Max Gladwell

If you like word-of-mouth advertising, you’ll love discovery marketing.

When it comes to social media marketing, we like to say “it’s better to discover a product with unique value than to be told a product is valuable.” This is the essence of what we call discovery marketing. Since the term can’t be found in Wikipedia, we’ll assume for now that we’re using it in an original way to describe the following.

Discovery marketing is essentially what we outline in Be a Beacon. It’s a strategy that maximizes the discoverability of a product or brand on the Web with an emphasis on the social web. We describe many of the tactics including blogging, RSS, SEO, and lifestreaming. We divide target markets into two groups: those who are looking for you and those you are looking for, where the beacon signals are programmed accordingly. The ultimate goal, though, is to facilitate a discovery.

We’re all aware of the power of word-of-mouth advertising, also known as word-of-mouse in online circles. It’s widely considered the best kind of advertising because the brand message is being spread through trusted referrals. This is why marketers put so much faith in social networking because networked individuals can spread a message more quickly and to more people more easily than non-networked individuals. That’s why today’s key influencers, whether they be moms or tweens, can largely be found online. Still, a word-of-mouth message has to start somewhere. And whether or not it originates through a discovery can make all the difference.

Paid advertising is one way to distribute and originate a brand message. It’s a direct pitch. The company is telling you why it’s product is valuable and why you need it. If you decide to try the product, you’ll find out whether or not it lives up to the hype. The only discovery being made, then, is whether or not the company was being accurate in its ads.

Assuming that’s the case and you like the product, it’s possible that you’ll refer a friend or two i.e. what we call word-of-mouth advertising. But this isn’t a discovery either. It’s just second-hand advertising. It can be effective and often is, but not quite as effective as when the origin of the message is a bona fide discovery.

When someone makes a brand or product discovery, it creates a connection with that brand or product that no ad pitch or word-of-mouth referral can simulate. It’s the fabled a-ha factor or a-ha moment, when the true value and uniqueness is revealed through a learning process and personal experience. This is ideally how all customers should come to know and appreciate a product.

There are many ways to employ discovery marketing. A demo tour where a company enables prospective customers to try its products in an appropriate setting, such as what Burton does with snowboards, can facilitate discoveries. Sample trays at the grocery store or farmers market enable discoveries of new food products. What sets this apart from advertising and referrals is that there’s little or no pitch. The idea is to position your product or brand such that it can be discovered by the right type of customer in the right setting. Burton would have a tough time demo’ing its snowboards at the beach, which is why they do it at ski resorts. On the social web, companies can use similar methods to aid potential customers in discovering their products or brands. And the nature of the social web makes these efforts that much more powerful and effective.

By using the beacon tactics of blogging, Twittering, social networking, and YouTubing in strategic ways, you can make your brand more “discover friendly”. In other words, by sending these targeted signals into the social web, you are enabling people to follow them back to the source, where the discovery can be made. There is no pitch involved, lest you be a spammer, but rather quality content that provides value in and of itself. Burton can’t offer snowboard demos on the Net, but it can produce compelling content that snowboarders will appreciate, and that can lead to a discovery of the Burton brand.

When discovery marketing and word-of-mouth meet on the social web, the results can be especially powerful, even viral, because those doing the discovering are highly motivated to spread the message. There is a certain pride of ownership in making a product or brand discovery. It’s similar to those who discover a great article and then submit it to Digg. They proceed to promote it to their friends in the hopes that it’ll get voted to the front page. We take pride in the things we discover, whether they be articles, products, or brands. We want to do our friends the favor and be known to them as the one who first discovered something cool or useful. We don’t, however, tend to feel the same way about products that get pitched or advertised to us.

This isn’t to say advertising and traditional word-of-mouth don’t work. It’s just that discovery works better. Therefore, all brands should strive to become more discover friendly.

Photo: Flickr

Update: This post was partly inspired by Ari Herzog’s call to action, “Social Media Marketing Tip: Pause“.

His call to action went as follows: “On that note, I tag David Bradley, Max Gladwell, Jacob Morgan, Gillian Swart, and Kim Woodbridge to add to the conversation on their blog.”

To which we responded, essentially, that making your brand or product more discoverable through social media can be a supremely powerful marketing strategy (see above).

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