20,000 ft to go until your next client
In my previous blog, 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 had a chance to review and decide which one to three tips you plan to use in your campaign.
If you have not, make sure you go back and read the list, pick the tips and tricks the best fit your product/service, ideal customer, and company culture.
Today, we will wrap up this series on word-of-mouth, where we provide you with a 20,000-foot view of your campaign.
Now, let’s get started building your campaign:
- Build your influencer network.
- Find some way to get the product into the hands of key influencers. A good influencer is passionate about the problem you solve with your product/service and has access to 5000 or more of your ideal customers.
- Provide a channel or help the influencer to activate theirs, allowing them to share their experience.
- Review & Testimonials
- Capture testimonials from the beginning and before they’re done with your service or product.
- Offers lots of testimonials and other resources.
- Develop clips on your website featuring enthusiastic customers talking with other excited customers.
- Create an opportunity for prospective clients to meet past clients.
- Create an opportunity to share experiences
- Form an ongoing group that meets once a year in a resort and once a month 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.
- Hold seminars and workshops.
- Create a club with membership benefits.
- Gorilla
- Pass out flyers.
- Tell friends.
- Offer special incentives and discounts for friends who tell their friends.
- Put business cards on all the cars you see
- Put the Internet to work.
- Do at least one outrageous thing to generate word-of-mouth. We live in an age of 10s video’s.
- 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. However, before you can release your word-of-mouth campaign out into the world, you need to go through the checklist to make sure you’ve covered all the essentials.
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, as well as 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/service once a year, and it is easier to try or buy?
- Have you written down the specific behaviors you want your prospect to follow during each step of the campaign?
- Are your people primed?
- Am I ready to handle all the additional communication?
- Am I ready to handle all the additional business?
These are essential elements to keep in mind 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 products and services. Remember, if you need help with anything in this series, try our FREE test drive to gain access to the best resources, tools, and business coaches you can find.