Well, it was ship 30, and we want to align incentives that way. And so things like swag material status, that's kind of how we reward our ambassadors.

Yeah, I would definitely say that it's worth recognizing how much of a rabbit hole this is. And there are some businesses that are like, entirely built on their referral program. You know, they've mastered referral. And so you should think of referral as a spoke on the wheel. And there's lots of different types of marketing you can do. I think, Dickie, it's fair to say our referral program, even though we. We definitely have some cool things in there, it is probably one of the less mature elements of our. Of our marketing overall. And so you just kind of have to figure out where it sits on your priority list of what do you want to build and what's driving the most. And recognizing that a really great referral program takes work. Like, it just like paid ads take work or creating content takes work, you know, and so you just kind of have to bounce around on the different spokes of the wheel, like building each one individually.

Yeah, we have. It's definitely the least built out of all of our different acquisition sources. Because of the natural referral that happens. We don't necessarily need to build out the full program and give it a ton of attention, but it's you. You put it perfectly. Just like paid ads, just like organic content. Just like anything that is a traffic generation source, it takes more work. I think we've probably fallen victim to that of like, oh, yeah, we'll just spin it up. And we could definitely have created better educational materials, better trainings, better kind of periodic reminders and additional workshops around it. But again, it goes back to like, on your build order, what is the return on that? And maybe it's something we should give more attention to. You know, as you weigh the potential upside of something like that compounding for you versus additional tweets and Twitter threads, like, which one for two weeks of work is going to provide more value in the long run? Mm.

Yeah. I mean, you could think, like, what would a 10 out of 10 referral program look like? And it would probably end up looking like some sort of group where people who are driving referrals, it's gamified. They unlock more and more bonus assets. There's weekly webinars where they get access to special trainings that other people don't get access to. Right. Like, you would almost treat it like a mini mastermind group. And I think a lot of people, ourselves included, get that in theory. And then the challenge is always time allocation and focus and Is that the thing that takes priority right now? You know, when do you build that out? And I think anytime, Dicky, we're confronted with stuff like that, we just go, well, the exciting reframe is we don't have it yet, and look at how far we've come. So imagine one day when we are able to do that and just kind of continuing to look at the shortcomings of your business as if we don't even have that yet and it's working. Imagine the day when we do, you know, and just chipping away at it over time.

That is the best reframe that we started to use. It's whenever there's something we should be doing instead of, like, that feeling of, oh, we need to go do that, like, right now, it's like, oh, we'll just wait till we do that in the future. And then that and then that and then that. Because we could rattle off 50 things that we should be doing right now that would grow the business, right? And having those as a almost relaxing realization rather than a stressful one of, like, oh, okay, we have plenty of work to do for the next 10 years. Just keep chipping away. Boom. All right, that's it for today's Espresso Hour. I think that was good. A bunch of little tactical things that people should be able to take away and apply and some reminders for us on things to improve as well. So if you have more ideas that you want us to cover, reach out via Twitter DM. Reach out via comment on this YouTube video. We love hearing from everyone listening, and we're kind of bootstrapping our ideas as we go based on your feedback. But for today's winner of the next free spot in our ship 30 cohort coming up in July for leaving timestamps or writing a Twitter thread on this episode, this is for last one. The winner is going to be cast and spear. I don't know the full name, but appreciate you putting together those thorough timestamps. So we'll get in touch with you with your free ship 30 spot. And if you want to be added to the list for the next one again, leave a comment with timestamps or write a Twitter thread with your takeaways and you'll be entered. That's it for today's Espresso Hour. We will see you all back here next week. As a reminder, we're on YouTube. We're on Spotify, we're on itunes. We're on every platform. You can listen, watch, and do all that on the go see you next week.