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Prepare for Lift Off!

Last time I gave you a list of tips and tricks you can use to make your Word of Mouth (WOM) program work for you. Hopefully you’ve had some time to reflect and identified the ones that best fit your company, products, services and target customers, so you can put them to work. We will conclude this series on WOM with the specific steps to create a WOM campaign. These steps are: Seed the market. Find some way to get the product into the hands of key influencers; Provide a channel for the influencers to speak and get excited about

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John Gentle

Put it to Work!

In the last post we explained how to conduct Word of Mouth (WOM) research and then put that research into action. Today we’re going to provide you with some proven ways to use WOM when building and executing your campaign. The list below are some proven ways to use WOM that have been offered by George Silverman and can be found in his amazing book The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing. Here they are: Give them something worth talking about; Cater to your initial customers shamelessly; Give them incentives to engage in word of mouth; Ask them to tell

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John Gentle

Search and Implement

People tend to only remember the extraordinary. You need to ensure your ideas and marketing reflect the extraordinary. This doesn’t mean you have to have a product or service that is completely out of the norm, in fact, this could easily drive customers away. Rather, your product or service must be high quality and easily marketable, and then you work to market it as extraordinary and innovative. As you research Word of Mouth (WOM), there are some questions you should be asking yourself along the way: What are the users willing to tell the non-users? Exactly how do your customers

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John Gentle

Decoding Word of Mouth Messages

Today’s lesson will focus on how Word of Mouth (WOM) messages are delivered and what you can do to influence those messages. There are essentially 3 methods of WOM: Expert to Expert Expert to Peer Peer to Peer When experts are discussing your products and/or services you will most likely receive a noticeable increase in sales and new customers, so obviously, this is one of the best things that can happen. You can also facilitate this outcome through offering free products to experts for them to review. Expert opinions can also bring about new ideas that fuel new products, services

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John Gentle

Word of Mouth Meets Customers Head On

Today we’ll cover the idea of shortening your customers’ decision making process with positive word of mouth (WOM). There are essentially 5 stages in the decision-making process: Give the product a chance and transition from a “no” to a “maybe”; Check out the options and investigate different products available; Observe the product to check for potential benefits, features, and operations to see if it fulfills a need; Become a customer and purchase the first item. Customers will be discriminating with their first product as they form their opinion of the business; Purchase again and start spreading positive WOM as an

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John Gentle