Achieving high levels of word of mouth should be the ultimate goal of any company.This is because once your business runs off of word of mouth, you’ll begin seeing sales without having to do any costly 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 would be wise to understand what it involves.Word of mouth research is when you set up a marketing campaign to determine what the drives your customer's actions. Surveys are one of the best ways you can do this, especially if you give your customers additional compensation.
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, on their own goodwill 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, dynamics change if you give your customer money or a free product in exchange for their participation.This is the case if the reward is given immediately, without the participant having to worry about free trials or a drawing at a later time.Sweepstakes or free trials can still work for you in some cases, 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, when you offer a free product for filling out a survey, there is some risk that a customer could put down anything 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.
Granted, you will get people that may shy away from your survey because they think doing all this is too much work.In order to counteract that emotion, you’re going to have to try to administer a bigger incentive.You could, for example, reward the participant $10, more than the $5 that the survey would normally give. And if you can’t afford to do that, you may sell advertising space on your survey, (especially if it is online).