What is a good “word of mouth advertising” worth?

What is a good “word of mouth advertising” worth?

A fortune, I’d say. Allow me to elaborate a bit.
Last week I posted an article about the process I went through of buying a motor on ebay and getting my old Mercedes fixed up to drive. Well, I have been driving it around a lot and I get do a lot of looks, smiles, nods and “nice old car” comments. I have told every person that I’ve been in contact with for longer than two minutes how I got the motor for it on ebay for $79. People can’t believe it. They’ve said things like: “Really? You’re kiddin’. Nah. How’d ya do that? On ebay? No Joke? Awesome!
I wrote about it on my blog, and talked about it in my seminars and mentioned it onstage at the Kentucky Opry where I have a Country Music Show on Kentucky Lake. So I estimate, conservatively, that over 2000 people have heard me bloviate about how I got the motor and fixed up my “old car”.
Ebay paid me NOTHING for my great advertising. My only thinking is: “Hey, this was a good deal for me. If you want to find good deals, better go look on ebay”.
What is my good “word of mouth advertising” worth to ebay? Well, the whole company was built on such as this: people telling their friends about something they thought was a good thing. People are like that. All over. Not just in Kentucky. My point for you if you own a business is this: is the word of mouth “out there on the street” on you good or bad?
Great advertising or as I call it “Above Average Advertising” will only accelerate what was going to happen anyway. Are people, after they partake of your service or product, saying good things about you or are they saying nothing, or are they doing like I did about ebay: telling everybody they come in contact with that they are absolutely excited, happy, and tremendously satisfied with you and can’t wait till they can do business with you again??

As I speak around the country, one of the topics of one of my seminars is: How to Achieve Above Average Results from Your Advertising Dollars. I just did one of those in Paducah, Kentucky (that’s right close to where I live) the room was filled with business owners and when I said this they all nodded in agreement because it’s so true. My mentor Roy H. Williams has said these things many times in many different ways in his books articles and Monday Morning Memo’s.
“It is unusual to find a businessperson who will ask advertising to do only what it can. Most small business owners are asking it to do what it can’t.
Advertising can’t repair a broken business. It will not make you better at what you do. It can’t turn failure into success.”
“I’m sure you can name a very successful business or two in Murray, Paris, or Paducah that does virtually no advertising, right? So why does it surprise you that a business can struggle and fail in spite of brilliant ads? If a business has what it takes to succeed, that business can succeed in spite of bad advertising. Advertising will only accelerate and enlarge the success or failure that was going to happen anyway.”
“If you are good at what you do, advertising will make success happen faster and bigger than it would have happened otherwise.”
“But if you aren’t good at what you do, or if people don’t want, or care about what you do, then advertising will be just one more bill that you can’t pay.”

There are Several Ways to make sure that the “word of mouth” about you and your business is good.
# 1 Architectural— Physical design, Product design, or your store’s decoration. Like a piano music store: where the whole front of the store looks like a huge piano. How about a glass bottom floor in a store, so you can see what’s happening on the floor under you. (Canada) What about the volcano outside Mirage Casino in Vegas? How about the restrooms in Shoji Tabutchi’s Theatre in Branson Mo? I’m telling you, it’s worth the price of the show ticket just to see the potty. McDonalds playground (1st restaurant playground) it worked miracles for 20 years to make folks talk about their place of business. (I’ve never heard anyone say “hey you ought to go to McDonalds: they got the best hamburgers I’ve ever had”)

#2 Kinetic— Relating to or product of motion. It goes far beyond “good service”. To be a word of mouth trigger it must be constantly observable by management and the customer. Customer service is delivered privately one on one. The best example is I know personally is; Lambert’s Café Home of the Throwd Roll in Sikeston, Mo and near Branson, Mo. Or: Seattle Pike Place market, or tableside restaurant chefs twirling knives at Benihana, or kissing the cod and being “screeched in” upon 1st arrival in Newfoundland.

#3 Generous —Why not offer free deserts in nice restaurants? Hey, flour, butter and sugar are cheap advertising. Free watch batteries at a jewelry store, free weddings at Why sell it if it’ less valuable then the word of mouth that it will create?Chapel Dulcinea.

These things must go far beyond the boundaries of what is normal.

If you don’t want to be average with your business, then why do you insist on being normal?

It wasn’t normal for a person to find a $5000 motor on sale for 79 bucks. That’s why I’ve been raving about ebay. There’s a very book about the personal experience factor and having customers that rave about you and your business. My Partner Mike Dandridge calls it The One Year Business Turnaround.

I haven’t got back to my intended subject and that is how I looked up a lot of parts for that old car and the part that the search engines played, and how one might go about raising the ranking of your business in the search engines. Or search engine optimization.
Later
Clay

Comments

[Zip3]

Great article Clay! There are many success stories where companies have exploited or were based on word-of-mouth to spread their message around the globe (the most common example is Google). Sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, I believe.

In your specific case however a bad and unreliable seller wouldn't have made you advertise ebay in thousands despite the fact that it's not ebay to blame about the bad purchase (any rational user should know to blame the unreliable seller). That is the reason of course for ebay to have inspectional mechanisms.

[Gayathri]

Has anyone out there heard about WideCircles.com. It seems like a way better service then wasting money on PPC. Apparently they are using refering websites ( forums, blogs, wiki, etc. ) and have a viral word of mouth distributed approach to it. My friend told me he got around 100 visits from single post which cost him $0.40c. I am going to give them a try today . In case you are intrested here is it. http://widecircles.com?s=imt1

[qqqq]

http://widecircles.com?imt=3