Word-of-mouth marketing: How to get customers to do your selling
By Douglas Gantenbein
Word-of-mouth marketing can be an affordable, powerful tool for a midsize business. Done correctly, it can give your company's marketing efforts more leverage, credibility, and reach than many traditional approaches. But finding the customers you need to spread the word is the challenge — and it takes thoughtful analysis of what motivates someone to talk about your product or service.
Dr. Charles Shaefer is a busy internal medicine specialist in Augusta, Ga., who has been in practice for 24 years. About once a month, he gives short presentations to doctors at conventions or other medical meetings about Epocrates, a software product that turns mobile computing devices into encyclopedias about drugs, disease symptoms, and more. Each time he talks, doctors in the audience sign up for Epocrates' service, which was launched in 1999.
What's most surprising is that Shaefer is not an Epocrates employee, nor does he gain anything financially for his time spent plugging Epocrates. He simply believes in the product — so much so that he willingly spends time trying to find more customers for the company. His diligence is one reason Epocrates, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company with 130 employees, now has a client base of more than 200,000 physicians, with another 325,000 users in other health-care fields.
Shaefer is that most valuable of customer — someone so enthusiastic about a product or service that he or she becomes an unofficial sales agent for a company. "The most desirable way to generate sales is through referrals, and those are generated through word of mouth," says Delia Passi, a consultant on viral marketing and the author of Winning the Toughest Customer: The Essential Guide to Selling to Women. "That's a cost-effective way to build business for anyone running a small or midsize organization."
Word-of-mouth, or viral, marketing is perhaps the most valuable sales tool a company can employ. Yet it's also one of the most difficult to put in motion. It requires a great product or service, of course. But there's also a need to identify and encourage "evangelists" such as Shaefer without making them feel used, and to understand what motivates people to talk about a product.
 | The most desirable way to generate sales is through referrals, and those are generated through word of mouth. |  | | Delia Passi
marketing consultant | |
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Find your enthusiasts
Not everyone is going to become a product evangelizer, so businesses need to work at identifying those willing to assume that role. That's a model Epocrates followed perfectly. Richard Fiedotin and Jeffrey Tangney, co-founders of Epocrates, between them had some 500 names of friends and colleagues from their days at Stanford, where Fiedotin earned his medical degree and Tangney an MBA. They began by sending e-mails to former classmates asking them to try Epocrates' software — with appeals to tell others about it.
Soon, Epocrates began receiving great feedback from its first customers, among them Charles Shaefer, who was devoted to his Epocrates-enabled handheld device. "I'd go back home to get my Palm Pilot with Epocrates before I'd go back to get my stethoscope," he says.
People such as Shaefer were primed to spread the word, and Epocrates decided to make use of them. The company put together presentation materials using Microsoft PowerPoint and boldly asked physicians who had complimented its products to speak at medical conventions and other venues. Many of the physicians responded, willingly taking the Epocrates message to their peers.
Motivate evangelists to talk
People who voluntarily evangelize for a product do so for a variety of reasons, such as to gain recognition or visibility, or to help friends. But they rarely do it for money or other remuneration. You want to avoid the trap of "buying" loyalty.
For example, Fiskars, a maker of high-end garden and craft accessories, realized that many of its customers were avid scrapbook enthusiasts ("scrapbooking" is a $3 billion-a-year business, according to the Hobby Industry Association). So Fiskars found and hired four expert scrapbookers to become the "Fisk-a-teers," offering advice and tips on a Fiskars-sponsored Web site (www.fiskateers.com). Then Fiskars invited scrapbook buffs to visit the site, post messages, ask questions, and even participate in online chats with product designers about features they would like to see in Fiskars products.
While the "Fisk-a-teers" are paid for the part-time work, the others who participate in the site get little more than a welcome kit with a scrapbook newsletter and a pair of scissors. "They participate to be part of something," says Virginia Miracle, a word-of-mouth expert with the South Carolina-based marketing company Brains on Fire, which has Fiskars as a client.
To get word-of-mouth marketing programs going, Miracle says, a company should:
| • | Identify associations, user groups, or other communities of people who are familiar with your product or service. |
| • | Devise ways to communicate with those people, through company outreach teams and/or a corporate blog. |
| • | Give people a reason to talk positively, through quality products or superior customer service. |
Give evangelists freedom and a role in your business
Successful word-of-mouth campaigns share one other key quality: They cede control to a company's self-appointed evangelizers. That can be difficult for some companies. But Miracle says it's essential if a campaign is to succeed.
Create a blueprint for how a word-of-mouth campaign should develop, and know when to let go. For instance, Epocrates gives its physician evangelizers free rein to talk about their own stories and select the groups to whom they talk.
Ultimately, it's all about creating an emotional bond with users. Maker's Mark, a 75-employee producer of high-end bourbon, has created a word-of-mouth campaign using "ambassadors" who sign up at the Maker's Mark Web site. The company invites the ambassadors to visit the distillery for special events, where they can have their name stamped on a barrel of whiskey that's in the aging process. If they wish, a year later they can return to the distillery and try "their" whiskey.
"That is really powerful — inviting customers to become part of the brand," Miracle says. "That's when people will really talk about it."
Douglas Gantenbein writes often on technology matters for Microsoft. A journalist for more than 20 years, his work has appeared in Business 2.0, Scientific American, Popular Science and other magazines.
