In many respects marketing by word of mouth can be said to be the “hidden statistic” for all programs, as it’s well near impossible to actually gauge the effectiveness of marketing done this way. It should be mentioned that every product in this digital age has relied on this marketing methodology to drive public awareness of a product or service.

A recent study exemplified that two thirds of online marketing is expected to be done this way next year, which when coupled with the advent in leaps of Web 2.0.0 social networking and social marketing sites point towards promoting your product by word of mouth may be both more cost effective, and have an increasingly better ROI than more “traditional” online advertising media.

Think about the business model of the current social networking sites. There has yet to be a successful site of this type that charges monthly, relying instead as they do on ad generated income. While there is no metric that can be used to measure marketing by word of mouth, there is one method of knowing if your campaign is worth while – sales.

A company must know from their output exactly the difference between pre campaign, during a campaign and post campaign. This gives businesses a highly measurable statistic to show effectiveness of this methodology. It is true that not all businesses need or desire this form of sales technique, but is also through that not one business turns away prospects garnered from the by word of mouth method either.

Whatever your area of expertise, a study completed by Hill and Knowlton this year showed that decision makers are highly influenced by personal experience’s (58%), with recommendations tied at 51%. Coming in third was direct marketing at 21% with internet advertising at 17%. These figures might only reflect the buying habits of sole decision makers, but a woman in Oregon deciding to buy a specific car insurance or another IS the key decision maker for that type of purchase, and her friend Sue to deal with the same company will have a greater influence over Sue than an actor selling the product on TV.

Essentially, this statistic can reflect any industry, any segment, if each purchaser is the key decision maker. This makes the resurgence of the world’s oldest sales tool easy – get vocal or start tweeting, but tell everyone!

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