Driving more Business with Word of Mouth Marketing and Leveraging LinkedIn

We are all looking for that next referral. Someone to say something nice about us. Someone to tell their friends how great our company.

But what isn’t always easy is knowing how to go about building your organization in such a way that word of mouth marketing comes naturally. Without sounding pushy or desperate.

Because nobody wants to be that company that’s paying “influencers” to talk a big game about their product. Those relationships aren’t real. They’re not authentic. And people can see through them.

On a recent episode of the B2B Revenue Executive Experience podcast, Bill Bice, CEO at Boomtime, was on to talk about the right techniques for word of mouth marketing, its challenges, and what makes a good referral.

“All that hard work of creating a great product or service and taking care of your clients, that only pays off if you have great marketing.”

BILL BICE, CEO at Boomtime

What Are the Challenges?

There are a number of challenges when it comes to word of mouth marketing.

One of the biggest challenges in any B2B organization today is the alignment, or more often misalignment, between sales and marketing. It seems like no matter what happens, the two seem to always be at odds. So step one is getting marketing and sales into alignment with one another.

There’s an old saying out there that goes, “I know half of my marketing is hitting the right targets, I just don’t know which half.” Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have that problem in today’s business world.

We have an influx of data. We have more data that we can possible handle. The challenge is knowing which data to trust. We know too much about everything, and when you have so many data points and sources, it can be hard to know what good data looks like.

What Are the Right Techniques?

First and foremost, as mentioned earlier, getting your sales and marketing teams in alignment should be job one. Before you try to implement any sweeping changes, those teams ought to be in total alignment with one another.

Because no matter how good your product is, if your sales and marketing teams are at odds, you’ve got a problem.

As far as solutions go, particularly with small to midsize companies like Boomtime deal with, sometimes it makes the most sense to look to the market. Take a look at what the larger companies are doing. Learn what’s working. What’s not working. Then figure out how to deconstruct that and turn it into something that is scalable and able to be implemented at a smaller organization.

“The number one thing you should have in marketing is consistency.”

BILL BICE, CEO OF Boomtime

What Makes A Referral?

So what makes a referral?

In order for someone to give you a referral, for word of mouth marketing to really work, they have to have been impressed enough you through ALL of your channels. Through every aspect of the intake process, to closing the sale, to them being a customer, you’ve done something that has caught their attention.

Results are the best way to convince a business to implement a change. If you want to get quality word of mouth marketing, done for you, results are the best possible way to make that happen. Because results are the ONLY way to get organizational buy in for large changes.

At the end of the day, it’s crucial for any business to have a solid word of mouth marketing plan in place. Because the big guys might have multi-million dollar marketing budgets, but a smaller company has to rely on word of mouth to really make it.

This post is based on a podcast interview with Bill Bice from Boomtime. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to the The B2B Revenue Executive Experience.

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