Word of Mouth Research: How To Start A Survey
The ultimate goal of any given business should be to attain word of mouth, plain and simple.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?You would be wise to understand what it involves. 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 a great way to do this, especially when you give your customers a reward or some form of compensation to participate.
In my opinion, surveys without compensation or some type of "thank you" are a waste of time because they have no word of mouth value. Instead, there’s the expectation that the customer, on their own goodwill is going to fill it out.That is not going to be the result unless they are genuinely enamored with your brand or your company's mission statement.
It is a whole new ball game if you give your customer cash or even a free product in exchange for their participation.This is the case if the reward is given immediately, without the participant having to worry about free trials or a drawing at a later time.Sweepstakes or free trials can still work for you in some cases, especially if you’ve established a name for yourself.When you are just starting this method, you will want to avoid that and give your customer a more immediate incentive.
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, when you offer a free product for filling out a survey, there is some risk that a customer could put down anything simply to receive their gift.In order to avoid that, you could consider administering surveys that require detailed responses from the individual participating. Require them to actually write a sentence or two of why they felt the need to answer as they did.Do not let them proceed with the survey until they’ve completed this portion and you get the information that you desire.
Keep in mind, some individuals may shy away from your survey because they think doing all this is too time consuming.So, to counteract that feeling, you’re going to have to try to award a larger incentive.You could, for example, reward the participant $10, more than the $5 that the survey would normally give. And if you can’t afford to do that, you may sell advertising space on your survey, (especially if it is online).
Tags: Internet Marketing, word of mouth marketing, word of mouth research