Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth is the precursor to something going viral on social media in my opinion. First people start talking about it and then start posting,tweeting and checking in and what not.

I find it a bit odd that it is being billed as "one of the biggest trends..." Word of mouth has always been important to my business. Making sure the customer is being satisfied and maintaining credibility is vitally important, especially if you are an offline marketer who specializes in local business marketing.

As the industry grows, so does the amount of people offering the same services, who are willing to undercut you just to get a foot in the door. If your customer's are happy, and see their investment in your services pay off, than you will have a better chance of keeping the customer. Offer incentives for referrals and you will likely get them, if they believe in you. Some of my biggest clients have come from referrals.

Coming from the 'old school' door-to-door sales world - word of mouth has always been a significant means of advertising.

If you look at the "Rule of 500" (old school) everyone has a sphere of influence of around 500 people. This is people telling friends, neighbors, relatives, coworkers, etc. who then tell the same people they know. You can either have 500 people know you are a good way to solve problems or 500 people who will stay away from you.

In contrast with the online world where most people on FaceBook have a hundreds (or more) direct people to do the same and those people know others to tell, you can either be on the right end or wrong end of viral marketing.

When you consider a lot of people not only have FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social avenues; the figure could reach epic proportions from all the different people each person can impact.

With all this is should be EASY to get things to go viral right?

The reality though is you either have to REALLY excel at either upsetting someone or making their day to get anyone to mention you at all online.

It, at least to me, is the fact in the 'real world' the "Rule of 500" does depend on people actually seeing the product and commenting on it. Seeing the new car, TV, coat, dress, book, or whatever. The customer would either sing your praises or tell them what a bad deal they got. You don't get a lot of that in the online world.

In the online world it is more about compelling content people want to share. Links, videos, pictures, memes, and such is more of the stuff people online share in abundance. Giving people interesting and compelling things to share that link back to a monetization is what it is about now.

Word of mouth is more about sharing things face-to-face. Changing paradigms.

Just my 2 cents...

Word of mouth means you would speak to your clients and customers? if this is then you have to use off line marketing, of you have to use telephone and video to capture emotionally....?

From owning a retail business to now owning a marketing business..I can truly say that word of mouth is great.....IF they ever talk about you!

The one thing about word of mouth is that no one spreads GOOD news. It is only if the service was terrible, or if something went wrong do people talk about it. Not many people go around and tell all of their friends about a new restaurant they found that has great food..it's not an entertaining topic to speak about. That's why there is only BAD news on the news.

My $0.02.

I believe Word of Mouth Marketing is the present, not the future. This form of marketing is the basis for many of the popular services on the Internet. In addition, many viral videos (such as Rebecca Black's "Friday") were popularised mainly by communication between friends.

Word of mouth is, and always will be the most powerful way to get your business noticed.

I sell a physical product via a website. Word of mouth is a very important tool for me. I enclose a couple of business cards with every order we dispatch and frequently get calls an emails from people who were given the card by a friend which is exactly what I want. We also see from our sales data that over time we build little clusters of customers in a particular area which we also believe to be the result of word of mouth recommendation.

I don't think there is anything more powerful than a happy customer telling a friend about my business. They take more notice of a friends recommendation than anything they read on a random website they found.

Honestly, I think Word-of-mouth marketing isn't as a future trend as others think. The reason is, it's already being employed in the past generations and is certainly being employed now since social media and other online entities highly rely on this method for survival in the industry.

Anyway, as in the other generations, whatever kind of style or media that we develop for marketing in the future, I'm sure word-of-mouth will still be of great use since it is a great way to instill trust on products to other people on person knows of and is thus a great marketing tool.

~^_^~

I don't know about the future; but at least 50% of my current business comes from happy clients referring me to their friends and business associates. I don't think this will change in the future. People like to do business with people they trust. If they don't know who to trust then they ask their friends, "Who do you trust?"

Even in the vast marketplace of the internet people like to do business with other people. Not faceless websites.

Rose