What is ‘Word of Mouth’?

• The unpaid spread of information by promoting a particular business, product, or service whilst in conversion.

Essentially, this means that your business is naturally brought up in conversation. The people mentioning your business tend to have experience with your company and they are actively promoting your business without being asked or being paid to do so. These advocates are hard to create. So, how do you get to this point? The answer is marketing.

How Marketing Relates to Word of Mouth

You might not have realised but everything from customer service, product/service presentation, how you communicate with your customers and prospective customers, and more comes under the umbrella of marketing. Marketing activities involve a variety different areas of the business. It can be hard to understand where marketing starts and ends!

Your marketing activities influence everything you do as a business, which means having a plan is incredibly important. If you are relying on word of mouth to spread knowledge of your business, you need to ensure that your customers are receiving a high-quality experience and clear information when they engage with your company.

Customer Journey

Take a look at your reviews. What are these customers saying about their experience.

What do you do well? What can you improve?

Using this information, you can refine the customer's experience. Minor changes can have a significant impact to the customer journey and their perceptions of your business:

• Training your staff, so they have an increased knowledge of the products or services you sell.
• Improving the process that the customer goes through to make a purchase.
• Informing customers about the background of the company; this makes the company relatable and improves the information spread by the customer.

Now, how do you influence word of mouth and get stakeholders talking about your business?

Reviews and testimonials

After a customer has engaged with your business and bought a product or service, follow up with a polite message asking them to tell you if they enjoyed their experience. Why not ask for a testimonial for your website and social media if it is appropriate? If they had a negative experience, you could request feedback on how you could improve. This is a wonderful way to engage with your customers after they have been through the buying experience and shows you care and value their feedback.

Story Telling

Tell your customers about your business. Not just about the product or service they are receiving, but about the history, people, and experience of the company. This will help them to connect with your business on a more personal level. Spreading information about your business also improves the wealth of knowledge to be brought up in conversation.

Differentiation

Clarify what makes your company unique (Unique Selling Point). Confirming why customers choose to use your company over others in the same industry can be enlightening. Capitalise on this by using your USP to promote your company to grow and gain new customers.

Conclusion

Word of mouth is a lot more than just people talking about your business. Give yourself some credit for all the hard work you have done to get people discussing your company. There is much more involved than you first thought. Why not use some of the ideas discussed to continue to grow your business, improve your results and get people talking about your brilliant business?

There is so much more to marketing than meets the eye...