Helping the Message Travel
Word of Mouth Marketing is giving people a reason to talk about you, and making it easier for that conversation to take place. WOM empowers individuals to share their experiences. It's harnessing the voice of the customer for the good of the brand. (and it's acknowledging that the unsatisfied customer is equally powerful)
We believe that WOM should be both encouraged and facilitated; the ‘Thumbs Up’ feedback program was designed to do just that. Sent to clients following their event, these feedback cards encourage customers to leave an honest review of our services on our website. As a result of working hard to make people happier, listening to our customers, and making it easy to share their opinion, this campaign has greatly improved out brand’s WOM.
The first step to any Word of Mouth Marketing program is identifying your talkers; those people who are most likely to tell a friend about what you do. Talkers can be anyone; influencers, bloggers, stay at home moms. Our talkers happen to be past couples who loved how lighting transformed their wedding. These individuals are our core recommenders.
Once we identified our talkers, the next step was to give them the tools to spread the message faster and farther. In itself, WOM is very powerful, but it doesn’t go on forever. It gets much more powerful when you help it along. We found the greatest tool for getting WOM is to ask for it. This tool is free, easy, and the most effective way to turn a single recommendation into powerful word of mouth.
It’s nice to see when someone tells a friend about us¾ it’s nicer when they post an online review for the world to see. This is why we don’t merely ask our past customers to tell a friend about us, we ask them to come share it with the world. Not only does this let them know that their opinion matters, it also expands the power of our talkers by making it easy for them to share with more than one person at a time.
The reason WOM is so effective is because of the natural credibility that comes from real people with no agenda tied to their recommendations. Such recommendations are critical in the wedding industry, where clients only use service providers once, and the reputation of these vendors is often unknown. By having a forum to submit and view honest reviews of our service, we have achieved a level of honesty and transparency that is unseen in the wedding industry. These reviews have also enabled our satisfied clients to do the selling for us.
