Word of Mouth Marketing

At the October Business Marketing Association, Milwaukee Chapter meeting, we listened to a fantastic presentation about word of mouth marketing from Spike Jones from Brains on Fire.

Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing "encompasses dozens of marketing techniques that are geared toward encouraging and helping people to talk to each other about products and services", according to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association or WOMMA.

Here are just a few types of WOM from WOMMA:

1. Buzz Marketing: using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.
   
2. Viral Marketing: creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email. Example: YouTube videos.
   
3. Community Marketing: forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums) providing tools, content, and information to support those communities. Example: Adobe Users Group for programmers
   
4. Grassroots Marketing: organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach. Example: political action groups
   
5. Evangelist Marketing: cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf.
6. Product Seeding: placing the right product into the right hands at the right time, providing information or samples to influential individuals. Examples: Free samples at trade shows
   
7. Influencer Marketing: identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinion of others.
8. Cause Marketing: supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause. Example: "Truth" television ads about smoking
   
9. Conversation Creation: interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertainment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity. Example: "How many licks does it take to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop".
   
10. Brand Blogging: creating blogs and participating in the blogosphere in the spirit of open, transparent communications; sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about. Example: Microsoft and Apple
    
11. Referral Programs: creating tools that enable satisfied customer to refer their friends. Example: "Send to a Friend" links on websites and emails.

While WOM has been around in various forms for ages, the key take-away is that people buy from other people first. We may be inundated with advertising on television, radio, newspapers, emails, texts, billboards, bus signs, and pop-ups; but when we really want the facts, we get it from people we trust--family, friends, co-workers, etc. It's these people that talk about the products, services, and companies that can influnce our purchasing, whether we know it or not.