Word of Mouth Research: How To Use a Survey to Design Your Marketing Campaign

Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 2:34 pm

Achieving word of mouth should be the ultimate goal of any business.This is entirely due to the fact that once your company operates using word of mouth, sales will commence without having to do any additional high-cost advertising. However, if you conduct word of mouth research, you’ll receive an additional benefit with the same amount of buzz: the opportunity to evaluate your customers’ mindset.

So, how do you go about conducting word of mouth research? First, you must understand what it entails. And basically, word of mouth research is when you set up a marketing campaign where instead of selling a product your main goal is to understand your customers’ psychology. Surveys are one of the best ways you can do this, especially if you give your customers additional compensation.

In fact, in my opinion, surveys without compensation are useless because they have no word of mouth value.Instead, there’s the expectation that the customer, of their own freewill is going to fill it out. That’s not really going to happen unless they are genuinely enamored with you or your company’s objectives.

However, things are different if you give your customer money or a free product in exchange for their participation. This is especially the case if the compensation is given straight out, without the participant having to worry about sweepstakes or free trials. This is not to say that sweepstakes or free trials can’t work, especially if you’ve established a name for yourself. But when you’re just starting out, you want to stay away from all that and give your customer more immediate satisfaction.

Anyway, after giving your customer decent compensation, you need to concentrate on the next step associated with good word of mouth research; making sure your survey questions promote an honest response.

Now, by the fact that your customer is getting money or a free product for your survey, there is a risk that they could put down any old thing simply to receive their gift. To prevent that, you might want to consider giving surveys that require more detailed feedback from the participant. Require them to actually write a sentence or two of why they felt the need to answer as they did. And don’t let them proceed with the survey until they’ve completed this portion.

Granted, you will get people that may shy away from your survey because they think doing all this is too much work. So, to counteract that emotion, you’re going to have to try to award a bigger incentive. For example, if your survey awards the participant $5, consider giving them $10. And if you can’t afford to do that, you may sell advertising space on your survey, (especially if it is online).

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