WOM Marketing

Or do you say Word of Mouth

You receive about 500 to 3,000 commercial communications a day. This includes everything — banner ads on websites, newspaper or magazine ads, ads on the sides of trucks, labels on products. You won't read or actively see most of them, but you are still exposed to them.

How often do you act on them?

In the world of advertising and sales there is a “law” that says it take 9 times of seeing or hearing a message before a sale is made and people see only 1 out of 3 adds put before them. So it takes 27 messages to get though to a person for them to buy.

But imagine a friend calls you up and says, "There's a movie you've just got to see."

How often are you going to act on that? There are no hard statics that I know of but rule of thumb says that some people act on it once in every three times. But, let’s not get all puffy and downgrade this to say it's once every five times.

We now have a ratio of 5,000 to 5. That's 1,000 to 1. That means word-of-mouth is around 1,000 to 5,000 times more powerful than conventional marketing.

This means that getting a few people each day to tell their friends about your service or product can create more sales than all of your sales force and advertising put together. Here is another way to look at this: A magazine is limited to direct and pass-along readers. An ad may be seen by two or three people who read each copy. But word of mouth is unlimited. Consider this...

Watch how fast word of mouth spreads
Most people have about 50 names in their email list. So, let's say 25 people tell 25 people about your product — and every person tells it to 25 of his or her friends. Just watch what happens:

25 x 25 = 625 (that's the size of most neighborhoods!)625 x 25 = 15,625 (that's the size of a small town) 15,625 x 25 = 390,625 (that's the size of a city like Minneapolis or Oakland) 390,625 x 25 = 9,765,625 (that's around the size of New York City) 9,765,625 x 25 = 244,140,625 (that's the adult population of the United States) 244,140,625 x 25 = 6,103,515,625 (that's about the population of the WORLD!)

Now that's growth!

Larson note: In today’s connected world we sometimes forget the tools or yesterday. A time of slower paced marketing when time was on our side but we can still use those marketing tricks of a few years ago. They do still work, both off and now online.

To the marketer Word Of Mouth of WOM is as good as it gets. WOM marketers are working their networks to get people talking. And now it is probably going to be on twitter or some electric kind of social media network, Facebook, MySpace, a ning or a host of other SM sites.

WOM marketers are talking to people to get people to talk to get the message out, their message out. Are you in the hunt?


Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
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