Marketing is one of the scariest departments of blogging (SEO is another one of those).
The word “marketing” sounds too geeky and too alien that it makes most bloggers faint; as if it is not for the faint hearted!
And in fact marketing is not a separate department as many bloggers think of! It is so very well integrated within whatever you do with blogging.
You write a blog post - that is marketing
You leave a blog comment - that is marketing
You do a guest post - that is marketing
You share your blog post in social media - that is marketing
You connect with a new person (peer, influencer, or reader) - that is marketing
You write an email to your subscriber list - that is marketing
As you can see marketing is pretty much integrated with whatever you do with blogging. In fact you are casually already actively “doing” marketing even if that word scares the crap out of you!
In this blog post, I am not going to talk about the marketing you think of. It is not about paying for Facebook ads. It is not about your Adwords ads that run.
It is not about those banner ads you purchase hoping people will click through.
This is a totally different area of marketing that in fact shouldn’t cost you money. It does cost you time but you will find it really amusing.
Let’s talk about word of mouth marketing!
What is word of mouth marketing?
Word of mouth marketing is nothing but others spreading the word for you. Simple, right?
It does sound simple. But it is not really simple to make it work for you.
People don’t simply talk about you! You need to give them an experience more than your product or service; and mind you, let that “experience” be an exceptional one, hopefully, so you get people to talk nicely about you (and not the other way around).
I went to a restaurant with my family last week. It was our first visit to that particular restaurant. We went there purposefully to test it since we’ve been seeing it quite some time.
Here are certain things that caught my attention:
(i) We were warmly welcomed at the door - a group of attenders were waiting by the door to greet us and show us the way in to our table.
(ii) Our toddler was given special attention at the table.
(iii) The waiter stood by our table very patiently until we were finished with our chaotic discussion about the dishes!
(iv) The food tasted fantastic.
(v) A very hot (spicy) dish was modified especially for our kid (with the addition of sweet sauce) so he too can enjoy it.
…. And a few more things!
As you can see, I am writing about this restaurant in my blog post. I am NOT paid by them to talk about their restaurant.
The experience I had during the dinner at that restaurant gives me a good reason to mention it to you.
The same applies to your blog! If your readers have had a great experience at your blog (or with your product or service) they will automatically talk about you. They will automatically spread the word - without you having to ask them to do so.
This is word of mouth marketing.
But it is not really simple. It is (almost) free. But you have to earn it. You cannot simply appoint few marketing personnel, have a marketing department and assume it is done!
Why does Word of Mouth Marketing ROCK?
I’d say WOMM rocks. It does. Much more than any other traditional marketing technique - or the so very latest marketing technique you learned in one of the latest business courses.
Let’s see why!
For one it is (almost) free
WOMM doesn’t require you to burn a hole in your pocket by paying for those CPC ads or banner ads. But it is not totally free, I agree on that.
In order to “please” your customers you will have to invest yourself - your time, your work and much more.
You might have to invest in good quality software, themes, scripts, and other stuff like these.
But it is not like the money you spend on standard advertising or marketing. This is different.
With standard advertising you spend raw hot cash; you even experiment with your hard earned money.
WOMM is playing safe. You don’t throw away cash upfront to see if people click through and get back to your site.
You can do lots of experimenting without having to worry about money leaving your pocket in jet speed!
Word of mouth marketing builds up your authority
This is another thing with WOMM that you cannot get with conventional advertising/marketing. When you put up a banner ad, you are talking about yourself.
You are telling people that your product is great and that they should buy it.
With WOMM, others talk about you. They endorse you. They tweet about you. They write blog posts about you and link to you.
This way, your authority builds up in the blogosphere. This is sweet and I am sure you cannot get this benefit in the conventional marketing/advertising.
WOMM is not “bombarding on the face of your audience”
Think about conventional advertising where you do your best to explain to your audience about how great your product is.
You interfere them with a pop up or a slide in or a flash ad. You write sales letters that are filled with hype!
You design colourful banners - you choose psychologically proven colour combinations on your banner ads so you can make people click through.
You set a time limit for your offers and push people to get on it. All this is powerful marketing. But this is also “punch-in-the-face-marketing”.
WOMM is nothing like any of these! You don’t have to sweat over forcing people to notice. Your happy customers and followers will do it for you.
And people usually pay attention if someone else other than the product owner praises the product. We all know that a product owner will certainly tell only nice things about their own product.
But if hundreds of other people are saying that, it carries more weight - and it is not punching in the face. People slowly start paying attention to what their friends are saying!
WOMM scales up and goes autopilot over the time
This is plain fact. Once the good words start to spread, this can create an avalanche effect. More and more people will start to talk about you and this scales up.
Over the time you will find that your company’s marketing is taken care of on autopilot, even when you sleep - not by the CPC campaign that also takes away money from your pocket while you sleep!
But it gets more and more people talk about you over the time, so literally it gets on autopilot for you, for good!
Convinced word of mouth marketing is something that absolutely works?
Are you convinced yet? I hope so. It is pathetic to see that most bloggers are willing to spend quite some money on other forms of advertising and marketing but fail to pay the least attention to make word of marketing work for them.
This WOMM goldmine stands unattended in the career of most bloggers. This short post is to create the awareness! I hope you will focus on making word of mouth marketing work for you.
As to “how” to make word of mouth marketing work for you - another post is coming up!
Hey Jane,
Word of mouth marketing is definitely a powerful way to get yourself and what you promote out to your audience. I use to be in network marketing and this was emphasized a later.
The major benefit of this is the know, like, and trust factors. People will listen to their friends because of this. When you leave a great impression among your visitors then more than likely they will tell their peers about their experience starting a ripple effect.
Great post Jane! Not too many people talk about word of mouth marketing too much anymore. Have a great week!
Hey Sherman,
Great point - exactly! People usually won’t have trust issues with their friends. So if their friend is recommending something they will usually believe it without a second thought. In that case, practically we don’t have to do all the hard work to establish trust with each and every reader that we reach out to.
WOMM can take a lot of weight off our shoulders because other will be doing the marketing for us. We just have to make sure to stand up to the standard
Thanks for your wonderful comment Sherman. Have an awesome week!
Cheers,
Jane.
word of mouth marketing is considered as the best marketing for any brand or service, when ur case spreads like fire, courtesy, WOMM, there are big rewards to reap! after reading the post i suggest people should master the art to get WOMM will indeed do a world of good for the brand!
Hi Ali,
Indeed. WOMM can create an avalanche effect with much lesser effort
Thanks for stopping by and have a great week!
Cheers,
Jane.
Hi Jane
Hats off to you for writing on such an interesting topic.
In our offline world many people are so popular because they with their good deeds and pleasant behavior create a huge word of mouth for them and everyone who meets with such people tell about them to his own friend and this process keeps going on.
In business too the same way of dealing with people works great if the businessperson just have to double objective of first making good relations with the persona and leaving the indelible impact of his business on that person.
In short WOMM is a recurring process both for affecting it and for reaping its benefits as well.
Thanks a lot for sharing on such a unique topic.
Hey Mi Muba,
You are so right. I’ve seen many such people in the offline world and I talk about them and spread the word without a second thought. It is exciting to think that it works the same way for me online. I just have to be nice and make an impact.
Usually I’ve found people to spread the word about my business and refer me clients, when I go beyond the mile and help them. People like a down to earth, friendly attitude. They don’t want to be treated like “clients” or “customers”.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the topic
Have a wonderful week!
Cheers,
Jane.
Hey Jane
I had simple ideas about WOMM, but from your article now I’m clear abut it and I’m also amazed to read it, how it work and increase business position.
Thanks a lot for your good information.
Hi Sohel,
I’m glad you found the post useful! You are welcome
Thanks for stopping by and have a great week!
Cheers,
Jane.
Hey Jane,
One of my most favorite types of marketing. I know, it’s a little different because as you said it’s not like you’re writing some content and promoting it. It’s about people making that initial connection with you and that’s how things start to get spread.
I love sharing my analytics stats with people because with mine you’ll notice that I have a much higher rate of referral traffic than search engine. That means people are out there talking about me and sharing my content. They wouldn’t do that if 1) they had no clue who I was 2) they didn’t care for what I wrote and 3) they didn’t like me.
You have to build up that trust with your readers, make connections with other people and start building those relationships. When you really care about others people notice. That builds up the trust factor and they are much more eager to start spreading the word about you.
I love this topic and I’m excited to read your next post on how people can go about doing this. I know there are plenty of people out there eager to hear this from you.
Thank you for bringing this up and teaching others. Great job my friend. Enjoy the rest of your week now and so glad you’re feeling better.
~Adrienne
Hey Adrienne,
I know you’d love this
You are one proof that this WOMM works! You are exercising it every day and you are making it work for you.
I love it when you say you are proud to share your analytics with others - indeed it is a pride to have referral traffic, more than search engine traffic. It shows that your business “works” even if search engines recognize that or not.
It all starts with the relationship we build with our readers and peers.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your wonderful insights.
Have a great week!
Cheers,
Jane.
Hi Jane,
I am a big fan of word of mouth marketing. Being an entrepreneur for many years offline I had a business (still running) that was based upon Word of Mouth. It was only because I put my clients first. If they needed extra time, I gave it to them…no charge! I also gave them some perks on my mailing list (yes snail mail lol)
I still have the business running but at a slower pace, and each time the phone rings, it is because of a referral.
When I came online I applied the same principles - over deliver. When I develop a product, I do over deliver. I also give them time with a product purchased. A 15 minute phone or skype call can go a long way!
We have to give everything we do from blogging to emails to products our very best. When we do and keep others in mind the word of mouth will start happening. And these are the very best clients/customers we can have.
Thanks for raising this issue because this is one I’m so passionate about.
-Donna
Hi, Jane, you’ve picked a great subject here.
You are so right that WOM is a strong technique, if only you could press a button to make it happen
As you say it seems to be all about just doing what you do and doing it well. (but I’m looking forward to your next post to see if you have any pointers to make it work better).
I hadn’t thought of it scaling up but it makes sense. I wish I could encourage more!
One thing I’ve found is that when WOM happens it’s like a reward. In the last couple of weeks someone tweeted about my site for no reason at all – I suppose I expect to see people sharing the odd tweet about a post but this was just about the site in general. Whether or not anyone took any notice didn’t matter to me, it made me feel good
Thanks for a great post, enjoy the rest of the week!
Hi Jane, wonderful post yet again, and this one really made me think about how I could improve my own efforts with my blog, so that I could please a lot more people and get them talking about my content and services, so thank you for this.
It’s so easy to get caught up with other conventional marketing tactics we often forget that all we need to do is be the best we can be, connect with people and give then an experience they’ll never forget, so that they’d talk about us to their friends in a positive way. But like you say it’s not an easy process at all, you have to earn it with hard labor and time.
Enjoy the rest of your week Jane.
Hi, Jane,
So glad you’re feeling better, Jane! Cool subject!
I love marketing and have not really ever been afraid of it.
However, I can most definitely see your point that sometimes folks are intimidated by their perception of it. You laid out a very good clarifying description that it is basically already part of what we do.
Your analogy using the restaurant is cool.
I agree with you about the wonderful benefits of word-of-mouth marketing and have benefited from it almost since the beginning of my online business. I used all free methods for getting traffic in the beginning, and I only just recently (within the last year or so) dabbled in a bit of paid traffic.
Yep, I prefer pull marketing over push marketing. My main thrust is content marketing because it is sustainable. It is a much slower way to get going but has the staying power, and provides value to folks.
I’ve never been involved in push marketing, unless you consider sending a total of 3-4 emails for an affiliate campaign once in a blue moon push marketing. My verbiage is that of pull marketing anyway though, because I base everything on relationships.
Have to differ on your inclusion of list building elements being viewed as push marketing, or how you call it, ‘punch in the face’ marketing. Have a completely different view on that. Guess we’ll agree to disagree on that point.
There have been so many people that have emailed me over the years saying, “I’m a friend of so-and-so. . .(one of my readers or subscribers), and they recommended you - I have a question about…” I have a folder full of these word of mouth referral emails. Many times we go on to form wonderful friendships and I’m able to help them quite a bit in what they were struggling with. So I’ve been blessed by word of mouth marketing, and it’s my absolute favorite!
My husband and I have been in business 30+ years and word of mouth marketing was a huge reason for our success (in our restaurants) and in our carpet cleaning business as well. Very rarely did we need to advertize.
I am so glad you covered this topic today, Jane, because it is definitely something worth thinking about, and acting on! Great article!! Sharing this out.
Have a wonderful evening.
˜Carol
Welcome Jane,
Try to follow your ideas.
It’s new to me and thanking you for posting such a wonderful blog. I agreed with your point of “referring our business through word of mouth”
Nanda Rahmanius says
Hi Jane,
What an interesting post, indeed!
I have read a lot of online references about marketing, but this is the first time I read an article about word of mouth marketing.
Well, I know the power of word of mouth for marketing our products or services, but very few people who discuss about it. That’s why I feel that this is interesting.
I agree with you. In the offline business, word of mouth has a major role in the success of a business. And for example, as you mentioned in this article, a restaurant.
Word of mouth marketing will increase our business authority in the eyes of other customers. And we can get it all for free. All we have to do is provide the best service to all our customers. By doing so, our customers will start marketing our business with their own word of mouth.
Thanks for sharing this with us, Jane.
It’s really a great one. I will start to share it right now!
Do have a wonderful week ahead!
~Nanda
Hey Jane,
Great post. Word of mouth marketing is really, REALLY effective.
The more I try these other marketing methods, the more I’m realizing that they really have nothing on WOMM. However, while WOMM is the bread and butter to offline businesses, it’s a little more difficult to make it as effective online.
Not saying that it can’t be done, but you just have to work twice as hard for it to be effective.
Hope you have an awesome week.
- Andrew