For those B2B digital marketers out there – good news! Bizo launched a news and community website – ‘Digital Marketing Remix’ specifically for you. Chancing upon an article by them – ‘Remix Opinion – Activating B2B Advocates to Boost Leads and Sales’, I found out that many B2B companies get more than half of their businesses from word of mouth. In fact, I have always thought of word of mouth in relation to a consumer’s decision process only, but this article tells me that advocacy is even more influential in business than in consumer purchase decisions, because you lose millions if you make a wrong decision. However, regardless of whether it is a B2C or B2B transaction, the reason that advocacy is important is the same: It’s all about trust.
Let’s bring ‘word of mouth’ to an online context. How does the internet facilitate the ‘word of mouth’ process?
- Efficient (yet scary) – The Internet spreads things like a wildfire. Spot something good – people ‘share’ it and you or your product gets famous. A negative publicity – you get famous too, but in a bad light. Take South Korean singer Psy’s hit song – ‘Gangnam style’ as an example. The song has stormed to number one in charts around the world while the video has been watched more than 454 million times on Youtube since July. But look at how some have lost their jobs over social media – the recent insensitive KitchenAid tweet joke at President Barack Obama’s late grandmother.
- Convenient – The internet is transparent. Just a mouse click away, or a search up Google, people find information in real time. Reviews, price differences, or product features, you get to compare what you want. With this ‘convenient’ factor, I think it’s important for businesses to consider how they could make ‘searching online’ more effective – simple yet not complicated. Two good examples I can think of in a travelling industry is cheapoair.com and priceline.com – they present different flight carriers in a single page with all the lowest deals, instead of me having to ‘select sites to compare’. Some consumers might like the option of comparing deals on different sites, but I prefer when the entire ‘search’ (i.e. lowest deals) has been done for me in a single page.
The internet is indeed a platform for word-of-mouth, and firms should definitely be taking note of how impactful and important that is.