Word-of-mouth marketing isn’t a new concept. Traditional public relations, for example, where a journalist is asked to write about a brand – is a classic form of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing. More recently, however, marketers have begun to discover ways of circumventing the journalist so that the potential customer receives recommendations or mentions from an even more trusted source: friends, colleagues, suppliers, clients and contacts. This shift in tactic ultimately helps to create a buzz around a brand by encouraging as many people as possible to get talking about it.
It is easy to see why marketers are so excited about this. Danny Whatmough, PR consultant at Wildfire PR suggests, “In many ways, WOM is the nirvana of marketing. Personal recommendation has been shown to be the most influential medium because we trust our close friends and acquaintances. This trust means that we are powerfully influenced by their recommendations or advice.”
New impetus
The recent enthusiasm for WOM marketing has been given greater impetus by some of the major business trends of our time. The first trend is shrinking marketing budgets. The global recession slashed most marketers’ budgets, and made us keener to find techniques that reduce our dependence on old-style advertising and direct marketing, but still produce the same number of sales leads and new customers.
The answer for many has been social media. Nick Gill, planning director at marketing agency DCH, says, “The advent of the social web has enabled word-of-mouth to flourish. Spaces like Facebook and Twitter enable word-of-mouth recommendation to happen faster and spread more quickly through connected and frictionless technology. This is even more so now that all these services are available on mobile devices. If you’re having a good or a poor experience, you can let people know about it in an instant. Although people complain that Twitter is full of random stuff about what people are eating for lunch, consider that one in every five Tweets mentions a brand, product or service.”
Alongside the economic and technological drivers has been the social one: the declining effectiveness of traditional marketing. In April 2010, insight agency Nunwood conducted research among 1500 European consumers for the Chief Marketing Officers Club. It found that on average, two-thirds of purchase decisions are now based on what people read or hear about others’ experiences.
In simple terms, marketers can no longer control what people think or say about their brand. Direct mail is put straight in the bin. Advertising is ignored. Even emails are deleted. People make more and more of their purchasing decisions based on word-of-mouth recommendations and increasingly those conversations take place online, especially in social media. Marketers are discovering that they can influence those online conversations and, best of all, that it actually costs very little to do so.
WOM works in B2B
Is this just a consumer phenomenon? It is a charge that is frequently levelled at WOM marketing, and with good cause. B2B marketers have been slower than their B2C marketing colleagues to fully embrace this new technique. Molly Flatt, WOM evangelist at 1000heads, says, “We’re a word-of-mouth agency that’s been around for 10 years and we have clients like Nokia, Sainsburys, mobile operator 3, and Cancer Research, but we don’t have a single B2B client. In the US, there are some B2B brands doing this, but in the UK there’s this misperception that word-of-mouth is only relevant to B2C.”
However, there is a growing body of research to disprove this theory. The Buyersphere Report (www.b2bm.biz/buyersphere), released in April 2010 and developed by Base One, McCallum Layton and B2B Marketing, is based on a survey of 503 business buyers who have been involved in a purchase worth at least £20,000 in the last 12 months. It revealed that the most influential channels, across all stages, were Twitter, Facebook, blogs and word-of-mouth. These channels provide a personal recommendation, which is clearly valued by business buyers, whether those recommendations are delivered face-to-face or enabled by social media.
Furthermore, this research revealed that the propensity to make purchasing decisions based on recommendations, as opposed to advertising, is higher amongst buyers aged under 30. In the future, this is how business buyers will make their decisions. This is why forward-thinking B2B marketers are rushing to understand the three keys to successful WOM marketing: understanding and manipulating the channels; presenting your message so that people genuinely want to tell others about it; and measuring success.
Manipulating new channels
Before you do anything you must work out where your target audience is. Too many online campaigns have failed before they have begun simply because the marketer has decided to focus solely on the latest social networking site, regardless of whether or not prospective customers use it. By all means begin by looking at Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, but don’t limit yourself to those alone. There may be others that are relevant to your vertical niche, as well as specialist chatrooms and forums. Spend time finding out where everyone is and what they are saying about you and your competitors.
It is quite possible that you find none of your customers. The communities may not exist or your potential customers may not have been sufficiently excited by them. If that is the case you may want to consider developing your own branded online community. Lachlan James, lead digital strategist at integrated agency Archibald Ingall Stretton, says, “These can be very hard to establish as there needs to be a critical mass in terms of valued content and audience engagement to get them off the ground, but US software company Archer Technology has done it well and now receives 20 new members, 4000 unique visits and more than 400 downloads every week.”
If your audience are avid blog readers – and an increasing number of people are – then you should start reaching out to the people writing those blogs. Tim Gibbon, director at PR agency Elemental, says, “Bloggers can be influential in conveying what is happening in a space. They normally fall into the camps of being ambassadors, authorities, influencers, opinion formers and trendsetters; or indeed an amalgamation of these different disciplines. It is therefore sensible to include bloggers in the conversation when pushing WOM activity.”
Crafting the message
Another danger with WOM marketing, and with online marketing generally, is that you can get caught up in the medium and forget about the message. No matter how active you are on Twitter, if what you say is of no interest to your potential customers then no one will listen to you, much less tell others about you. If your product or service is fundamentally flawed then you may attract plenty of discussion and debate, but not much of it will be welcome.
So, you need to ensure that your product or service is right, and then spend some time crafting your message. Paul Anderson, strategic marketing consultant at email marketing provider Emailvision, argues that the traditional marketing monologue will not work in this context. “Who wants to pass on an email or a social media update that’s all about how great a company is?” he asks.
He continues, “Instead, try telling a story. It’s the oldest form of communication and it comes across as more authentic. For example, Filofax tells people about how its customers are using their Filofaxes. Recipients pass it on to other people. Use email and social media to disseminate these stories but also to gather them. Encourage customers to post their stories. You’ll be surprised at what comes back, and at how interested people are.”
Of course, the danger with this is that not all of those stories will be positive. That is the risk with this new world of uncontrollable conversations. Get the product right so that the positive stories outweigh the negative ones, be honest with people, and trust them to understand that not everyone is always perfect.
Measuring success
The final piece in the jigsaw is measurement. Every marketer knows that campaigns must always be measured to justify expenditure and to adapt activity for ever greater success. WOM marketing is no different. The problem is that so far this piece in the jigsaw seems to be missing. Where WOM marketers do talk about measurement, they tend to talk about social media metrics. They boast how many Twitter followers they have, or how many times a viral video was viewed, or how many comments a blog post received.
These metrics mean almost nothing. What matters is how many enquiries this generated, how many qualified sales leads it produced, and what uplift in sales it led to. The sooner WOM marketers develop ways of measuring their activity against these all-important metrics, the sooner they will take a greater share of B2B marketing budgets. They are already beginning to do so. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association reported in 2008 that the money spent with its 400 members increased 14.2 per cent to £1.05 billion in 2008. It was predicting year-on-year growth of 10 per cent until 2013.
WOM marketing is a concept that B2B marketers can no longer afford to ignore. As Flatt concludes, “People, whether they are consumers or business buyers, really reward brands that take the time to engage with their customers, to show they’re human. That’s why word-of-mouth works. And there’s so few B2B companies doing this that there’s an enormous opportunity for someone to step into this space and make a really huge splash.”
