Word Of Mouth Advertising, How To Use It To Increase Your Sales

The simple fact of life is that you can toot your own horn until you are blue in the face and it will not have as much impact as one of your customers telling someone how great you are.

One thing that everyone will agree on is that “word of mouth” is the best form of advertising. The problem with word of mouth advertising is that it is a very slow moving form of advertising.

There are things you can do to speed it up.

The idea is to amplify the good word about your business. The way to do this is by collecting testimonials and success stories from happy customers. The best way to do this is to make it a practice to ask for them. When a client is happy with your service ask them if they wouldn’t mind sending you it in writing. It can be as simple as an email with a few lines about their experience. Most will be more than happy to oblige you.

Once you have the success story, you will incorporate it into your advertising and marketing. A postcard campaign will work better with a testimonial in it. Your brochure will be more effective, offers are more believable with testimonials and success stories. In fact all of your advertising will be more effective with the inclusion of success stories and testimonials.

Prospects are more likely to buy from you if they know how other people have benefited from your services. Success stories are very effective and have many uses; in ads, newsletters, email blasts, postcards, brochures, sell sheets, on your website, rack cards, door hangers and even on the back of your business cards. The list of uses is endless.

These success stories are in fact “word of mouth” advertising. By including them in your marketing you are simply increasing the speed of your results by 20x. Let’s face it, one happy customer may be able to tell maybe 10-12 people how happy they are with your service. You can mail out 5,000 or 10,000 post cards or brochures and in a week’s time share that success story with more people than that happy customer could ever do in his entire life.

Because you used testimonials and shared the positive experiences of your customers with a larger audience, you generated more buzz and interest about your business, and more sales.

After reading stories with issues similar to their own, prospects and prospective buyers recognize their need for your services. Because success stories and testimonials are rich with the keywords that your most promising prospects enter when searching the Internet for solutions like yours, you can attract more web traffic.

Again, some of the uses of client success stories are:

• Use to increase the results of your advertising programs. They can be very effective for supporting and verifying the claims in your ads.
• Use them in brochures to support and help build the story of why your company is the best choice.
• When used on postcards they can be very effective and help drive home the benefits of your offer.
• Improve the effectiveness of your sell sheets and other sales collateral.
• Your sales staff can use them to help overcome objections from prospects.
• Use them to send out as drip email marketing to other clients in similar businesses.
• Highlight a different customer’s success story in each issue of your company newsletter. This is particularly effective with helping to up-sell a product or service to existing customers.
• Use on your web site to help drive traffic with key word searches and sell particular products or services.

The impact and effectiveness of your promotion and leave-behind sales materials will be greatly increased by incorporating success stories in them. If you are not doing it already you should be collecting success stories from happy clients. Once collected please use them.

Mark Hale
CEO