WOM
The saying goes, “The only reason you need advertising is because the market isn’t talking enough about you”. So, how do you get buzz going? All sorts of PR is definitely one tactic that you could use, but there’s another one that’s even better – WOM.
WOM (word of mouth marketing) is in some industries one of the most effective, but also one of the most under utilized marketing tactic. Why is that and what are some of the challenges?
The biggest problem in some B-2-B industries is that the customers aren’t emotionally (emotional branding) attached to the product . The product is often just a tool for them to get the job done. Consider this. Not too many people walk around talking about, for example their measurement gear, unless of course there’s a problem, which would mean bad WOM. Then there aren’t that many opportunities or incentives for customers to publicly express their opinion, sometimes by design and sometimes by default. By design, many companies aren’t allowed to share case studies or comments for confidentiality reasons. Some companies ban endorsements completely, and a WOM without the source (a credible source) is only a marketing ploy. By default. Some industries are slow to adopt social web for business purposes, because they don’t see the business value in it, or going back to the branding point, they are not interested talking about their tools. There’s also another challenge in making WOM successful, which goes back to endorsements. When asked to rank information sources in a survey, many customers state that WOM is one of the top 3. The problem is that when you drill deeper into the sources of this WOM, it often comes from within the company, rather than from other companies. This means that it’s really hard for marketers to capitalize in a larger scale on WOM. Problematic particularly for products that are somewhere in between commodity and strategically critical to a business.
