On Tuesday, Andy Sernovitz, author of “Word of Mouth Marketing – How Smart Companies Get People Talking” and the GasPedal.com blog, shared some of his PR insights. Here is the continuation of our interview:
What are some other tips you can offer small business owners who want to increase sales and awareness via word-of-mouth?
Focus on your Talkers, Topics and Tools:
Talkers: Find The People Who Like To Talk — Are they your customers? Neighborhood moms? Doctors? Bloggers? Think about the people who are most likely to tell a friend about what you are doing. Make sure they know about your new topic of conversation.
Topics: Give Them a Reason to Talk — Give people a reason to talk about you. It doesn’t need to be fancy. A special sale, good service, a neat new feature, a better flavor, a funny package. (Remember the Gateway computers that came in cow-patterned boxes?)
Tools: Help the Message Spread Faster and Farther — Do everything you can to make it easy for talkers to pass along your topic. Include postcards and stickers in the box when you ship a package. Put up a chat room so people can talk to each other. Join a blog conversation. Hand out samples. (Did you ever get one of those emails with a “secret” coupon that was supposedly for employees only? Did you forward it?)
Where can entrepreneurs find out more about your services?
We have a fantastic blog that teaches word of mouth called “You can be a Word of Mouth Marketing Supergenius” at https://blog.gaspedal.com. If you want to get really great at this, sign up for our Word of Mouth Crash Course at https://events.gaspedal.com.
Thanks for your great tips Andy!
If you have questions, or a great PR story to share, please let me know at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you.
