Steal My Word of Mouth Strategies: What Actually Worked for Us in Wilmington, NC

Hey, I'm Meg — Co-Founder and CMO of What's Good. And I want to be honest about something: we didn't set out to compete with tourism.

We started as frustrated locals who couldn't figure out what was happening in our own city on any given weekend. Events were scattered everywhere. Calendars were outdated. Good things were happening and nobody knew about them until after they happened. So we built something to fix it — for us, for our neighbors, for anyone who just wanted to know what was good.

Then something unexpected happened.

The messages started coming in. From locals at first... then from tourists. From Airbnb hosts. From people who'd visited once and bookmarked the site. Messages that said things like: "We're coming to Wilmington next month and we use your website every time to plan our trip." Or from hosts telling us they share our events page with every single guest who checks in.

We hadn't targeted any of them. We hadn't run a single ad. We were just consistently showing up for locals — and locals were quietly doing our distribution for us. They were forwarding the newsletter to visiting cousins. Bartenders were telling their patrons. Airbnbs were using a QR code to our site in welcome packets. They were sharing our Stories with friends asking "what should we do this weekend?"

That's the flywheel. And once it starts spinning, it doesn't stop.

Engaged locals invite friends and family to visit. Those visitors have great experiences because locals show them around. They go home and tell people about it. More people visit. The destination gets better. More locals are proud of it. The cycle compounds.

No ad budget required. Just consistent, useful infrastructure that gives locals something worth sharing.

We shared the exact strategies behind this at the OACVB Conference. Here's the full breakdown — take whatever's useful:

3 Things to Do Starting Next Week

1. Make local events a core part of your strategy — not an afterthought
2. Empower locals to spread the word — ask them: "What would help you when friends visit? What information do you wish you had?"
3. Start a consistent weekly email newsletter — keep it useful, keep it light, never miss a week

Word-of-mouth isn't complicated. Locals want to know what's happening. Visitors want to know what to do. Be the consistent, reliable answer to both.