Marketing for local businesses no-nonsense advice, personal experiences and lessons learnt

Forget advertising. Grow by word of mouth alone.

Everyone knows it is great to have word of mouth but how do you make it happen?  Conventional wisdom says that all you need to do is provide a good product or service and word of mouth will do the rest.  The truth is that it is less straightforward than that and there are a few subtle issues to contend with.

Some people love to find new things and tell their friends about them.  If your business is something new or different, you’ll need to seek out early adopters because many people don’t like change.  Your effort to find early adopters is usually rewarded as these people love to tell everyone about the great new things they have discovered.  A word of caution, though.  If you expect people to change their buying habits for you, your product or service will need to be remarkable.

What if yours is the type of business people don’t talk about very much?  How often have you raved about the wonders of your gynaecologist over dinner with your friends?  Do you talk about contents insurance at the pub? Not every product or service can grow by word of mouth alone.

Can you make it any easier for people to talk about you?  Think about how your customers communicate.  Can you send an email or an SMS with a special offer that they will want to forward to their friends?  How about creating a Facebook page for your business and posting news, events and offers there?  When someone becomes a ‘fan’ of your Facebook page, their network of friends will be able to see that.

Let’s assume you have provided a great service, you have given people a reason to talk about you (maybe an incentive), you have made it easy for them to remember you (perhaps a branded box of matches to take home or an occasional email update), made it effortless for them to talk about you and you have identified your most influential customers, paying special attention to them.  What next? 

Well, what do you want them to say?  Can you describe what is great or unique about your business in the few seconds of captive attention you would have if a prospect were travelling in an elevator with you?  It’s not always obvious and big businesses spend thousands working out their ‘elevator pitch’. If you can’t, it’s very unlikely that your customers will be able to.  If you think it could be hard for customers to ‘sell’ your business in a few words when they bump into a friend at the supermarket, do something about it.  Come up with a strap-line for your business and make it visible in your premises, on your van or your business card.

The good news is that, for some types of businesses, such as restaurants and bars, word of mouth alone can bring great success as long as they pay attention to the subtle details.  For others, they’ll need to think carefully about how to get people talking about them.