Do word of mouth make a powerful marketing tool?

Word of mouth is the most effective marketing tool ever.

Period.

Word of mouth is very powerful. There are many ways you can approach it though:

1. Emailing existing customers and asking for referrals
2. Making strategic alliances
3. Offering incentives such as money or discounts for referrals
4. Creating an exclusive club that you can only get into with an invitation

And the list goes on and on.

Word of mouth is actually closer to a branding school of thought than a direct response school of thought.

What I recommend is figuring out what would:

* Delight
* Excite
* Grab the attention of

Your prospective customers. Then offer that for free. Usually one of the simplest ways to get word of mouth out is to design a campaign that is highly unusual. The key is:

* Say something that gets people emotionally charged up
* Make what you say extremely beneficial to your readers
* Deliver that message to as many channels as possible

A channel is a way of delivering your message. Warrior forum is one channel, you could post in the war room section. Document sharing sites are another. Other forums, blogs, and twitter verse are more.

The key is to get as much reach for your word of mouth stuff as possible. There are two variables that determine the success of a word of mouth campaign:

1. Quality of your campaign
2. The amount of people you can reach

Consider both of these factors when your trying to spread the word about your product. Also PR can be a very powerful tool to help stimulate word of mouth.

Doing both a PR campaign about a free report and simultaneously launching a highly controversial report is a powerful way to get a lot of attention.

word of mouth still most powerful marketing tool, but i think you still need another promotion tool like advertising, banner, ads, etc.. then if the costumer come, you give the best service you can do, if the costumer satisfied, he will tell another (word of mouth)

Yeah, it's been said time and time again. Word of mouth is definitely one of the MOST powerful methods of marketing.

If your business does not involve anything online, then word of mouth could be a powerful tool for marketing or promotion strategies. Yet, in this web 2.0 generation, I don't think that would be effective alone. It has to be integrated with online marketing strategies like the social media. Facebook and twitter are good examples of reaching out to potential customers. Hope this helps...

Word of mouth is critical, especially offline IMHO. Established or not word of mouth, or reputation is the difference between survivability and growth (especially in services).

This works like a magic, and once you setup a system where word of mouth can aswell leave some feedback on your site and keep building it until you have enough reputation for which you feel confident and then slowly using other offline marketing techniques i.e. sending promotional material to your targeted community or geography and slowly onto online advertisement.

This can be explained like the following way :

1) Word of mouth > Build up your reputation and reliability in the market with known and unknown and then slowly ask them to leave feedback on various site where your business or program is registered with a reputed website.
2) Built this list of customers and after enough feedback ( I target minimum 50+ reviews ) and then start sending them some free gifts to remind them I am still here to serve you and sell you my product and then following that
3) I target my audience pool and send them flyers, leaflets, promo materials and ask them to try my service, product and also mention them about my reviews.
4) Once this slowly builds up the traffic and then go onto online marketing ( i.e. banner purchase, seo (on site /off site) , adwords, paid directory listing , original press release and an engaged facebook fan page ( both comes from offline sources : I normally go out for a pub night and give away some staff and ask people to join up, clubs, university student unions etc..... list is enormous) ; tweet, pinterest and many more to add.

This has to be down in a systematic manner and surely back to your Q. Yes word of mouth is the biggest tools ever but will be very useful when we use systematic approach to marketing or algorithm approach to marketing ( You can read about it on scientific article databases )

Kind regards,
Swrajit
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Always on on WF to help, learn and Earn