The 5 T’s of Successful Word-of-mouth Marketing
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So I was browsing Twitter the other day, looking for anything half interesting – why is that so hard? I just happen to follow all of my followers back, half out of courtesy, and half because I want two-way interaction too. It gets difficult to find anything useful in your time-line when you’re following so many people, but I always hated when companys built one-way communication walls between themselves and their customers or clients…So I follow them regardless. Getting off on a bunny trail here…
ANYWAY, I have a special list just for the super helpful people with marketing tips, and I was browsing through that and I came across a post from Ronald Skelton (@ronaldskelton Follow Him!) which really got me thinking…
The more I thought about it, the more his ideas made sense, so I’ve compiled my interpretation of his post below. I hope you find it useful!
1) Talkers
Your talkers are your salesmen, your go-to guys, and the all around mouth of your business. If you sell a physical product and you don’t have a good talker on your team, it is crippling your sales. The talker is one of the most important aspect of selling anything.
An experienced talker wont just convince someone to buy your product, they will show your customer why it is an absolute necessity that they do not leave without it in their hands.
Your talkers are also the face of your company; they have to be likable and friendly. If they are hard to talk to or overly quiet, I’m sure you can see how that can impact sales. This is even true for phone sales…Why do you think telemarketers are some of the most talkative people in business? The obvious advantage you have over telemarketers though is that your customers are calling you (at least they should be!), instead of cold calling someone else.
2) Topic
The topic is what your talkers speak about to potential customers or clients. It is not necessarily about your business or about the product itself, but more about the impact your product or service has on society – that is the kind of stuff that gets picked up by word-of-mouth advertising. You want to talk about why. Humans are emotional buyers.
Sure the topic can be how great your revolutionary new blender is and how it can blend 10,000 different types of super hard fruits, and you may sell a few of them…
But what if it was about the world’s most revolutionary company who aims to single handedly change the way you consume fruit with your new process and the use of this amazingly simple new blender custom tailored to the healthy conscious consumer? Do you see the difference?
3) Tools
The tools are what your talker uses to gain an advantage and reel the customer in. I hate to use that example, because I don’t like to think of my customers as fish, but that is essentially what you are doing.
Every salesman knows that it is a lot easier to make sales if you have some flexibility with either the price, or a free product of some kind. There has to be something you can “Throw In” to seal the deal.
Of course, that’s only one of many tools… There are way too many tools to list, but anything that aids your talker in making the sale is a tool. Keep this in mind, and make sure your talkers are well equipped.
4) Taking Part
Taking part in my opinion should be called “Two Way Communication” but I kept it intact out of respect for the author of the original idea. What this means is that people don’t want to talk to robots. It’s good to have a rehearsed version of the general stuff to say, but your talker needs to engage with the customer.
Ask about their day, and when they tell you about it, ask for details. When someone says “Oh! My days great, we were out shopping and we’re just having so much fun!” You can ask “Oh! Did you guys find anything interesting to buy?” Get it? A good talker knows where the line is between engaging the customer and invasion of privacy…That is one line you do not want to cross.
Get engaged. Create a two way conversation, and take part in that conversation. Listen to the details and take the relationship a step further by repeating or acknowledging what was said. Small talk is especially useful during “Down time”, like when you are waiting for a computer to load or another team member to assist, etc. Create a friend first, and then convert to a customer.
5) Tracking
Tracking is extremely important in any aspect of marketing, but when you are dealing with real people and word-of-mouth, you need to keep tabs on what people are saying.
Places like Yahoo Local or Google Places offer a great way for your customers or clients to leave reviews. Social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter are also fantastic methods to keep an eye on your business buzz.
As with anything else, you also want to match up any campaign, word-of-mouth or otherwise with some sort of analytics data, like Google Analytics or some other specialized software to graph your traffic in a visual way. This assumes you have a website, but the same applies for sales as well. If you start a new method, and your sales go way up from last week, it is probably not a coincidence. You need some sort of tracking in place to see the difference though.
You need to monitor what’s going on, so that if something starts to go in the wrong direction, you can make changes to your campaign to hopefully correct the issue before it becomes too damaging.
So that’s it then…
Any marketing campaign needs at least one or two of these things in place, tracking especially…But for word-of-mouth, I am a firm believer that you need a good solid foundation in all of the above.
Your talker is the most important part, as they become the actual representation of you or your company when they interact with a customer. When you’ve got an A-player talker though, most everything else falls into place, so a word to the wise: a great talker is worth triple the commission of an average one.
Questions? Comments? Nasty hate remarks telling me how horrible my grasp of English Grammar rules is (are??)? Leave them below!
Yes and no...word of mouth has been around far longer then traditional marketing, but when you engineer something to be shareable, you can get much better results.
No matter how often I think about buzz and viral marketing, whenever I read a list like yours, I get inspired to try harder to get the word out about our company.
omg.. good work, bro
This is a very creative, well structured and superbly written article, thanks for sharing the article!
Great info I can’t wait to use them in my next presentation
I love your interpretation of this tweet. Very insightful, yet different from what I ment.
In the world of Word of Mouth Marketing, its about what the customers says.
**The Talkers are people who openly communicate about products or services
**The Topic is us giving them something to talk about, something news worthy or in the words of the famous Seth Godin Re-Markable (worthy of a remark)
**The tools are things like this comment form or your share links just above it. Tools to make their conversation about you easy to share
**Taking Part... Now this is where we come in. We, as business owners must join in on the conversation.
**Tracking ---- Anything worth doing is worth measuring. We can measure leads, customer satisfaction, influence, google rankings etcs.
Even though we have different approaches to the same tweet, there is no flaw in your approach. We just come from two different sides of the same coin.
Ah! haha awesome.
So your post basically was the criteria of what your content should be to get it to spread, while mine was kind of engineering your company and your customers experience to give them something to talk about.
I love that we live in a wold where two people can come up with completely different interpretations of the same thing, and still agree!
THANK YOU! For both the original tweet AND the insightful comment.
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Don’t know… Word of mouth marketing for me can be easily done without the traditional marketing techniques. Cos the WOM is usualy better if it is secret (gureilla like).
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