Business Marketing Spreads Best By Word Of Mouth
Monday, March 21st, 2011Marketing sure has been altered with the growth in networking websites and social marketing. A Quick Tweet by a sdisgruntled customer can spread quickly on the web resulting in much lost business. How many times have you heard someone say they posted a complaint message on Twitter or Facebook about their local cable company or another company and within 10 minutes, they’d been contacted by the company and had a resolution to their problem?
Word of mouth marketing can make or break a company quite fast.
On the other hand if a customer wants to tell the world through a social network about some positive event, then your business can explode overnight capturing the web and even the nightly news.
Word of mouth marketing is marketing that quite simply happens when someone talks about your business product or service. And as we’ve already mentioned, word of mouth marketing is often based on customer satisfaction.
Satisfaction is inherently linked to your honesty and integrity. If you mislead a customer, intentionally or unintentionally, they can and often will tell others about your dishonesty.
For example, word of mouth marketing might be talking to a friend about where they have their website hosted. They tell you a story about how they were motivated to try ABC Company by a coupon they received. However, the coupon didn’t include about $20 of annual fees. It was misleading and it ticked them off.
People are MORE THAN HAPPY TO SHARE THEIR GRIEVANCES.
They’re also happy to spread the word about companies they feel positively about.
That is the power of word of mouth marketing.
While word of mouth marketing implies speaking, that doesn’t have to be the case. Referrals, testimonials, and endorsements are all word of mouth marketing. A blog post that refers to a particular business is considered word of mouth marketing.
Word of mouth marketing is based on giving people something to talk about. When you’re honest, and every practice, every single marketing piece is authentic and transparent, (a concept we’ll talk about in a later chapter), you’re on your way to long standing success. It can be a really great product or service, a funny ad, or a celebrity being photographed with your product in their hand the end result is people are talking, (or emailing or blogging or sharing videos) about your business.
There’s something else positive word of mouth marketing accomplished…credibility.
Resources: Successful Internet Business | Government Grants For New Businesses | Products To Sell On eBay