Internet Marketing and Word-of-Mouth Advertising: The One-Two Punch
from jfaccento.quicm.net
Imagine your word of mouth advertising on steroids…
In a healthy way
A business owner asked me recently why his business should consider increasing their internet marketing spend if they were “doing quite well” on word of mouth alone. Initially I answered the question with another question(s):
What exactly do you mean by ‘doing quite well’? Don’t you want to ‘do better’?
He chuckled, ‘of course.’ But his real question was whether his business’ marketing was even influencing the word of mouth (WOM) advertising his business already had rolling in.
As long as there is an unfulfilled need for your services, and as long as you have the capacity for more work, then effective marketing efforts can boost your word of mouth advertising.
At the root of this savvy business owner’s question was an implication that his stellar customer satisfaction record was, by itself, generating enough WOM leads to sustain (and grow) his business. What we went on to discuss, however, was whether these WOM leads were flowing in naturally (ie: as a result superior customer satisfaction), or whether what he thought were WOM leads were actually the result of his marketing campaigns. He admitted that he didn’t have any definitive lead tracking methods in place, so he agreed it could be a little bit of both. In other words some of his WOM leads might not have materialized without marketing.
Although this business had an informal process in place to track their leads, and he was attributing most of these leads to “customer referrals,” what he hadn’t considered was that many of his 30,000+ email subscribers were actually existing customers…and each time they received the monthly email newsletter, they were being reminded of his brand, and were therefore more likely to spread the word to friends about their positive experiences with the company.
So, could you eliminate the need for actual ‘marketing’ by providing a stellar customer experience, and hoping your customers do your lead generation work for you? You could, but that’s like boiling a pot of water with a match. Why not turn on the stove? The point of marketing is not to eliminate the need for word of mouth leads – but to give them a boost. So even if you your customers are so loyal to you that they refer a ton of business your way, you can still grow that WOM pipeline by reinforcing your brand – through marketing – in the minds of prospective and existing customers.
