More often than not, people only remember the extraordinary, strange, wild, surprising, and unusual. As a business owner, it is crucial to make sure that your ideas and marketing reflect these common reactions.
This doesn’t mean that your product or service has to be completely out of the norm (in fact, this could easily drive customers away). What you need to have is a product or service that is high quality and easily marketable. From there, you need to promote it as extraordinary and new. This process begins with conducting word-of-mouth market research.
Conducting Word-of-Mouth Research: Questions You Need to Ask
• Exactly how do your customers describe your product?
• What are the users willing to tell the non-users?
• What are the non-users willing to ask the users?
• What are the things they need to know, but are unwilling to ask?
• What happens when these issues are raised?
• Exactly what do your prospects have to know in order to trigger purchase?
• Exactly how do your customers answer the objections, concerns, and qualms of your prospects?
• How do your customers persuade their friends to use your product?
• How do your customers suggest they initially get to know or try your product?
• What warnings, safeguards, tips, and suggestions do your customers suggest to your prospects?
• Are your sales messages, positioning, and important facts about your product getting through and surviving word-of-mouth?
• What messages do you need to inject into the marketplace in order to turn the tide in your favor, and how will you deliver them?
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There Are Two Main Reasons As to Why This Type of Research is Important:
1. To get real impressions and feedback from customers
2. To define word-of-mouth itself and the concept it creates
There is a simple formula that can help you conduct your word-of-mouth research. It’s called the “2-2-2” model.
2-2-2- Model
What this breaks down to is:
• 2 groups of customers
• 2 focus groups of prospects
• 2 mixed groups (enthusiasts & skeptics)
In these groups you need to ask the following questions:
1. What would you tell a friend?
2. How would you persuade a skeptic?
3. What questions would you anticipate from a skeptic?
4. How would you answer their objections?
The best way to conduct these groups is by teleconference. Doing this helps ensure that you’ll get a diverse sample of your customers and potential customers. It also allows people to feel safe, and more able to express their true feelings. These teleconferences should not be conducted by you, but an independent party to avoid adding pressure to the situation.
We’re going to transition a bit and talk about how to construct a word-of-mouth campaign.
First we’ll take a look at the essential ingredients you need to put together a campaign. These ingredients are:
• A superior product
• A way of reaching key influencers in your marketplace
• A group of experts willing to bat for you
• A large number of enthusiastic consumers
• A way of reaching the right prospects
• One or more compelling stories that people will want to tell to illustrate your product’s superiority
• A way to substantiate, prove, or back up your claims and how the product will work in the real world
• A way for people to have a direct, low-risk experience (e.g. a demo, sample, or free trial)
• A way of reducing overall risk, and an ironclad guarantee
Once you have those ingredients ready to use, you should consider the situations in which your company can benefit from a strong word-of-mouth program.
Some of these situations are:
• When there are credibility problems
• When there are breakthroughs
• When there are marginal improvements
• When the product has to be tried in large numbers or over time
• When there is high risk in trying the product
• With older or mature products that have a new story that people tend to ignore
• With unfair competitive practices such as spreading rumors, or telling lies about your product
• When there are governmental or other restrictions on what you may say or claim directly
While most of the word-of-mouth tactics are positive, there are a few products to avoid using in this program.
They are:
• Products where a seminar would not provide meaningful added value
• Products that can’t be experienced, and where there is no consensus among experts
• Products that are clearly inferior, without having a compensating superiority for similar products
• Products that are so personal or emotional that rational discussion is irrelevant to the decision
• Products where the decision value is so small (low price/low volume) the medium will not be cost-effective.
If you need help with your research, as well as a plan to use the results of that research, try our GUIDED TOUR www.iamcharlottehoward.com to get all the help you need with our top notch resources and tools.
Charlotte Howard is the Founder of the Hair Artist Association with over 4000 members, CEO of Heart Centered Women Publishing, Founder of Wealthy Women Inner Circle and Co-Founder of Wealthy Women Entrepreneurs.
She’s written and published thousands of best selling books. She’s one of the most-highly paid board certified book writing prosperity life coaches, women’s book publishing consultants and influential women’s book publishing expert trainers in the world.
Charlotte has been called by the Information Marketing Journal an “Information Marketing Genius”. Amazon and the Yearbook of Experts named her one of the most influential women in the world of beauty, business and women’s transformational book publishing industries.
She is also in the Top 1% Most Followed Transformational Public Figures In Beauty, Women’s Business and Women Book Publishing on LinkedIn, with over 100,000+ fans across her pages.
Charlotte is a proud homeschooling mom of 4 beautiful kids. She loves the beach, reading, writing and traveling with family and friends. She is an avid Netflix and Amazon Prime lover. Since leaving corporate america she’s finally been able to enjoy a freedom based lifestyle and believes everyone should be able to do the same.
