Yesterday,Marcia Yudkin’s latest Marketing Minute showed up in my inbox with the headline: Beware Misplaced Trust.
The first paragraph really caught my attention:
Are you proud to say you get 90 percent of your new clients by referral? That does indicate people trust you, but it should also send up a warning flag: Your business may be shaky, just six months or a year from collapse.
That got my attention. I’ve put a lot of work into developing ways of spreading information about my business out via Word of Mouth means, and I know there are wedding photographers who get the majority of their business—perhaps even as much as 90%—from Word of Mouth.
Curious, I sent her an email asking her if there was anything intrinsically wrong with word of mouth?
“No,” was the reply. ” Word of Mouth is a powerful and inexpensive way to get new customers. The problem with getting most of your new customers by word of mouth is that business owners get complacent and lazy with their marketing, or they do not actively market at all. When referrals dry up – and this seems to happen without the business owner noticing it – the business dries up, too. And if there has been little to no marketing in the past, the business owner must suddenly scramble desperately to drum up new customers. Desperation is not conducive to effective marketing.
“If you get most of your business through word of mouth AND also have plenty of other marketing feelers out there – your web site comes up in searches, you are listed in directories used by potential clients, you have a constantly running ad in a local paper, and so on – then there is no need to worry. Do worry if you have never engaged in marketing and are proud of your referral rate, because that tends to blind you to noticing that it is beginning not to work any more.
The key, says Yudkin, is not to start marketing when you most need it, but way before that.
Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and publisher of Marketing Minute, found at at www.yudkin.com/markmin.htm .
You might also like Mark Lutz’s article on Word of Mouth. How Facebook Messed with a Good Thing to Make it Great!
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3 Comments at "Do You Trust Too Much in Word of Mouth?"
Thank you — very timely advice for my business.
[...] to Free Publicity and publisher of Marketing Minute recently wrote to Trent Ernst on his blog here saying “Desperation is not conducive to effective marketing.” [...]
NOTHING beats the power of word of mouth. Period.
I don’t care what company you’re with and what industry you’re in, word of mouth is contagious. There are so many ways to turn around marketing efforts, and that is one that was nicely done. But, sorry I didn’t fall for it.
I will agree with one thing that was said: “The key, says Yudkin, is not to start marketing when you most need it, but way before that.” Well, actually, I kind of agree. In other words, let me add to that. The correct way to phrase it would be “The key, says Yudkin, is not to start marketing when you most need it, but [market while you're busy]“.
Why? Because that’s when people are buying!!!
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