I’m reading a book by Andy Sernovitz “Word of Mouth Marketing”. In the book, he talks about five elements to every word of mouth marketing campaign. I want to share them with you here as they are just too good and to the point. I hope you start implementing them when you are building your word of mouth campaign:
- Talkers – Who will talk about you to their friends? Who are the talkers, the people that like to share their experiences with everyone. People sometimes refer to them as the “influentials”. These are your loyal customers and people who like you. They are your regular customers, people who you interact with on a daily basis. They need something worthy to talk about with your friends. They need a topic of conversation.
- Topics – give people a reason to talk about you. Special sale, new program, special event. Something easy that people can remember and discuss with friends.
- Tools- help spread the message. Refer a friend, Send to a friend, Share This button, these are all ways to help spread the message. Your task is to make sharing easy and obvious.
- Taking part in the conversation – You need to take part in the conversation. Answer questions. Respond to feedback. State the facts when someone reports false information. Be nice. Lead the conversation.
- Tracking – use online listening tools to hear what people are saying about you. Tracking will also facilitate the engagement process. Every comment, every blog post, every tweet can now be tracked. You just need to dedicate the time and resources to listen to the conversation. The benefit is consumer research, engagement and feedback that will ultimately lead you to improve your business and create more honest and smarter marketing. Marketing that works.
Simple, right? I’m sure you can find a way to implement this in your marketing strategy. What do you think?
If you want to read the entire book, which I highly recommend, just click below to purchase it directly from Amazon. Happy reading!
People are talking about your tourism brand. Making comments – good or bad when they travel. We know how word of mouth is affecting people’s choices about where to go on vacation, where to stay, which spa to book their appointment in, where to go out for dinner. If you know what’s been said, you can at least make sure the facts are right and try to lead the conversation. It’s important that you monitor your online reputation. You can also monitor your personal name, your competition, your indsutry. There are hundreds of tools available, some free and some paid. There are also individual tools that monitor for example blogs only and there are aggregators that go out and search the universe – photos, blogs, videos, micro-blogs (like Twitter). It’s fairly easy to set up a dashboard on your computer so with a quick look each day you can see what’s been said that concerns you. Here are some tools that are worth exploring:
