Marketing usually works like this:

You have a product -> You find a way to get users -> The users sign up and use your product

There's a small problem with this approach: Everything works in one direction. What happens after the user signs up and uses the product? We all hope it's this:

Are there any more deliberate ways to engineer word-of-mouth than just having a great product and hoping people will tell their friends about it?

They answer is a clear and resounding yes.

Which elements of your business feed off of each other to accelerate growth?

The goal with engineering virality is to create a flywheel. We want to become less reliant on the traditional marketing tactic cycle:

...and create a loop where each new user brings more users, and each new user brings more users, etc. If you know what compound interest is, you'll know what I mean.

Is there something simple that any product can do to start engineering word of mouth? The answer lies in 3 words: "refer a friend".

The simplest "word-of-mouth engineering" tactic: Refer-a-friend

Email newsletters do this often. The whole flow goes like this:

You become a subscriber -> You get asked to refer-a-friend and get X in return.

When your friend clicks on your referral link, they get something like this (this example is from Morning Brew):

Another flow is asking people to refer-a-friend in order to get faster access to something. Here, the user:

Signs up to a waiting list -> You ask them to refer people in order to get higher in the queue. Here's one example:

The flywheel: This is the easiest way to get new users from your existing users.

Just think about it: In theory, if you can get 10 users to refer 3 more users, that's like saving 30% on marketing.

Let's explore some more complicated approaches.

Target a segment of your audience which has exposure

Have you heard about Cameo? It's a service where you can request personalized videos from your favorite celebrities.

Cameo engineered word-of-mouth by targeting the celebrities first. Each of those celebrities has a large fan base. A few of those celebrities posted their Cameo gig on their profile, causing their fans to sign up and buy the service.

Another software tool that got traction using a similar approach is Community. Community targeted celebrities, which resulted in social media posts like these:

After texting those celebrities, you'd get a message like this: