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B2B Word of Mouth Marketing for Lethbridge, Calgary, and Edmonton Alberta Businesses. Six Tips to Help Your Business.

alberta word of mouth marketing calgary lethbridge edmonton 6 WOMM tips B2B

WOMM is about conversations.

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Probably the greatest marketing challenge for a small to mid-sized Alberta company that operates primarily in the B2B world is generating Word-of-Mouth marketing (WOMM). Unlike B2C WOMM, where a plate of cookies can make customers talk about you, B2B WOMM can take a lot more work.

There are many parallels in the B2B world between networking, great customer service, sound management, and WOMM. Separating those distinctions in order to focus on WOMM alone is a challenge in itself.
The problems with WOMM for B2B lays in the managerial constraints of small and mid-sized business owners themselves.

For WOMM to happen, we need three things to occur:

(1) An action on the part of the business seeking WOMM

(2) The recipient or witness of that event needs to be wowed and

(3) That impression needs to be great enough to motivate the “evangelization” of the business and its activities – the creation of WOMM. The term evangelization is more often used in biblical terms but think of it in the same way in WOM marketing. If you have a client or customer who loves your business so much that he or she talks about it every opportunity he or she gets, then you have captured the holy grail of WOMM.

In my experience, the typical small and mid-sized company’s management, which is often the owner and maybe one or two other managers, isn’t willing to put time in to building a WOMM strategy. Their time is so constrained that it seems easier to spend a few dollars on telephone directory advertising or other form of traditional advertising than it would be to think about how they are going to wow their customers. No one is going to give you WOMM unless you have wowed them.

So how do you WOW a customer?

Tip #1 Become a business consultant. For some people, simply doing a job on time and within budget is enough to generate WOM. Depending on how competitive your industry is, you may have to offer advice or suggestions on how they can improve their own business – if it’s no sweat of your back to help a client better use your product or to do anything within their business better, then you are going beyond the call of service and thereby making yourself a candidate for WOMM. Find out how to make your clients’ lives easier. Create a list of what you can do and the cost of each action. Start implementing the lowest costing ones at first, track how sales are affected, and keep adding value if improved sales justify doing so. This tip sounds a lot like good customers service – because it is.

Start the conversations before it is too late for your Alberta business.

Tip #2 Know what WOMM really is. Almost without fail, when I talk to a business owner about WOMM the response is, “yeah, we get plenty of that.” Their anecdotal evidence is enough for them to shoot down any suggestions of controlling or influencing WOMM with a well thought out strategy. This is passive WOMM and these business owners have mistaken passive WOMM as being the only kind of WOMM. To control your WOMM you need to measure it – every time you gain a new client ask them how they heard about you. WOMM should have the same respect as advertising, personal sales, Internet leads, trade show conversations etc. Setting a proper strategy turns WOM in to WOM Marketing.

Tip #3 Referrals are WOMM: The concept of WOM marketing has been around longer than most people think. Up to a few years ago, marketing strategies focused on lead or referral generation. But the best leads and referrals come from your current customers. Almost every referral that was delivered to you by an existing customer came by way of WOMM. The more one client participates in bringing a customer your way, the more they are engaged in WOMM. Make WOMM a habit and facilitate that habit with tip #4.

Tip#4 Food to create WOMM. As often as possible, take a different client out for lunch. A free lunch in itself can be WOMM worthy. Take you lunch one step further and make the lunch conversation about WOMM. Find out what your clients are doing in their own businesses with respect to WOM marketing.

Tip #5 Turn your lunch meetings in to a WOMM network, that is to say, facilitate your WOMM strategy. If you see an opportunity to connect two of your clients then do it. Building these networks (yes, networking) creates a stage to get people talking. These events should be very casual and don’t always meet with the same people. I personally followed this tip two months ago with four of my clients and the results were amazing.

Tip #6 Help Them Help You. Sometimes people have trouble expressing an idea. Your best client may be terrible at selling your products or services for you. If there is something that you would love to have people talk about then make it easier by putting it on video. Use your website to facilitate the conversation. You may have a client sit with a potential client and your video is the only way to start the conversation.

Caveat – The use of the tem WOMM in this article assumes a positive connotation for your business. But WOMM comes in both Good and Bad forms. Your WOMM strategy should include contingencies for dealing with bad WOM. The reason WOMM is so important is that a happy customer may tell five people about how great you are while an angry customer may tell 50 or more people about why they will never do business with you again. Think about what word-of-mouth really means – it’s a conversation. It should come as no surprise that WOMM is ultimately controlled by conversations. If you want the best WOMM, make sure your customers have good reasons to talk about you.

If you need help with your word of mouth marketing, call me at 403-991-8863 or 403-393-8863.

Thanks,

David Howse