Client relations – A phone call is worth 10 emails. A meeting is worth 100 calls
April 20, 2012Customer Experience: Is it time that you gave your law firm a caffeine shot in the arm?
April 30, 2012Word of mouth marketing is a powerful weapon in any growth strategy. However, many people struggle to generate good word of mouth as hard as they may try.
Andy Sernovitz, the author of Word of Mouth Marketing, is an expert on the subject and suggests that when thinking about this and working up a plan to develop your word of mouth marketing you should think about 5 T’s:
- Talkers – people like customers, employees, fans, friends, volunteers, partners, bloggers, press, influencers etc who will talk about you
- Topics – people need a reason to talk about you. So, give them something to talk about. Be it great service, a new offer, a funny new ad, a great cause etc
- Tools – rather than leaving the talk to chance make sure that you give your talkers the right tools to be able to spread the word about you whether it is by email, flyers, handouts, vouchers, forms or whatever
- Taking Part – all of this won’t necessarily happen without your help so to get things going you have to join in, be around, participate, reply, discuss on and offline etc
- Tracking – realise that there is a lot of ‘art’ in word of mouth marketing but also realise that you should always be measuring what works and what doesn’t.
I think this is a great process but when talking to a client about their word of mouth strategy the other day, we realised that the there are distinct reasons why people talk about and share things. To help with the planning of their word of mouth marketing strategy we found it easier to break down their ‘Topics’ into two areas:
- Little talk; and
- Big talk
Little talk tends to be incremental day to day stuff that you do that customers like, think is cool, unusual or great and, hence, mention it to their friends.
An example of little talk that worked on me the other day happened when I was in a Caffe Nero near to me. On that day, they were giving away ‘tasters’ of a new chocolate pastries that they had just got in. Now, these were no ordinary ‘tasters’. None of these mere morsel stuff that you usually experience. These ‘tasters’ were big enough to be more than just a regular taste give away. They were almost a snack in their own right and they tasted good too.
Another coffee shop example I came across was when a Starbucks I was meeting a colleague in was giving away free latte’s for a whole day. Nice, if you drink latte.
On the other hand, big talk tends to be stuff where it’s not about little things but about things and people that your ‘Talkers’ and their friends and family care about.
A great example I heard about the other day came from the Springwise website, where Ribar Floral in Detroit is giving away free ‘Good Job Bouquets’ to locals that are nominated by their community for the kind things they’ve done. The rationale behind the programme is to say thank you to the community and to give something back to all of those people that have supported them and kept them going through tough economic times. Nice work.
The conclusion for me in all of this is that people don’t talk about vanilla stuff. People talk about stuff that’s different and that they care about and it splits into big talk and little talk.
Note: I write these posts because I am passionate about great service and helping companies get more value and growth out of the customer relationships they already have. If you’d like to find out more about how I do that then get in touch here. Alternatively, sign up for my monthly newsletter here.
Thanks to pedrosimoes7 for the image.
10 Comments
Perhaps it is also making the distinction between good talk and bad talk
I’ve always found one travels far faster than the other
How about this example from papa John’s pizza chain?
http://gossiponthis.com/2012/01/09/papa-johns-apologizes-calling-asian-customer-lady-chinky-eyes/
Thanks for the post
James
Hi James,
That’s a great point. Reading the Papa John’s post I think it’s a great example of what we think about internally privately coming back to haunt us. Best to first address how we think and talk internally before we start blaming other people for our indiscretions.
What do you think?
Adrian
Mouth marketing strategy was very much prevalent in the past but today there are Facebook fan pages where people can vote about their interests.
Thanks for the post.
I don’t agree. Everything doesn’t and shouldn’t happen on Facebook.
The 5T’s introduction sounds new and interesting to me! It really makes me start thinking about the difference between little talk and big talk. I will pay more attention to my words when marketing our network marketing softwarefrom now on.
Hi Ivy,
That’s great to hear that the ideas in the post will make you think differently about your marketing.
Hope to see you here again soon,
Adrian