In many respects marketing by word of mouth can be said to be the “hidden statistic” for all programs, as it’s well near impossible to actually gauge the effectiveness of marketing done this way. It should be mentioned that every product in this digital age has relied on this marketing methodology to drive public awareness of a product or service.
A recent study exemplified that two thirds of online marketing is expected to be done this way next year, which when coupled with the advent in leaps of Web 2.0.0 social networking and social marketing sites point towards promoting your product by word of mouth may be both more cost effective, and have an increasingly better ROI than more “traditional” online advertising media.
Think about the business model of the current social networking sites. There has yet to be a successful site of this type that charges for any sort of membership, relying instead as they do on ad generated income to fuel their corporate engines. It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of marketing by word of mouth, but it should be noted that there is a method of measuring if your campaign is working – increased sales.
A company must know from their output exactly the difference between pre campaign, during a campaign and post campaign. This gives businesses a measurable statistic to show effectiveness of this type of marketing. It is true that not all businesses need or desire this form of sales technique, but is also through that not one business turns away prospects garnered from the by word of mouth method either.
Whatever your area of expertise, a study completed by Hill and Knowlton this year showed that decision makers are highly influenced by personal experience’s (58%), with recommendations tied at 51%. Coming in lower than expected was direct marketing at 21% with internet advertising lat 17%. These figures reflect the buying habits of decision makers, but a housewife in Washington deciding to buy her car insurance is the key decision maker in that case, and suggesting that her friend Tammy also deal with this company, will ultimately have more weight on Tammy's future decision than a TV or print advertisement any day.
In essence, this statistic may be calculated into any industry, any niche, if every person is classified as the key decision maker. This makes the resurgence of the world’s oldest sales tool a given – so get talking or tweeting, but tell everyone!