There are few better forms of product marketing than word of mouth.

Think about the most successful movies at the theatres.

They’re not necessarily the movies with the biggest marketing budgets (though that helps).

Instead, they the movies that have the biggest impact on the culture around them.

When a movie is genuinely exciting, thought-provoking, and different, it gets attention.

People tell their friends, and they tell their friends.

This is how you get your “sleeper hits.”

Examples of sleeper hit movies include The Blair Witch Project, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Napoleon Dynamite, and The Sixth Sense

They are all movies which opened small and then grew to be massive through word-of-mouth.

So how do you get people to talk about your product?

How do you turn your product into a “sleeper hit?”

In this article, we’re going to find out.

Talk About the Product Itself

The first and most important point, is that the product itself needs to be effective in driving discussion.

This is something that not many internet marketers understand. How many online books are there that sell essentially the same thing?

How are you going to get someone to talk about a book that teaches you how to make money, when that is what 500 other books released this month are doing?

Now consider something like the Vivobarefoot shoes. These are the toe shoes that you might have seen some people wearing. These things look so odd that just wearing them will invite questions, comments, and discussion.

And of course there are countless articles written about them!

This isn’t to say that everything you sell needs to break the mould and be completely new.

Instead, you need to make sure that you find an angle that makes it interesting.

You can sell a book on making money, but try to find some tip in there that is different and then make that into the “USP.”

Find some way to make your product noteworthy.

Talk About the Story

They say that stories are SEO for the human brain… and that couldn’t be more true.

We love telling and sharing stories, so much so that this practice is ingrained into us by millions of years of evolution!

If you wanted to make your product worthy of discussion, then find a story/narrative that you can promote.

That could be the story of how you created the product, or it could be the story of someone who used it and was highly successful.

Announce Your Products with Press Releases

Next you need a press release.

This outlines news of your product or service in a way that will hopefully get news coverage from other websites or papers.

The key with Press Releases though is to use the previous two tips.

Too many business expect press releases to get them free coverage and advertising.

This is not how it works.

Journalists are serving their readers first and so they will only cover your announcement if it is interesting to that audience. It also helps if the story an entertaining read.

That’s where having something new and different, or a real human-interest story attached, will make all the difference.

Failing that, a well orchestrated PR stunt can do the job as well!

But before you get to wacky with your stunts, think carefully about how you want to present your brand.

The master of the branded publicity stunt is Richard Branson.

Regardless of whichever Virgin business he is launching, Mr Branson always finds a fun and interesting way to get himself on the news.