Episode 159: “Word of Mouth Marketing Checklist”

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Synopsis

Before you start your word-of-mouth marketing campaign, you should have these things on hand to help you, both in print and digitally.

• Testimonial letters from satisfied clients
• Photos of yourself and your facilities and/or products
• Photos of your key customers or their logos
• Photos of awards you’ve won
• Articles that you’ve been mentioned in
• Articles that you’ve published
• Faxable one-sheet about your business
• Audio or video that’s downloadable, or on YouTube
• New product announcements & press releases
• Display ads
• Ads you’re running, or specials
• List of memberships and affiliations
• Product catalogs
• Q & A sheets
• Logos, trademarks, servicemarks
• Newsletters
• Mission statement
• Survey results
• Articles on trends affecting your target market
• Posters or banners for trade shows

Be sure to store the printed materials in easily accessible bins.

Get the whole checklist at Dr. Misner’s Networking Now blog at Entrepreneur.com.

Brought to you by Ask Ivan Misner.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 159 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by AskIvanMisner.com, which is a Web site where you can ask Ivan any question you have about networking.

I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, California, and I’m joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. How are you and where are you today?

Ivan:
Well, this week I’m in Ireland in the United Kingdom doing BNI events, and I love coming to both countries. I get such a warm welcome and huge turnouts. And it’s been great here, and I’m looking forward to continuing to do a couple of pretty good events here, and next week I’m off to the mainland of Europe.

Priscilla:
Wow, that sounds like so much fun.

Ivan:
It is! Yeah, I love what I do. It gives me an opportunity to meet lots of BNI members and have the kinds of conversations that we have on these podcasts, only I get to have them individually with many people.

Priscilla:
So what are you going to share with us?

Ivan:
Today I want to talk about having your Word of Mouth Marketing Checklist, and I want to give you a whole list of things that I think that you should consider to have before your word of mouth efforts. If you want to develop an effective word of mouth campaign, you need to have an arsenal of credibility enhancing materials at your disposal and use them at every networking opportunity, not necessarily use all of them, but have them to draw upon. Many of the things I’m going to talk about you want to have both as a digital form and a printed form, not necessarily everything in both, but as much as possible, you want these both digitally and in printed form, because much of your networking effort is actually face to face, especially if you’re a BNI member. So having copies of these things is very important.

So what I’m going to give you is a checklist of items that you should – some you’ll already have; others you may not have, and you should consider assembling them and using it as collateral material in developing your word of mouth marketing campaign, the image you want to present in that campaign. So there’s over 25 of them, so let me list them, and we’ll talk a little bit about them as we go.

First is testimonial letters from satisfied clients or maybe testimonial e-mails from satisfied clients. You should have those. If you are – particularly, in a business where people want to see other people’s experiences, and that’s a lot of businesses, you might want to actually put that in a binder of some kind or in one document where there’s a whole list of satisfied clients and what they have to say.

You need to have photos of yourself and of your office facilities, particularly digitally, and you want those at your fingertips, because people will often ask for a photograph. And if you’re doing any kind of writing, a photo of you in your office is important. Also, in some cases, photos of your products. For example, I’m often asked to send a jpeg of my books, so I need to have those at my fingertips.

Here’s an interesting one, photos of your key customers or their logos, customers that you’ve worked with, their offices or their logos. That’s a great thing to have.

Photos of awards and certificates that you or your staff have earned.

Articles that you’ve been mentioned in. That’s a really good one, and that one you should have digitally as well has hard copy because you want to be able to send that to people who may be asking about you.

Articles you’ve published. Always have those available, because it shows your credibility as an expert in your field.

You should have some kind of information about what you do that’s sort of a one-page faxable document. Here’s my Business 101 in a simple faxable document.

Audio or videos that you may have; ideally, something that’s downloadable or something that you can send somebody to YouTube on. I use videos on YouTube all the time, and I send the links, and I say, “Here’s some information,” particularly when I do work on International Networking Week. People say, “Well, what is International Networking Week?” I send them a link to my ten minute video; it really sets them on, it’s really effective.

Any of your new product announcements or press releases, you want to have those handy.

Copies of display advertisements that you’ve used.

Possibly sometimes even advertisements that you may be running or specials that you may have.

A list of your memberships and affiliations. That’s probably best digitally, particularly for use on a Web site.

Product catalogs that you use. You want to have that information.

There’s more; I’m going to give you some more, but if you have most of what I’m giving you here as a list, you have your arsenal for building a word of mouth based business.

So here’s another one, question and answer sheets. For me, it’s my Ask Ivan Misner site. Say, “Hey, go to Ask Ivan Misner and listen. You can post a question and you can listen to all of the answers, and you can listen to them on the live recording for free; it doesn’t cost anything.” So that’s kind of a creative example of a question and answer process.

You definitely want to have your logos, trademarks, servicemarks, patterns. You want those at your fingertips, especially digitally.

If you’re a corporation, you want to have your annual report at hand.

Newsletters or news-type publications that you use, both printed and digital.

Your mission statement. That’s an important one to have available, and it should be short and sweet.

Survey results that you’ve done. I think that surveys are a great way to open up a dialog. I talk all the time about my surveys, sometimes on my podcasts, often during my presentations. And so it’s always important to have some of those surveys with you so people who may say, “Gee, do you have that information,” you can hand it to them or least get their card so you can send them a link to it.

Articles on trends affecting your target market. That’s a really good one.

Posters or banners that display the material that you have. And you use those when you’re going to events where it’s appropriate for you to put up posters or banners.

So there’s more than 20 items that I’ve just given you for your word of mouth marketing checklist. Be sure to store the printed material, any printed versions of this, in bins or in a set of shelves built to make it easy to retrieve frequently, because I find myself walking out the door, and if I have this stuff in a bin, I can say, “Yep, I want this, this, this, and this,” and you take that with you. And that really helps. And always have it at your fingertips digitally for any communication that you want to send via e-mail.

That is my Word of Mouth Marketing Checklist of things that you should have available to help support your networking efforts.

Priscilla:
I think that’s great, and I thought of something else ,which seems amazing since you have so many on your list.

Ivan:
What’s that?

Priscilla:
If you could have a sheet of paper with the links, or the even digitally, the links to any Facebook page that you might have or LinkedIn account, Yelp. We have Yelp here in the Bay Area, you know, ratings on your business. Those kind of things are helpful, too.

Ivan:
Great suggestion. I don’t know why I didn’t put it on my list, but I will make sure it goes on my list.

I particularly like those for online, even more so than printed, because sometimes the URLs can be a little long, but you want to have a link online to all of your Facebook, your Twitter accounts, whatever, so that people can follow you.

That’s a great suggestion, Priscilla. Thanks.

Priscilla:
And the other thing is when you were talking about videos, if you have one of those little flip cameras, you can actually take videos of your clients giving you feedback on your products and then put those on your Facebook page or on your Web site.

Ivan:
Great suggestion! Yeah, that’s a really good use of – and those cameras are so available now, and they’re reasonable inexpensive. And it’s pretty easy to upload. I’ve uploaded stuff to my Facebook and, of course, to YouTube.

Priscilla:
Yeah.

Ivan:
And that’s a great one to use. “Here are some testimonials.” Make them short, sweet, to the point. The longer it is, the less likely they are to watch it, so if you can just keep it a couple of minutes…

Priscilla:
Right.

Ivan:…you’ll get people to watch it. That’s a great suggestion, two really good ones. I’ll add it to my list.

Priscilla:
Okay, good. Thank you.

Ivan:
Well, that’s it for today, Priscilla. I hope that BNI members can take this list and share it with each other and put together their tools to network effectively.

Priscilla:
Perfect. Thank you, Dr. Misner.

Ivan:
Thank you.

Priscilla:
I’d just like to remind you listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by AskIvanMisner.com. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.