Word of Mouth Research - A Discussion For Marketers

posted by TheMarbellaSEO 6:01 AM
Thursday, April 30, 2009

Achieving word of mouth should be the ultimate goal of any business.This is entirely due to the fact that once your company operates using word of mouth, sales will commence without having to do any additional high-cost advertising.  However, if you conduct word of mouth research, you’ll receive an additional benefit with the same amount of buzz: the opportunity to evaluate your customers’ mindset.

So, how do you go about conducting word of mouth research?You should always understand what it entails before you begin.Word of mouth research is when you set up a marketing campaign to determine what the drives your customer's actions.Surveys are a great way to do this, especially when you give your customers a reward or some form of compensation to participate.

In my opinion, surveys without compensation or some type of "thank you" are a waste of time because they have no word of mouth value.Instead, there’s the expectation that the customer, of their own freewill is going to fill it out.  That’s not really going to happen unless they are genuinely enamored with you or your company’s objectives. 

However, things are different if you give your customer money or a free product in exchange for their participation.This is really the case if the compensation is given up front, without the participant having to worry about entering a sweepstakes, for example.  This is not to say that sweepstakes or free trials can’t work, especially if you’ve established a name for yourself.  But when you’re just starting out, you want to stay away from all that and give your customer more immediate satisfaction.

Anyway, after giving your customer decent compensation, you need to concentrate on the next step associated with good word of mouth research; making sure your survey questions promote an honest response. 

Now, by the fact that your customer is getting money or a free product for your survey, there is a risk that they could put down any old thing simply to receive their gift.To prevent that, consider giving surveys that require the participant to reveal very detailed feedback.Require them to actually complete sentence or two of why they answered as they did.Do not let them proceed with the survey until they’ve completed this portion and you get the information that you desire.

In some cases, people will not want to spend time doing your survey because they feel that they have to put in too much work.  So, to counteract that emotion, you’re going to have to try to award a bigger incentive.You could, for example, reward the participant $10, more than the $5 that the survey would normally give.If you cannot afford to do that, you might think about selling advertising space on your survey, especially if it is online.



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