Word of Mouth: A Marketing Strategy Or A Tactic?

When I teach introductory advertising classes, students want to jump to the tactics right away…they take the class thinking they’ll be doing TV ads for Nike the first week, and are ready to go! When I explain that marketing is a process, some of them get it and some of then don’t (the don’ts generally don’t become advertising majors!).

Part of learning this process is understanding the difference between a strategy and a tactic, and many students struggle with this.

Your marketing strategy derives from your business goals. Your business probably has a goal…or several goals…for the upcoming six months or year. These goals can relate to sales or market share, but can also involve bigger issues of developing an identity among employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

If you want to increase sales in the next year by 10%, your strategy may be to bring in customers, or to increase sales among current customers, or to extend your business in a new direction or to open a new location or start franchising. Your strategy may be a mix of a few of these, but not so many that you can’t focus your efforts well.

Tactics, then, are the day-to-day decisions you make to achieve the strategy. What percent of your marketing budget will go to new customers and which to existing ones? Which products will you advertise and which will you not?  Will you use television advertising, or social media like Facebook?

Where does Word of Mouth fit in?  It depends on your goal. Recently, I’ve spoken with two marketing people at two different casual restaurants. One restaurant has a goal of increasing their dinner traffic by 20%.

Their marketing strategy is to focus on their specials made from locally grown food, and word of mouth becomes one tactic to achieve this goal. The restaurant advertises the fact that they prepare meals with locally grown food via newspaper and magazine, and uses social media like Twitter and Facebook to announce daily specials and the specific local ingredients used in preparing the special.

If your goals relate to your corporate culture, such as developing a workplace that is response to both employees and customers, then word of mouth is going to be more of a strategy. At the second restaurant, the menu rarely varies. The goal of their marketing is to ensure that their target audience of adults 25-54 knows that the restaurant provides food that is satisfying to both the body and the soul.

Word of mouth is the marketing strategy to achieve this goal: it is one thing to tell someone that your restaurant satisfied in both those ways but another thing altogether to have others talk about your restaurant in that way. Customers’ own stories of how they feel when they eat at the restaurant are the best way to achieve the goal; the tactics then, are to find places where customers can share these stories with others, using both an online community, social media, and in store events.

When Word of mouth is a strategy, it becomes part of the fabric of your business. You and your employees make a long-term commitment to developing and fostering conversations with your customers and using the information to improve your business. In contrast, when word of mouth is a tactic, you put a lot of energy into a short-term effort with immediate results.

Word of mouth can work under both the strategic and the tactical scenarios, but they work differently, and your approach to utilizing word of mouth will be different because you’ll be working toward different goals. Perhaps one way to figure out the issue in your own mind is to think about your own goals.

Do you have only sales goals, but think you need to develop more word of mouth to compete? Then develop a goal in addition to your sales goal in order to capture the need for word of mouth.

Do you want your staff to be more responsive? To create a customer community? To have a competitive share of voice without spending an arm and a leg on advertising? To become, basically, a more consumer-centric business?

If so, then word of mouth is going to be a key part of the strategy. Having a specific goal allows word of mouth to become more of a strategic force in marketing your business, and you will be able to track your progress utilizing word of mouth to achieve the goal.

These are tough concepts, and sometimes we just want to ignore the idea of goals and strategy and jump right to the tactics. Many businesses do. However, you can’t know where you are going unless you understand where you are so take a hard look at your business and set some goals for the upcoming year. Word of mouth may be the strategic boost you need to meet some important goals.

– Kim