Word Of Mouth Marketing
In the Internet Age

Many businesses love the idea of word of mouth marketing.  It has several advantages.

• It’s Viral
• It’s Positive
• It’s Effective
• It’s Free

Word of mouth marketing spreads the word about your business virally. Friend to friend, who might not otherwise know about you.

It’s great but it’s kind of slow and takes months and years to get fully established to the point needed to sustain a business. At least it did in the pre-internet era.

Presumably the word of mouth advertising is positive. We all appreciate how the negative seems to get passed around a lot more quicker and wider than the good.

So keeping customers happy is a key ingredient of word of mouth marketing both today and in the pre-internet era. But today as we will show you later, it’s actually easier to deal with bad word of mouth that it used to be. [But you do need to know how.]

But when the word is a good word, word of mouth advertising is wonderful. The new customer is pre-sold and favorably inclined to do business with you.

They will buy more, buy quicker and will be happier with their purchase. If only because they share the positive feelings of the friend who sent them to you.

And finally, and perhaps best of all, Word of Mouth Marketing is FREE!

Compared to billboards, newspapers, Television, radio, direct mail, leaflets, anything else you can name, positive word of mouth marketing has an infinite ROI because it’s all profit. At least in theory.

In truth, you get positive word of mouth activity because you have invested in providing your customers quality goods and/or service. But that investment sure beats the cost of a virtually worthless Yellow Page Ad.

The Downside of Word of Mouth Marketing

Woven into our positives above there were a couple of side issues.

• It’s slow
• Bad comments spread faster and
• Bad Comments are difficult to deal with and
• You might not even know about them
• Good comments are hard to stimulate

If you are a small or new business, it can take a long time to build a customer base large enough to provide good word of mouth marketing results.

This is a real problem for new businesses who have limited funds to pay for marketing. But it affects even the largest businesses as well.

It’s slow. Depending on your market niche, even your happiest  customer may go days, weeks or months before they run into someone they can tell about you.

Not so the bad experience. They will share that with their best friends in everyday conversation even if the people they are talking to are not at all interested in your product or service.  These people will in turn pass that word on to people they know who are interested as soon as they find out that they have an interest in your product line.

As the business owner, you may not even realize you have a problem.  The complainer may share their negativity with the free world and never mention it to you. All businesses are made up of people.  Sooner or later everyone will have a mishap or screw up in some way.

Now when someone complements you on your goods, prices or services, you may well tell them to “Tell Your Friends.”  And some may.

But the reality again is that it is hard to stimulate person to person word of mouth marketing.

However in recent years, the opportunity to share people’s opinions has grown dramatically with the advent of social media.

Word of Mouth Marketing: Online Reviews

In the past word of mouth marketing was a pretty passive affair.  It would be sparked by chance conversations between two people or perhaps in a small group.  Today in the internet world that has changed.

Dozens of formats have emerged from Angie’s list to Yelp! and Google Plus and many more.

These services have taken the place of the chance word of mouth conversation of yesterday. In today’s internet world people do take the time to research everything from new products to restaurants to shoe stores and everything in between.

In a recent webinar I prepare that you can access on this site, I showed a negative review a dentist had that I estimate cost him well over $100,000 before he was even aware of it. [See link below}

In the webinar replay you will see how to use Online Word of Mouth Marketing to double or triple your online business adding new customers using a simple system.

You will learn the only effective way of dealing with negative reviews and learn a simple system that will significantly increase the number of speed of positive reviews.

Not only that, you will learn how you can steal customers from your competitors without their even knowing it, even if they outrank you on the Google Search engines.

This is powerful stuff, and the admission price is zero. That’s right the webinar is free, and at the end of it you will be equipped to immediately implement the system disclosed at no additional cost and get it set up within a week.

Word of Mouth Marketing Webinar

Bad Reviews Are Like a
Kick In the Pants

A bad review is like a kick in the pants, but sometimes that’s better than nothing.

What do I mean by that?

Well a couple of things.  A bad review posted on an internet site may actually help your business. It can do so in at least three ways.

• Get you noticed
• Get you informed
• Prove your responsiveness

In contrast, no reviews will keep you invisible to prospective customers, clients or patients.

As I demonstrated in my recent webinar, getting reviews is essential in today’s rapidly evolving social media world.  [to see a free replay of the Webinar click here]

Let’s review the three positive thing about negative or bad reviews.

Bad Reviews Get You Noticed.

I had a younger brother who was the bad kid to my good kid. That irritated me, because it really did get him more attention. The same is true online. Even though the review may be negative, the fact that you got some attention, warranted or not, gets picked up by Google or the rating service like Yelp that hosts the review.

You may get a 1 star out of five, but that in itself may draw some eyes to your listing.  Now don’t get me wrong, you would be far better off with a 4 or 5 star review, but some attention is better than none.

And it may even have the advantage of encouraging one of your happy customers to set the record right, when they may otherwise be content to sit on their hands and not do a review at all.

Negative Reviews Inform You of Issues

Not all negative reviews are baseless rants from jerks. Every business is made up of human beings and that means even the best will eventually screw up.

A bad review that informs you of an ongoing problem that you were unaware of, is golden. Once you know about a problem you can take corrective action.

Responding to Bad Reviews is Good PR

Most review sites allow a business to respond to reviews. It is a good idea to do that, promptly and politely.

People who check reviews are used to seeing negative reviews, and take them with a grain of salt. What impresses them most is the way a business responds to those negative comments they receive. Treat the dissatisfied customer well in your response and win many more new customers who see that you’re committed to doing things right.

 Be on the Lookout for Good and Bad Reviews

In a recent post on this blog I created a short video on how to set up a system to monitor what people are saying about you and your business.  It’s the best way to get a heads up on both good and bad reviews. And it’s free!

Learn how to stimulate Good Reviews

Once again, I invite you to watch the replay of my webinar. It will show you a great way to generate good reviews so you do not need to be the Invisible man online.

Get Good Reviews

Sometimes the best offense is a good defense.

If you have had a chance to watch the free webinar on this blog
you will remember the scathing review the dentist got.

Had I been looking for a dentist and chanced across the review, the odds are I would have just skipped over him and looked for someone else. In any market there are dozens of dentists, why take a chance and risk going to one who got such a bad review.

Now the really horrifying aspect of this review was that it was up for over 6 months before the dentist even became aware of it.

That means that he probably lost dozens of patients, who did just as I would, skip on to one of the other dentists online who had good reviews.

When you think of the life time value of a dental patient, it’s likely that that one bad review cost the doctor well over $100,000 of potential revenue if not a lot more.

The longer the bad review is up, the more likely people are to take it seriously. All the more reason to check your reviews on a regular basis.

But how do you do that?

The easiest way is to set up a Google Alert. Let Google do the watching for you. They are to world’s experts at monitoring the entire web and they are willing to work for you as well.

The best part, in this case, they are wiling to work for free!

To learn how to set up a Google Alert watch this short video:

Google will let you know when someone has posted a comment about you, good or bad. That way if it is negative you can respond.

Sometimes all that is needed is an acknowledgement that yes, we’re sorry we dropped the ball on that play. Other times, if you are dealing with a crazy*, or a disgruntled employee, or even a unscrupulous competitor you may need to take a more affirming response.

I will discuss proper responses to bad reviews in a future posting.

Today’s lesson is simply to be aware of what is being said about you. Set up a set of Google Alerts to cover yourself and your business.

As an overall strategy you want to encourage people to say nice things about your business and respond appropriately if and when you get a negative review.

If you haven’t watched the social igniter webinar yet, do so. It leads to a simple but effective strategy you can implement that will make sure you get tons more positive reviews than negative.

* Yes the Customer is Always Right, or so the saying goes. But that doesn’t mean they are sane.  We all run into difficult people, and these are the type who will often write bad reviews. Take em with a grain of salt and use the Social Igniter method discussed in the webinar to bury their negativity with positive reviews from happy customers.

You know that guy who never showed up to work on time. The one who never quite fit in with the rest of your team. Ya he’s the one. Two days after you let him go, he hops on Yelp! and gives you a bad review.  Then he goes to your Google Plus page and gets his revenge with another bad review. Before long, he litters cyberspace with as many bad reviews as he can find venues to post on.

Everywhere, he leaves a scathing review of your business and gives you the lowest possible rating he can.

Now he doesn’t leave his true name but you can tell it’s him.  Talking about your high prices, poor service and terrible employee relations policies.

Ticks you off, doesn’t it. No one likes to get bad reviews.

Frankly there is little you can do about it.  Once that review is posted online it’s pretty much there forever for all practical purposes their rage is carved in stone and a permanent feature of the cyber world.

It’s no joke, it can hurt you and your business.

Now while you can’t do much about the bad review itself, there are three things you can and should do to protect yourself.

First is to be aware of what people are saying about you. Yes that means you need to be on the look out for bad reviews.

Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to set up a Google Alert.

Second, if and when you do get a bad review you should respond to it. Most review sites won’t take down someones review, but most will allow you to post a response.  If you suspect it is a former employee, you don’t need to go into detail on what a lousy employee he or she was. Just say, you suspect the poster is a former employee you had to let go recently, and state as positively as possible that you stand behind you products, prices and services and invite readers to come in and see for themselves.

And finally, you need to bury it with good reviews. If you are getting a steady stream of positive reviews week in and week out from happy customers, a stray negative won’t hurt you at all.

Review readers will understand and give you the benefit of the doubt. But you need to develop a system to generate those positive reviews.

To learn one excellent strategy to deal with bad reviews I encourage you to watch the replay of my webinar on How to Get Good Customer Reviews

There is a solution, and it has the advantages of being both simple to implement and inexpensive.