The following information is from the 2018 Word of Mouth Report by Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin
“Word of mouth—online and offline—impacts every business, organization, candidate, and cause. But specifically, how do online and offline recommendations impact purchase and voting behavior in America, and do those effects vary based on age, gender, and/or race? These are among the most important questions we set out to answer in Chatter Matters: The 2018 Word of Mouth Report. “
The authors of the 2018 Chatter Matters Word of Mouth report studied 1,001 people to learn how they make decisions.
No matter how many emails you send, how many Facebook ads you post, how high you rank in Google search results—all those marketing tactics pale in success when compared with word-of-mouth marketing.
Word-of-mouth is effective in most industries. Half of all Americans rely on recommendations for restaurants, and they are 331% more likely to rely on word-of-mouth recommendations when planning a wedding than they are traditional advertising methods.
The authors found that:
- 50%, of all Americans, would choose word-of-mouth if they had to select one source of information to draw from when making decisions.
- 83% of Americans have made a word-of-mouth recommendation
- 55% of Americans make recommendations at least monthly
- 30% make recommendations weekly
- Americans value word of mouth recommendations from friends and family 41% more than social media recommendations
Additionally, the data from other sources find that depending on whether you are B2B or B2C, between 50 and 91% of all purchases are influenced by word-of-mouth in some way. It’s a massively important part of a business but of course, typically has no strategy. People and companies do word-of-mouth on accident in a laissez-faire approach which is a real puzzle.
The authors go on to say that one of the other things they found was that word-of-mouth is very trustworthy. It doesn’t even matter if you know the person as long as that recommendation is made by a person. More than 65% of Americans trust an anonymous online review more than they trust a recommendation from an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend.
What the authors take out of that data is that we trust one another even if we don’t know that person unless it’s a bad break up, and then we do not trust that person’s recommendation very much.
Word-of-mouth impacts voting turnout, shopping habits, lifestyle choices, and more.
You can get the entire report – for free – sent right to your email by going to www.talktriggers.com/cm
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