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Word-of-Mouth Marketing You Can Use

March 2009

Word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful tool that gets your existing customers working for you. It’s cost-effective, targeted and trusted. Word-of-mouth marketing is the backbone of any marketing program. It supports any claims that you make in your advertising and helps to convince potential buyers that your company or product can be trusted. Anytime you can get your customers to talk about your company, you are using word-of-mouth marketing.

Many customers rely on word-of-mouth when seeking new products and services. If you sell your products to Moms, no other consumer group shares buying advice more than they do. If Moms are your customer, make sure you give them positive reasons to talk about your company.

Word-of-mouth is another form of referral, but without monetary compensation to the existing client. It’s probably the most powerful form of marketing because it’s unsolicited, genuine and brings customers to you. The best way to encourage word-of-mouth is to go beyond the expected. Great service is a start and will get them back, but rarely makes you a topic of conversation. Do something out of the ordinary that makes your customer want to talk about it in a conversation! It could be anything – going out of your way to help someone, sending an unusual gift, hosting a special event…the possibilities are endless! The only things you need to ask yourself are:

Is this different enough to get people talking?

Is this still in line with my company image or product benefits?

Is this appropriate for the client?

Here’s a small example: my husband ordered shoes from Zappos. They are based in the United States, so when they saw that our order was being shipped to Canada, they hand-drew a Canadian flag with a personal thank you note. Nice touch, and my husband told his friends when they commented on his new shoes.

A bad example (true story) would be a magazine publisher (not this one) that crossed the line by sending out chocolate body paint for Valentine’s Day to all the media buyers. Yes, it was talked about, but I questioned how it related to the magazine (which was not racy and had nothing to do with sex). It was not appropriate for all their clients, many of whom they had never even met or spoken to before.

Referrals
Everyone knows that happy customers are great for referrals. In a perfect world, all of your new clients would come to you without any marketing. But in reality, your customers are busy, so unless you ask them for a referral, chances are they will not talk about your company. You could provide an incentive for
your customers to refer you. This can be achieved in a variety ways, depending on whether you are business-to-business or business-to-consumer. It could be a personalized coupon sent through e-mail that clients can forward to a friend, or a credit to a client’s account for each new client they bring to you.

Word-of-mouth
To encourage referrals and word-of-mouth, you need to make it easy for them to do so. Online mechanisms like e-mail, “Tell a friend” or “post to Facebook” features on your web site make it more likely that customers will act on your request. If they need to fill out a long form or make their friend go through
hoops, I doubt people will take the time.

Client testimonials
People value referrals from friends but also listen to feedback from complete strangers. Make sure you collect client testimonials and positive feedback and use it to its full extent. Post them on your web site and include them as part of your sales materials. Some e-commerce web sites are even featuring customer reviews right beside the product. Canadian Tire is doing this on their site and the customer reviews convinced me that, yes, a Dyson is worth the extra money and I didn’t even have to go to another site to find the reviews.

Just ask
Don’t be afraid to ask your customers for testimonials and their help spreading the word about your company. If you offer an incentive to them and to the new customer, you are rewarding them for their help. Furthermore, you are letting them know that you, as a smaller company, rely on word-of-mouth to keep
your marketing costs down which ultimately benefits them through lower costs.

Sharole Lawrence is President of Glow Marketing, Western Canada’s leading consultancy firm specializing in marketing to Moms. www.GlowMarketing.ca

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