The ultimate goal of any given business should be to attain word of mouth, plain and simple.This is because once your business runs off of word of mouth, you’ll begin seeing sales without having to do any costly 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. Word of mouth research is when you set up a marketing campaign to determine what the drives your customer’s actions.  Surveys are one of the best ways you can do this, especially if you give your customers additional compensation.

In fact, in my opinion, surveys without compensation are useless because they have no word of mouth value. Instead, there’s the expectation that the customer, of their own freewill is going to fill it out. That will not happen unless they are genuinely engaged with you or sold on your company’s objectives.

However, dynamics change if you give your customer money or 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.In the beginning, you want to stay away from all that and give your customer more immediate satisfaction.

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.

In certain cases, when your customer is getting money or a free product for spending the time to fill out your survey, there is a potential risk that they could fill it out blindly to save time and just to get their gift. In order to avoid that, you could consider administering surveys that require detailed responses from the individual participating. Require them to actually complete sentence or two of why they answered as they did. And don’t let them proceed with the survey until they’ve completed this portion.

In some cases, people will not want to spend time doing your survey because they feel that they have to put in too much work. In order to counteract that emotion, you’re going to have to try to administer a bigger incentive. If your survey awards the participant $5, consider giving them a bit more, like $10.  And if you can’t afford to do that, you may sell advertising space on your survey, (especially if it is online).

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! Blog Traffic Exchange Related Posts Blog Traffic Exchange Related Websites
  • Making Money On The Web Since the computer and internet were discovered, most people have been attempting to earn big bucks from this venue. Although many have succeeded, still many are trying and wishing for...
  • Work At Home - Online Marketing Business Opportunities Are Boundless! Why do you want a genuine work form home online opportunity? Most people's reply to this is to spend time with family, have more freedom and live the life they...
  • Learn How to Get Traffic to Blog When it comes to writing in a blog, simply writing and assuming that traffic will come is not exactly the right way to go about things. If you want to...

Tagged with: • •

Filed under: Internet Marketing

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!