Be different,
Be continuous

Word of mouth marketing

Word of mouth marketing involves developing an approach through which your potential customers talk to each other in a positive way about your product.   The classic approach involves creating an advert on TV or Youtube which people comment on.  An advert that appears via YouTube will then flow from one person to another as each one passes on the link to the next and the next.

However there are variations on the classic approach through which there is no need to create a video, but instead a written article is forwarded.   This technique has the article appearing on the internet in a web site or a blog.  

The article can then be referred to via a Twitter account, and of course linked to from other sites.  The key to the process is that you also have a blog – the type of web site that takes new articles all the time and to which readers habitually return to see what you have been saying each day.  Generally those who find and like an article will then post a link to that article elsewhere.

A further variation comes with the use of Google Alerts through which you search for new blog articles each day that are on your topic.  When you find one you then go to the blog and add your own comment linking to your article, or a web  page you have prepared.  This takes a bit of skill, since overt advertisements tend to be blocked by site owners, but anything that adds to their original article stands the chance of being accepted.

In this way it is possible to get hundreds or thousands of links to your site in the space of a year, simply by starting the chain of links.

Of course everything depends on how exciting and interesting your original piece or your comment on another person’s blog is.  If your article is a straight advert about your product, the chances of getting the piece picked up are small – whether the piece is a You Tube video or a text based article.

But if you supply information that people want, or you create something that is funny, then you stand a good chance of being able to undertake word of mouth advertising.
You should also note however that there mere presence of a lot of articles on a site will bring in a readership through everyday search engine searches.  To prove this point Hamilton House created www.blog.schools.co.uk – on which we place all the email advertisements that we send to schools on behalf of our clients.   There is nothing linking these items together nor is there any advertising of the existence of the site – but it gets around 30,000 hits a month, every month.

Hamilton House can help you create such a campaign by helping you write the original copy, undertake Google Alerts searches, and engineering the overall expansion of the awareness of your site.

Of course every web site and blog is different depending on the subject matter, but you might like to look at www.blog.emiratesstadium.info, a blog built to help promote some books on football.  The site has benefitted dramatically from word of mouth campaigns, and can get upwards of half a million hits a month – an extraordinary figure in a field that has so many other web sites and blogs in operation.  This site was built from scratch by Hamilton House three years ago, and its readership in the first month was 25 people.

For more information please call 01536 399 000