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. Saying that, however, it should be noted that almost every product in this increasingly digital age has, at one time or another, relied on this method of marketing to increase public and corporate awareness of product or service availability.

A recent study proved that two thirds of online marketing will be done on this basis alone in the coming year, which when coupled with the advent 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.

Consider any of the current online social networking site's business model. 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 in itself gives businesses a measurable statistic to show effectiveness of this marketing methodology. 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 you sell, a great study completed by Hill and Knowlton in February this year showed that decision makers are largely influenced by personal experience’s (58%), with recommendations and industry reports coming in at 51%. Coming in lower than expected was direct marketing at 21% with internet advertising lat 17%. These figures may only reflect the purchasing habits of key decision makers, but a young lady in Oregon deciding to buy one car insurance or another IS the key decision maker for that purchase, and her buddy Becky telling her to go with this company over that company will have a greater influence than any gravel-voiced actor pushing the product in a TV advert.

In essence, this statistic can be shown to reflect into any industry, any segment or niche, if every purchaser is considered the key decision maker. This makes the resurgence of the world’s oldest sales tool easy – get vocal or start tweeting, but tell everyone!

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Filed under: Marketing and Advertising

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