Great session at SXSW 2015
Another session I attended at SXSW 2015 was the landmark study of the Return on Word of Mouth (you can get the study by filling out their form) by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.
Yes, I know this is what they do and, of course, the study was probably pushing towards a good return but I was impressed with the results and the fact they used some major companies to prove their point.
Here are the five points from the Return on Word of Mouth Study.
Word of Mouth has a 13% increase in sales.
We always knew that WOM increases sales but we really didn’t know by how much. A 13% increase is nothing to sneeze at.
Paid marketing on the other hand account for 20% in sales.
Paid marketing is everything you are doing internally – even the stuff to get your Word of Mouth going. But then consumers take care of the rest. So 27% of your sales can be attributed to paid and WOM.
Word of Mouth amplifies the effect of paid media by 15%.
The good thing here is that if you want a boost to your paid marketing you need to incorporate social media. It’s worth the time and effort considering how much you would need to pay paid efforts to get that boost.
When you break down WOM into offline and online (and most WOM is offline – estimates are around 90%), online accounts for 1/3 of the boost to sales.
That’s a great statistic for online Word of Mouth especially when it’s only 10% of overall WOM.
Finally, WOM has an immediate effect.
A common myth of word of mouth marketing is that it takes forever for you to see the effects but this study shows that WOM after two weeks of exposure to a product, offline word of mouth has 65-80% of total impact while TV ads have only a 30-60% of total impact for the same time.
So what does this mean for the dairy industry?
When it comes to product marketing, you need to be tying all paid marketing with social media to get the boost you need.
For instance, instead of laying out my traditional buys for product marketing first, I would look at how I could drive word of mouth both online and offline and then use traditional marketing/advertising to drive awareness to the word of mouth campaigns.
Normally, we use in store samples. How about instead of thinking about in-store samples, we use online store samples – can we ship to customer’s homes and then ask them to share their experience online via social networks?
Can we use our TV advertising to drive people to online sign-ups to get the product to test?
Or maybe we decide to do the in store sample. Then if they like it, we offer them the whole product if we can get them to take their picture with the product and post it online? Or write a favorable review of the experience on our website?
Traditional advertising and paid marketing is a necessity but when combined with the interaction of social, we can drive some serious ROI.
And here’s a cool infographic they put together for it.
Snap Chat, iMovie, and Dealing with Negative Comments top my 2015 posts
It’s always kinda cool to go back and see what really worked with my posts and what didn’t. Things that I think people would really want to see aren’t normally the ones that they do. And, of course, there are older posts that just seem to work in an evergreen way. I didn’t include those, just the ones I wrote this year.
Anyway, here they are.
Customers don’t care about your brand if you don’t care about them.
1. It’s not “If You’ll Be Disrupted”, it’s “When You’ll Be Disrupted” – Crowd Companies at SXSW 2015
This posts hits on the disruption of the Collaborative companies and it hit a nerve with the industry. I’ve also become a member of Jeremiah Owyang’s Crowd Companies Innovation Council and gotten to meet a lot of smart people working to disrupt not only competition but their own companies in order to figure out where the world is going. Getting to peek under the hood at AirBnB and Uber was pretty cool as well.
Ask The Farmers
2. Is dairy farming a one-sided conversation?
With this post, I spoke about how sometimes it seems that I’m on the defense when it comes to conversations about food and farmers. And I talk about how to overcome that but where to reach out to for help. Essentially, it’s about who are the dairy farmer advocates that you can rely on in the digital world and I list them out and link to them.
3. You just received a negative comment online, now what do you do?
We teach a few classes on how to handle tough questions and this post came out of that class as well as a few others. It runs down the process but also includes a helpful flowchart of how to handle a negative comment. If you treat comments like this as objectively as you can, then you can calm down your emotional response, which is extremely tough to do.
4. Show Me Your Farm in Two Seconds. How to Set Up Snapchat For Your Farm
Now I didn’t write this article because I’m not a Snap Chat user. I mean I have snap chat but none of my friends really use it (because I’m old). But Jamie, my co-worker does, and she lays out a great argument of why you should be using it (because the younger people do) and then how to set up it up.
5. How do you make a movie with the iMovie App on the iPhone 6?
I loved this post. Not because it’s a great post but I’ve had so much fun with the staff making movies on my iPhone 6. It’s so easy to do and it doesn’t take that long to do them. Why not edit out the boring parts and get right the good stuff. With iMovie, it’s not as hard as you think.
So that’s it for 2015. Can’t wait to see what rocks everyone’s world in 2016.