How Word of Mouth Marketing Helps Grow Your Business

By Ted Wright November 5, 2018

By Ted Wright

As times change, company strategies should too. Many have adopted social media marketing in recent years, but Word of Mouth Marketing, when done right, is one strategy every company has access to, and should experiment with.

If you’re looking for a guaranteed overnight spike in business, you may want to find another blog to read. But, if you’re looking for long-term, sustained growth, Word of Mouth Marketing is a sure bet.

Unlike other forms of marketing, Word of mouth marketing works slowly. It has to go slowly if it’s going to work at all.
It may not increase your sales this quarter or even the next one, but it will work.

Word of Mouth Marketing is all about building and building.

Like most things in life that lead to long term success, there are no shortcuts.

It’s difficult to measure the impact of Word of Mouth Marketing, but there’s difficulty in measuring any kind of marketing. What’s the ROI of a billboard or ad? Marketers have always relied on math to help answer these questions, and we can for Word of Mouth Marketing too.

How do you measure the dollar value of a conversation?

We can use some rules of thumb to track leading indicators of our progress:

• Number of conversations – Create a tally of the intentional, face-to-face conversations you, your team, and ambassadors are having each day. Forming a culture of word of mouth marketing takes time and practice. If your rate of conversations is consistent and growing, it would indicate that you are following the plan, and progress will follow.
• Web traffic — Is your website suddenly getting more hits? This would be a very good indicator that you are creating a customer journey that leads to your website.
• Engagement — Are you receiving more comments on Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn? These are all great indicators that people are taking an interest in your business.
• Consideration – Are you receiving more requests for quotes? Are you being considered in the customer evaluation process more often?
• Advocacy and recommendations – Word-of-mouth referrals correlate to sales more than any other metric.

Although it requires patience, it’s an option worth investing in when you consider many alternatives out there don’t work as well any more.

Word of Mouth Marketing works when you allow an influencer to deliver a message at their own pace. Although influencers are just 10% of the population, they love to share.

A single influencer, according to Procter & Gamble, is worth one million brand-specific conversations, within that person’s social network, within a year.

One million conversations can be generated by a single influencer. So we have a single influencer and a buy-through rate of between 20%-92%. Functionally, this means you can dominate the US market in a category if you start out with a base of 1,000-10,000 influencers.

10,000 influencers x 1,000,000 conversations in a year… run it for a couple of years… you do the math.

Photo Credit: Pexels

Ted Wright is the founder of Fizz, the world’s leading word of mouth marketing (WOMM) agency. Ted is also an acclaimed WOMM keynote speaker and the author of Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth.