Last time I gave you a laundry list of tips and tricks you can use to make your word-of-mouth program work for you. Hopefully, you’ve taken a look and decided which ones are the best fit for your company, products, services and target customers, so you can put them to work in your word-of-mouth campaign.
We will wrap up this series on word of mouth where we give you the specific steps to create a word-of-mouth campaign.
Now, let’s take a look at those steps:
- Seed the market. Find some way to get the product into the hands of key influencers.
- Provide a channel for the influencers to talk and get all fired up about your product.
- Offers lots of testimonials and other resources.
- Form an ongoing group that meets once a year in a resort and monthly by teleconference.
- Create fun events to bring users together and invite non-users. Saturn, Harley-Davidson, and Lexus have all been successful with this approach.
- Develop clips on your website featuring enthusiastic customers talking with other enthusiastic customers.
- Hold seminars and workshops.
- Create a club with membership benefits.
- Pass out flyers.
- Tell friends.
- Offer special incentives and discounts for friends who tell their friends.
- Put the Internet to work.
- Do at least one outrageous thing to generate word of mouth.
- Empower employees to go the extra mile.
- Encourage networking and brainstorming ideas.
- Run special sales.
- Encourage referrals with the use of a strong referral program.
- Use a script to tell people exactly what to say in their word-of-mouth communication.
These are all fantastic ways to get the word out about your products and services and start a word-of-mouth campaign that takes on a life of its own. Before you can release your word-of-mouth campaign into the world, you need to go through the checklist to ensure you’ve covered all the essentials.
Here’s your word-of-mouth campaign checklist:
- Are all of your communications sending the same simple message? If it can’t survive word of mouth, it’s not a compelling story.
- Is your product positioned as part of a category? Ex.”A dandruff shampoo that doesn’t dry your hair.”
- Are your examples outrageous enough to be shared?
- Do you enhance your materials with success stories from real people?
- Are you using experts effectively and in an objective manner?
- Have you created mechanisms so people can follow up on the word of mouth they hear and simple ways of inquiring or ordering?
- Have you made the decision process easy for customers?
- Have you created events and mechanisms so that your prospects hear about your product once a year, and it is easier to try or buy?
These are all essential elements to remember when taking a second or even third check over your word-of-mouth campaigns. I hope you’ve found this series on word of mouth to be a great resource and are getting ready to put it into action for your own products and services.
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