Word-of-Mouth marketing best practice — make it easy!

Asking friends for their recommendations remains one of the best ways to find and select businesses, music, movies, wine, etc., because you know your friends’ preferences and they know yours. Based on your mutual knowledge of each other a useful recommendation can be shared. Harnessing this type of interaction is the essence of Word of Mouth (WoM) marketing. While attending a friend’s wedding in Napa last weekend, and doing some subsequent wine tasting, I was reminded that ease of use is a powerful driver of successful social media enabled WoM marketing.

There are many online services and apps that businesses and consumers rely upon to replicate real-world WoM by letting people Like, Follow, +1, Check into, Bookmark, Vote up, etc., something we like and want to share. A challenge with this approach is that all those positive referrals and recommendations are dispersed around the Web and are difficult to quickly locate. Anil Dash comments on this point, and explains why he “thumbs-up” a business in a recent blog post. His general themes for why he shares/likes will resonate with most people: 1) acknowledging good work, 2) Retaining for the future, and 3) Implicit sharing.

People share info about the good stuff they find on the Web, and while out-and-about in the world, for a variety of reasons and by using a variety of services and apps — which is why making it easy for consumers to engage with brands and share them with their social graph is so important. In a crowded, fragmented and noisy marketing landscape, ease of use is the primary barrier to entry for successful WoM marketing activities. If a customer can’t quickly and easily find and share your business, your online WoM marketing activities won’t deliver the desired results.

Following are some examples of how a couple of Napa Valley wineries I visited last weekend made “liking” them easy (or not).

1)   Create something worth liking:

• I am not an educated wine connoisseur — but love a good glass of wine — and I truly enjoyed the offerings from both Hagafen Cellars and Rutherford Ranch Winery. I’d recommend them to friends (note, these wineries are not clients of Sterling's and I am not affiliated with either company).

2)   Know your audience, and create an online presence with services and applications they use most:

• In order to tap into your customers’ social graph you must engage them where they spend their time online. Don’t make it hard for them to find you online, and don’t make them unnecessarily sign up for a new service in order to follow you.
• A caveat: there is nothing wrong with casting a wide net, and at Sterling, we recommend that our clients secure their company/product names on as many social media outlets as possible in order to achieve the most control over their online brand. But, companies have varying amounts of resources to dedicate to social media activities, and often they need to keep a narrow focus. So know your resources, and don’t over extend.

3)   Ask your customers to follow you:

• Once you’ve created an online presence that is targeted to your customers, let them know! This alleviates any possible confusion for consumers as to where/how to engage with you online.
• People are busy, and a simple request via a sign by a cash register, or inclusion of social media links in a newsletter can be a helpful reminder.
• This can also be done implicitly through the prominent placement of social media links/buttons on your website, in the signature line of your email, etc.

4)   Engage!

•  Make it easy for your customers to keep liking you by providing a steady flow of high-quality content (company updates, photos, videos, share news related to your industry). But know where to draw the line. Too many updates can come across as spammy and cause you to lose followers.
• Listen to your followers because they will tell you what they want to receive through their comments and how they share your content.
• Thank users for positive comments and quickly address issues or concerns.
• Offer specials or deals to your followers that can be shared with their social graph.

While these examples are fairly simple, I hope they are helpful reminders to keep your Word-of-Mouth marketing activities simple and easy. After all, it should only take a few seconds to tell a friend about a business you like.