Word of Mouth (and What I Can't Teach You About Marketing)
Module: Keeping It Going Without Burning Out
Here's the thing nobody tells you: I have no idea how to build you a following on Instagram.
I want to say that plainly up front because this whole class has been me telling you what I do know, and this lesson is mostly me telling you what I don't. Nearly all my catering work has come from the ward, from neighbors, from somebody at an open house asking who did the food. That's it. That's the whole system. I've never run an ad. I don't have a business page I post to on any kind of schedule. If you came here hoping I'd teach you hashtags, bless your heart, wrong class.
But I do know something about how word of mouth actually works, because I've been living off it for ten years, so let's talk about that instead.
What word of mouth actually is
It's not luck, exactly, even though it feels like luck when it happens. It's the residue of doing the work well and being easy to deal with. That's most of it. People don't recommend you because you're the cheapest. They recommend you because you showed up on time, the food was good, and you didn't make the whole thing weird.
So the "marketing" I can actually teach you is really just: do the job right, and let people talk. The talking part isn't up to you.
A few things that do help, that aren't marketing exactly
Make it easy for someone to say your name. If you don't have a simple way to describe what you do — "I make wedding luncheon food" or "I do soap, mostly gift sets" — people can't pass you along even when they want to. Practice saying the one sentence.
Follow up. Not in a salesy way. Just: if you did a job, check in a week later and ask how it went over. People remember that. It costs you nothing but a text.
Leave something behind. A card, even a plain one from the drugstore rack, sitting on the food table. I resisted this for years because it felt like showing off. Bless me, I was wrong. Somebody at an open house wants to know who did the shrimp and if there's nothing to grab, they forget your name by the parking lot.
Anecdote, since we're here
I bought a commercial food scale off a clearance rack years ago. Twelve dollars, marked way down, and I remember standing in the aisle thinking this was the smartest purchase I'd made all year. I used it maybe twice. It sat in the garage for probably four years before I did one of my reorganizing binges and found it behind the folding chairs.
I bring that up because marketing is where people do the same thing, just with time instead of money. They'll spend six hours setting up a fancy website for a business that's done two jobs. That's the twelve-dollar scale. It feels productive. It isn't the thing that's actually going to get you your next customer. The thing that gets you your next customer is the last customer telling somebody about you at church.
Spend your effort where the actual return is. For most of you, in year one, that's not a website. It's doing good work for the six people who already know you.
The opinion I'll stand behind here
Charge for your time or you don't have a business, you have an expensive way to be nice. I say this in almost every module because it's the root of half the problems people bring me. It matters here too — word of mouth will absolutely bring you more customers who expect the "friend price," because that's the story that got told. Somebody says "oh he did our luncheon and it was so reasonable," and now the next three people expect reasonable to mean cheap. You get to decide, each time, whether you're the business or you're the neighbor. Just decide on purpose instead of by accident.
What I actually do, in practice
I keep a short list — just names, in the same notebook I use for job costs — of everybody who's referred me work. Once a year, usually around the holidays, I do something small for them. A loaf of bread, a jar of something. Not a marketing move. Just noticing who's been good to me. It happens to also be the best marketing I've ever done, but that's not why I do it.
That's genuinely the whole system. Do good work, be someone people like dealing with, follow up, leave a card, and say thank you to the people who talk you up. I know that's not an algorithm. I don't have one for you.
Before next time
Write down the one sentence you'd want someone to say about your business at a ward party if they were recommending you to a friend. Bring it next time — we'll see if it actually sounds like something a real person would say out loud.