Are You REALLY Promoting Word of Mouth In Your Marketing?

When most small businesses are asked where the majority of their business comes from, the answer is Word of Mouth. Anyone that is a small business owner knows that Word of Mouth marketing can be the lifeblood of any business you have, but most business owners don't really think about HOW to promote Word Of Mouth as a conscious marketing tool for their business.

• Yes, you provide a great service.


• Yes, you provide great products.


• Yes, you have exceptional Customer Service.

But, what do you do to actually create Buzz around your business?

Word of mouth isn't just about doing a great job and expecting you customers to tell someone else about the job you did.

Word of mouth can become much more than that. It should become Viral. Let's take your basic Word of Mouth marketing and boost it in to a full on conscious Viral Marketing piece of your entire Marketing Mix.

What makes you stand out?
Providing exceptional services and products should be a given. Enough said there!

What you need to do is find the thing that makes you stand out from everyone else in your industry and create buzz about your business.

What can you do that will become viral?
Can you give away something that everyone that gets one will want to tell all of their friends about?

We have a business course that we give way for free to create buzz about our business. We're helping small business owners with their marketing and at the same time it helps promote our business. We encourage anyone that registers for the course to forward the email to their friends to download too. Since we are business to business, this really helps as many small business have good networks of other small business owners that they know. Most of the time, they all want to help each other out when they can, and this is a way for them to help out their friends.

This has become viral in just a matter of weeks because people have been excited about the free course that they get and they keep telling others about it because of the great information they get out of it.

Can you give something like this away for your business?

Have you ever seen a retail store that has an anniversary sale with big ticket items like TVs or DVD players for $10 for the first XX number of people? This is the same type of viral marketing. People will tell their friends about these types of sales. They even make it an event and groups of people will come together to make sure they all get to take advantage of the sale.

You might be thinking that you can't afford to do something like this but you need to think about the long term value of a customer. Once they come in and buy something from you the first time, how much will they spend with you in the future? Even on the day of the sale, will they come in and JUST buy the sale item. Most likely not. Many times, they spend so much more on additional products that they more than pay the cost of the sale item before they even leave.

But now you've added a new customer to your list that you can build a long term relationship with resulting in future sales for maybe years down the road. It's 10 times easier to sell to an existing customer than to find a new customer. Take advantage of your new relationship and nurture it just getting a new customer to building a raving fan.

Word of Mouth or Viral Marketing should be more than a passing thought. If your business relies on Word of Mouth Marketing to keep you going strong like so many other businesses, you need to bring it to the forefront of your marketing mix and actually devise a plan around what you do to make it more effective. Spending a little time planning this in your marketing plan will boost your sales and marketing efforts allowing you to spend less of your hard earned cash on other more expensive advertising and marketing ideas.

Your existing customers are your best asset and with a little work you can turn them from the occasional word of mouth fan to a full on raving fan and create your own mini sales force. Encourage them to talk about you. Stand out from the crowd and keep on top of their minds.

With the proper Word of Mouth marketing planning added to your marketing mix, you can see an exponential explosion in your customers and sales for your business.