word of mouth
Also called: word-of-mouth, word-of-mouth marketing, WOM
Customers telling other potential customers about a product on their own, in conversation, chats or communities. In a close-knit niche it is often the cheapest and most trusted way new customers arrive.
Word of mouth is customers recommending a product to others on their own: a shop owner telling a colleague at the parts counter, a message in a professional chat, a mention at a meetup. People trust a peer who has used the product far more than any ad, so a recommendation converts better and costs almost nothing.
It works best in niches where customers know each other and talk shop: owners of the same kind of business in the same city or region. That's one reason bootstrapped products do well by choosing a narrow audience: the audience itself becomes the distribution channel. Word of mouth can't be bought directly, but it can be made easier: a product that produces a visible, countable result gives people something to talk about; a referral offer gives them a reason to mention it now; a community (a channel, a group, a meetup) gives them a place to do it.
Measure it, or you'll either overrate or ignore it: ask every new customer how they heard about you and record the answer. And remember that word of mouth works both ways: in a close-knit niche one badly handled incident travels as fast as a success story.
Example
When Oscar asks new shops how they found GarageDesk, the answer is almost always "another owner told me" or "I saw it in the mechanics' Telegram group". The founders build on that: from February both the recommending shop and the new one get a free month; Oscar's Telegram channel for shop owners grows to about 900 subscribers with almost no posts about GarageDesk; and an April meetup at the warehouse of the distributor where Nina used to work brings forty owners, with nobody pitching anything.
By the end of May 20 shops have signed up through referral links. Five of them were about to sign up anyway, a reminder that word of mouth was already working before the program made it visible.
Common mistakes
- Waiting for it to happen. Give people a result worth mentioning, a reason and a place.
- Not measuring it. Ask every new customer how they heard about you.
- Advertising in communities that ban it. Useful posts with real numbers get read; ads get you removed.
- Forgetting it spreads bad news too. Handle incidents quickly and openly; the niche will hear either way.