Ten Tips For Word-Of-Mouth Success

Can you influence people talking about you?

Top ten tips to drive word-of-mouth success

1. Listen and learn:  If you are about to launch a new product, work with a small group of followers to develop your product further. Listen and learn from them to perfect your product prior to its launch.
2. Be interesting, by being interested:  Take an active interest in your customers - get to know them.  Deepen your understanding by getting your ear to the ground, so to speak, and listening to the conversations that they are having about you and your competitors. 
3. Act:   Develop customer-orientated initiatives. Engage your customers by getting them to actively involved in co-creating their own product features. Build a personalised customer experience - that reflects your brand identity and touches as many senses as possible.  Try not to be contrived. Your initiatives’ must look genuine.
   
4. Test your environment: Only launch your product when the environment is right.  Don’t just say ‘she’ll be right’ and hope for the best. Launch your product on a small scale and if it doesn't work as yourselves - is the environment right for us to launch this now.
5. Be creative:  Creativity is vital for creating a buzz.  Marketing is all about creativity so think out-side-the-box and do something that’s a little left field.  With 20% of brand conversations influenced by advertising (Keller, 2007) and social media platforms at your fingertips there is no excuse not too. 
   
6. Protect your brand’s credibility: Understand your brand and think carefully about the consequences and risks of launching your campaign.  Develop a robust post campaign plan to mitigate risks to your brand.  Remember you are never fully in control of word of mouth – therefore being disciplined about developing post launch plans is key for you to stay in control. 
7. Develop the right message and media strategy: Think about where your product is in its lifecycle and who's your customer.   
   
   If you are launching a new product or service target the message to ‘early adopters’ and appeal to their need for scarcity. Develop a media strategy that keeps your product discrete and exclusive. If your product is targeting the ‘early majority’, focus your message on social proofing, i.e. ‘join the thousands who are now enjoying this great new product’. Develop a media strategy that generates mass exposure, i.e. high reach through a creative viral campaign, facebook (likes) or maybe mass media if you have the budget.
8. Keep your brand visible:  People mostly talk about mundane things, so keeping your brand ‘top of mind’ will keep you in their topic of conversation.
   
9. Start thinking conversations:  Change your mindset and stop thinking campaigns and start talking conversations.
10. Understand ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’.  Understand who can influence your customers and then build team of influencers that are trusted by your customers. Understand what is important to your customer. For word of mouth to have an impact the message must address a person’s core functional needs. Where - develop networks that your customers trust - messages that are circulated within trusted networks have less reach but greater impact than those circulated through a dispersed community.
11. Measure & evaluate:  Word of mouth is not often thought about in marketing plans let alone measured and evaluated.  Develop a way to measure your word of mouth activity so you can evaluate its success and learn which activities have a better ROI than others. By looking at volume and then impact, either negative or positive you can start to measure the effects of word of mouth messages more accurately.  Then you can start to assess which campaigns are having a greater, more positive impact than others.  This will provide you with a wealth of information that will improve your word of mouth performance over-time. 

The above exhibit is an adaptation of the McKinsey’s word of mouth equity framework.

"The rewards of pursuing excellence in word of mouth marketing are huge, and it can deliver a sustainable and significant competitive edge few other marketing approaches can match" (McKinsey, 2010).