Measuring Word-of-Mouth Marketing
The word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing panel began the way any good marketing panel should: with a definition. “WOM is defined as the likelihood of someone to positively recommend a product.” These days, loyalty is what many strive for in marketing, not just customer satisfaction, as even satisfied customers are all too likely to switch. With the advent of services like Froogle, the effects of branding dissolve as soon as side-by-side price comparisons are available. Therefore, the company whose customers sell harder will take share from those whose customers are more often detractors than not.
The following is a list of methods of tracking WOM:
- relationship surveys to understand customer and segment needs
- transactional surveys to track and improve the customer experience
- service surveys to determine customer advocacy levels
- unstructured data analysis of emails to the company and survey text responses to create an understanding of the customer mood
- web outreach tools
- marketing data from online efforts
And if you don’t like what you see when you do that, here are the key ways of improving it:
- employee loyalty (who knew internal branding would be more than just a blip)
- your product
- the customer support experience (this was actually mentioned more than anything else as a key way of generating favorable CGM… uh, will define CGM in a minute)
- the ‘touch’: customer service and feedback in realtime
And for those of you who were just gagging to find out what CGM is, clearly you didn’t read the SF entry on WOM marketing. CGM refers to Consumer Generated Media, aka blogs (well whaddaya know), entries on message boards, opinion and review sites, bulletin boards, and forums, all of which have been informed by experience with the product. This holds tremendous opportunity for an organization to monitor which topics generate emotion, which issues are more likely to cause viral effects, and the credibility of what’s being said.
This knowledge can be applied to specific business problems:
- new product launch
- product quality: monitoring CGM can provide an early warning of problems and allow the company to manage them before they reach mainstream media
- marketing effectiveness: are marketing messages being reflected?
- reputation management
- relationship marketing: how to find thought leaders
Jonathan Carson, President and CEO of BuzzMetrics, offered the following advice about generating WOM: find the right people to market to, i.e. the individuals that will most effectively spread your message, and offer them appropriate WOM positioning and messages, which should be things that are easy to tell others about, or are “spreadable.”
Dave Balter, President of BzzAgent, also had some valuable advice regarding how to harness authentic word of mouth. First off, he differentiated between “buzz” and WOM, using Burger King’s subservientchicken.com. Subservient Chicken generated buzz, but failed to generate WOM, which is characterized as being the desired behavioral effect rather than simply gaining attention. The website did not increase sales of BK’s new chicken sandwich thing, and thus failed as a WOM vehicle even though it earned lots of attention. Dave went on to argue that WOM serves to enhance other marketing channels by giving them the credibility they require to drive home their message, which is already widespread given the traditional goal of using media to stimulate awareness rather than a specific behavior (ok, we’d like to use it to stimulate a specific behavior, but customers generally haven’t been all that cooperative on that front). One interesting finding was that the experts and passionate brand evangelists were not the best sources for generating leads, which is counterintuitive until one realizes the following: once experts are exposed they talk about it plenty, and then move on. The best people for generating new leads were “light loyals,” who tended to have a larger network through which to spread their message. This stands in contrast to people who, online, portray themselves as brand fanatics and are capable of generating a great deal of positive WOM. In Q&A, panelists pointed out that there is a distinct difference between online and offline WOM, and that that must be taken into account when planning a WOM marketing strategy and appropriate measures.
