The CEO of crmmetrix provides insight for leveraging word-of-mouth marketing.
In a recent iMedia article, I recommended to marketers that in order to leverage word of mouth, brands should be putting more importance behind listening to consumers rather than talking to them, arguing that most of the time marketers have been trained to talk (plan ad campaigns, test them, broadcast them, and so on), but do not know their own customers well enough because they do not really listen to them.
Why is this so important nowadays?
We have now entered the world of conversation marketing, a world where you listen before talking, where you continuously hear your customers by conversing, and where conversations are the only way to create customer engagement.
Still, as some of you will say, this is easier said than done. And indeed, after my last article, I got quite a few emails from readers asking about the how and the where of listening to the voice of the customer.
Below are some insights and tips from our day-to-day practice of customer-listening. I will mainly provide directions into the how and where to listen, and, for now, just refer to the who to listen to, in general. I will hopefully comment more on the who during one of my next articles.
Let's start with the how
In essence, listening is rather simple: You don't say anything, and you don't talk-- you simply listen by starting a conversation with an initial subject of discussion, then you stand back and listen. Or, even better sometimes, you simply listen to what consumers have to say about your brand (online for example).
Simple. Except, when you think about it, the function that has historically been in charge of consumer insights in most major companies (namely market research) tends to be more about asking questions and not at all about listening (or not enough). Again, I am not blaming market researchers (I am one myself!), but once you know that the future of marketing is all about conversing and engaging rather than talking, you also need to incorporate listening to your arsenal to generate real consumer insights.
I really mean >real here, as, in my experience, although questions are a great way to learn from consumers, the real insights are those that come from day-to-day observations and conversations that occur naturally, and from people talking about and living your brands. The implications are important, because it suggests that in order to maximize our chances to discover and amplify insights we need to integrate better listening abilities even when we ask questions. I call this active listening.
Active listening
This is a great way to engage consumers and learn from them. With active listening, you may still ask questions, but you also have the ability to better identify ideas and listen to the words that may actually be the real insights. Indeed, instead of relying on deductive type of interviews (where answers are always fixed and do not change as the process goes on) inductive interviews offer consumers the ability to be exposed to other consumer ideas (including some of the original brand ideas). This way you suddenly have the ability to engage and leverage consumer ideas and insights (take a look at www.brandDelphi.com for more ideas and further details on this).
This inductive process leverages evolutionary principles (in pure Darwin terms) to engage and evolve consumers in co-creating messages with brands. In my last article, I was referring to marketing with consumers rather than to consumers, and this is a good example of co-creation of brand message development and refinement. We use this approach extensively for WOM messaging with great success. That's mainly because we listen and are able to simply leverage the words and ideas that best speak to influential consumers to enable them to talk about your brands.
Passive listening
As argued above, active listening is the first way to better learn by listening. The second way to listen is really hot in the industry right now. This approach refers to such activities as measuring and tracking WOM online, listening to blogs, message boards and forums. I refer to this approach as passive listening.
Why passive? Simply, as I mentioned before, you stand back and listen in to conversations, like some type of giant focus group, where the group is the web, and the world is (hopefully) speaking about your brand (positively-- if it does not it is good to know anyway, no?) This is a great way to learn from online conversations and even identify key influential consumers.
By now, you should know a little more about ways to better listen to consumers to leverage what they say for your WOM campaign. The next element is really to know where to listen and learn from consumers, specifically those influential consumers.
Where to listen? (Fish where the fish are)
The web is a little village, or a world made up of many little villages with people who have interests and passions. Somewhere people are currently talking about your brand, so find out, search, scan the web and listen. If people talk about you on the web or to their friends offline, they probably would like to engage and converse with you personally, too. In this case, they will most likely turn to your brand's natural points of contacts, such as your call center, email, stores and brand website(s).
Our research systematically shows that engaged and vocal consumers, typically the influential consumers or opinion leaders, are looking for information from brands they love (or hate) and hope to get them from the brand itself at the brand website.
What a chance, then, for your brand to learn by listening. For once, you don't have to even ask for their attention-- you have it. And yet if you think about it, do you really listen enough to them? Let me know if you do, and how. The brands I work with listen effectively every day, to great benefit. It helps them grow their relationship with influential consumers, drive innovation and leverage these conversations to engage consumers in WOM and, subsequently, sales. It really does work.
Are you ready to listen and engage with consumers that come to meet you on your brand website?
Start thinking about an active listening feedback mechanism-- an active listening type of feedback mechanism like brandDelphi for example, a blog, a brand community or probably a combination of the three, on your brand website. Brands like Stonyfield, for example, took the time to start listening and conversing on their brand sites and it seems to pay off. Why? Listening always does.