Why word of mouth doesn’t happen
May 17th, 2008 by Alexander Kohl“There’s no easy way to bring it up.
It’s easy to bring up, “hey, where’d you get that ring tone?” because the ring tone just interrupted everyone. It’s a lot harder to bring up the fact that you just got a massage.”
That quote comes from Seth Godin’s Blog. It is one of the reasons he sees why word of mouth does not happen.
Does it mean, massage cannot generate word of mouth? No way, on the contrary, there are so many ways it can. What is one of the most talked about topics among friends? Health (or actually the lack of it).
People talk about how tired they are, how stressed they are, how their backs hurt. These things come up a lot more than cool ring tones. So, all you need to do to be talked about is change your identity from “I am a massage practitioner.” to “I give backs their strength back.” or “eliminating stress in 30 minutes”.
Hold that last statement in your head for a minute, I’ll come back to it.
The important thing is that people have you as someone in mind who does a really specific thing, a specialist. The specialist who can help beyond anything that others might hope for. And the better that specialty relates to what people are talking about, the more you will get word of mouth.
The Irresistible Offer
There are very few books, I read more than once. But if I do, I usually read them 5 or 10 times. One of my re-reads is called “The Irresistible Offer” by Mark Joyner. It teaches “how to sell your service in 3 seconds or less”.
How? By developing a “touchstone” that answers the four biggest questions people have when they evaluate a service (or product). After reading it, you will know why “I just got a massage” can never lead to successful word of mouth referrals and - more importantly - how you can develop an identity that will lead to lots of successful word of mouth.
Just imagine what “Eliminating stress in 30 minutes or less or it’s free” would do for you.
If you want to understand this example, you need to read the book.
You can get it at Amazon or you can download it here: The Irresistible Offer for free.
Tags: referrals, word of mouth
