Word of Mouth Marketing in 2021 – with JP Clement from Boomtime | DMR #241

Full transcript:

David Bain 0:00
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 241, word of mouth marketing in 2021,

Bot 0:06
Digital Marketing Radio with David.

David Bain 0:11
I am David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio the show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who wants to stay on top of the latest tools, tactics and trends shared by today, marketing masters, what exactly is word of mouth marketing? And how does word of mouth marketing manifest itself in 2021? How do you measure the impact of word of mouth marketing? And how does word of mouth integrate with other marketing channels? There was just so some of the questions that I’m going to be asking today’s guests in Digital Marketing Radio Episode 241, a man with over 30 years of experience in marketing, digital strategy and product management for companies ranging from startups to global brands such as Madison Square Garden, Johnson, and Johnson and National Geographic. He’s founded three digital strategy and market agencies and is currently CEO of digital marketing service firm. Boom time. Welcome to DMR, JP Clement.

JP Clement 1:04
thanks for having me, David. Yeah, thanks

David Bain 1:06
for coming on. jp, great to have you here. And so of course, you can find JP over at BoomTime.com. So, JP, word of mouth marketing. And you say that word of mouth marketing is one form of marketing that really works. Why is that?

JP Clement 1:23
Well, it does work because it’s been proven, year over year to be one of the top tactics or technique for marketers to generate, to generate awareness and consideration. So basically, feeling at the top of the marketing funnel. And every study says that referrals and you know, experience with content marketing by these trusted and credible brings the best the most as is what has the most impact on their decision making. So word of mouth marketing does work.

David Bain 2:02
So is there a certain definition for word of mouth marketing? Is it existing customers telling other prospects or people that would be interested potentially in a business’s services about that business? Or is there another better definition for that?

JP Clement 2:17
Yeah, I think there are many definitions of word of mouth marketing. You know, some people think is just influencer market marketing, we tend to add some time to think about word of mouth marketing, as, you know, a combination of a different bunch of different digital marketing tactics, such as content marketing, email marketing, it’s basically all about spreading, spreading the, you know, some awareness and messaging about what you do as, as a company. We think about it this way, because most of our focus is is on b2b businesses. So businesses that sell to other businesses, and for these types of businesses, the you know, whatever marketing for us takes a little bit, probably different form than you would take for b2c marketers.

David Bain 3:10
Okay, okay. So I’m sure we’ll come on to a guess the differences between word of mouth for b2c versus b2b. But just in terms of definition of word of mouth, and what word of mouth is and how it’s changed? Has it changed much over the years? I mean, it’s word of mouth marketing, very different in terms of the way it operates in 2021. Compared with maybe a few years ago,

JP Clement 3:35
I would say, Yes. You know, at the very beginning, word of mouth marketing was pretty rudimentary, and you did have a lot of tools to actually implement word of mouth marketing campaigns. In the past pirate, I would say, five, six years, there’s been a lot of changes in in what about marketing? A lot of companies I’ve actually come up with, you know, all kinds of tools, SAS tools, to, to help you do what am I mark marketing in the box almost. And so we don’t do that necessarily, you know, we, but we don’t use those tools at one time. But you know, they are out there, they exist, and they work pretty well. We still believe in that, you know, the fact that people are a little bit better than AI still in marketing, although that may change the next few years. But there’s been a lot of, of changes in, in, in the world of word of mouth marketing.

David Bain 4:32
So how can a brand be strategic with their word of mouth marketing? Or is it not just the case that if a product’s great and you’ve make that product, great and if you make your customer service great and people are naturally going to tell their friends about their experiences with your brand are other more strategic better things that you can do to make that more likely to happen? Well, first, I

JP Clement 4:55
think you know, any marketing and diverse should be based on a very sound And thoroughly thought out strategy. But for what about marketing is is specifically, you know, the the sad fact is that people were disappointed in your product are eight times more likely to talk about it then people who are happy with your product. So as a marketer, especially what about marketer, you have to have a strategy in place, and you have to stoke the fires of digital Moreover, what about marketing, and there are several tactics and techniques that you can use for that. But, yeah, in and of itself, or by itself, it will not happen, you have to really work on it.

David Bain 5:42
So, it will be one or two tactics that you could perhaps share now to, to give the listener or viewer, something to take away with and trying their business.

JP Clement 5:52
Yeah, so very several, but I think, you know, the most obvious one is online reviews. So advocacy, if you think about it in terms of the marketing funnel, and getting your, your customers to talk about your product, especially if you had a good experience with it and leave reviews on any place that makes sense for your business. So it could be Google reviews, it could be you know, Yelp reviews, it could be any kind of other directory type of reviews, but those reviews are super critical in terms of generating that word of mouth. And that ad advocacy, testimonials, obviously go with reviews, online reviews, but our so again, you know, a, if you can get people where peers to the your customer base to give you testimonials, reviews, case studies, those kinds of things are really important in terms of spreading the word of mouth.

David Bain 6:50
So initially, I guess when you think of word of mouth, it’s it’s variable. It’s it’s, it’s talking directly to someone, but from the way that you were describing it, they’re actually it’s not about sharing things face to face, it’s potentially just hearing what other real customers are saying about something. So it could be in the written form is is, is audio and video becoming more important or is still primarily about text based and for word of mouth?

JP Clement 7:20
Yeah, so you know, in this day and age, face to face eyes lost a lot of its appeal, for very obvious reasons. So yes, you know, the written word is important, but video has become probably one of the most important medium in terms of marketing period, you know, the engagement with video on on, on the web, in on social media networks. He’s just, you know, blowing away any other type of medium. So, podcasts obviously great. And I will be doing one right now. So but those do work very well. But I think, you know, if I had to rank them, I would see video first podcast or audio, second and written word third. Again, some businesses or some products or brands might have, you know, a different ordering, just based on what they do and who they are and what their brand is. But overall, I would say that, you know, people should definitely focus on video. Okay,

David Bain 8:25
I’ve talked to a few people from hot jar in the past, and they’ve actually grown their brands very effectively using Word of mouth marketing, thinking about it, because they, they actually get many sales from people who have heard about their brand from recommendations from appearing on other podcasts. And it’s, it’s great, but it’s also actually very tricky for them to measure. So how do you measure the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing and do more of what works better?

JP Clement 8:54
Yeah, that’s a very good question. And I’m big on measuring anything that that we do as an agency. And the great thing about digital marketing, but most of what you do, is measurable, but yet still that link between, you know, a podcast or video podcast, an article or blog post anything and, and its result in terms of converting leads into clients or converting listeners into into leads, is a little bit harder to measure. But there are there are tools that you can use, by the way, hotjar were big fan of hot jars, at boom time we we actually do use our product. But so, you know, we we try all kinds of various all kinds of little tricks that you can use to start measuring that. We do. And we do actually we do our own podcast and we measure that by looking at you know, we look at things like subscribers we we put tracking pixels in everything we do. We have calls to action at the end of our videos and our podcasts. So you know, these are ways that can enable you to track conversions, especially if you use a tool like I could gravity form on the other hand, or some kind of lead capture tool on your website and pushing people to specific pages or places on your website, then you can start tracking you know where you’re coming from, if you have the tracking pixel and starting tracking your conversion rates and things like that. So there are you know, there are tools and ways to measure that. But yeah, you have to work at it a little bit.

David Bain 10:35
Yeah, I’ve interviewed Louis Greenie and David’s darmanin from hot jar. So they’re great guys. And the thing about iPhones, about driving people to a call to action from a poll from a podcast is the majority of listeners won’t actually take that call to action, but they still will listen to the content, they’ll still get that increased brand awareness because of listening to your podcast. Dude, I obviously produce podcasts for b2b brands out there, as I’m always thinking about helping clients to measure the value of publishing a podcast. And I’m always uncomfortable with telling them to have a strong call to action on a podcast and use that as a means of measuring how successful that podcast episode has been. I mean, what are your thoughts on other ways to measure the impact of appearing on a podcast? Or publishing a podcast yourself? Because I’m tempted to say to clients things like well, ask your customers or ask your listeners ask people how they actually heard of you to begin with when they become a customer. And that helps you decide what content to publish in the future and see what content has worked? Is that kind of question, a good thing to do? Or is there something I’m missing in terms of a better way to measure the effectiveness of a podcast?

JP Clement 11:54
No, that’s a definitely a very good question to ask. You know, we do actually, sometimes always ask people, how did you hear from us? Sometimes we know, sometimes we don’t. And therefore the best way to get that piece of information is to ask for it. And these? Yeah, it’s it’s a great question to ask. I mean, and never question to ask, which is the thought that I had when we were talking about advocacy and word of mouth marketing generation for happy customers? What one question that we do ask as well, and I recommend any digital marketer to ask is a very, very simple questions that leads you to the computation of an NPS score or net promoter score, which is, you know, how likely are you to recommend blank to a colleague or peer? And that’s, that’s a that’s a very simple questions, and it takes literally 20 seconds for customers to answer it. And it’s not a very intrusive question. And it really can do wonders in terms of tracking your word of mouth in the sense that you can get a sense of you know, how likely people are to recommend you to talk about you, and therefore spread the spread the word about your company brands services offering.

David Bain 13:12
So how do you determine the optimum time to ask that question? Because obviously, I’ve been I get annoyed sometimes when I buy a product or service, and someone asked me to write a review before I’ve even received it. So obviously, ideally, you want to be asked at the time where maybe you’ve just started using whatever you’ve purchased, and you’re more able to actually write an informed review. So how do you define the right time?

JP Clement 13:35
Yeah, well look, the wishy washy answer answer but the figure the right answer, it depends on what your product is how your customers use your product or your services. So you know, for us, for instance, we we do we asked that question about three months after we’ve onboard a client and study the campaign, forever companies you can probably experience with their product or service is almost a medium you can ask a few days after you know, they probably have used your product, I think it really depends on on the on the behaviour of your customers, as with regards to your product, or service or service,

David Bain 14:15
or maybe as your customers when’s the best time to be asking you this question?

JP Clement 14:20
Yes. You know, customers don’t don’t make it my experience that these customers do not mind being asked questions, actually, it’s another way to engage them and keep them you know, to make sure that you know, they realise we made the right choice by buying your customer, your service or your product. We do actually we do a follow up campaigns after a while, not only ask that NPS question but we also do, you know, we try to communicate with our clients after we’ve closed the sale as much as possible. And we recommend that to all of our clients that they do the same. You know, that you know, it’s a it’s a great She’s great word of mouth tool to, to actually ask questions and communicate some information that is necessary for your customers to fully enjoy your products or service and get the most out of it, to communicate with them on a pretty regular basis after the sale has been closed.

David Bain 15:18
Yeah, I think a lot of marketers or not enough marketers get involved with a port, the post purchase funnel stage, they just try and complete the sale and then move on to the next customer.

JP Clement 15:29
Yep, exactly.

David Bain 15:31
And we were talking briefly, before we started recording about an example of a company we were talking about HP have a company that has actually used a b2c example to bring in more effective b2b marketing and more debates apart as part of that. Did you want to share a little bit about that?

JP Clement 15:51
Yes, definitely. You know, I’m, I’ve been an HP customer on the personal basis on on the b2c side of things, if you want to call it that for years with their printers, which are really good printers. But as I started, you know, I think my own age agencies and the business I was, it was very interesting to see how they were, that’s their communication, and they are very advocacy was working differently for a small business owner versus just an individual consumer. And, you know, their products are basically the same. I mean, they have some different products for enterprise versus, you know, consumers, but the differences are, you know, relatively minimal. And it’s interesting, because we’re using very similar tactics for all the digital marketing, basically, but especially for them of marketing, that, you know, that very, very transferring, and adapting those b2c tactics to, to the b2b world. And I think that’s a very smart move. And seems like they’ve been very successful doing that. So that was pretty impressed by that for especially for a company of that size. I’ve worked in the past for a very large comp companies too. And you know, a very nimbleness is something that usually, you know, it’s not really a top top quality. But in their case, I was pretty, pretty impressed by their marketing savvy,

David Bain 17:19
we touched a little bit on obviously, reviews and a couple of other forms of word of mouth marketing, but also the importance of measuring the the impact of everything, how do you actually Tali word of mouth, word of mouth marketing together with other channels with other marketing channels? I’m thinking, is it? Is it possible to automate certain aspects of word of mouth marketing, to maybe take the content and use it elsewhere and other forms of marketing as well?

JP Clement 17:51
Yeah. So you know, there’s a lot of ways to integrate it. And, as I mentioned before, you know, analytics and monitoring is very critical, I think, to any kind of digital marketing campaign. It is the same with word of mouth campaigns. And so, you know, as I talked about tracking pixels, everything, so there’s all kinds of ways to link, what you’re doing in word of mouth market marketing with the rest of your digital marketing package. For instance, you could do Google ads, right, which PPC or sem, depending on however you want to call it, type of campaigns. And you can, you know, use these in coordination with some content or creative that you’ve generated for word of mouth marketing. That’s another way to tie you know, things that might sound very disparate and separate. But to tie them into one kind of holistic package, I truly believe that the best marketing digital marketing campaigns, or marketing campaigns in general are the ones that use multiple components and integrate them into a hole that, you know, will make them work create synergies, and will make them work much, much better. I mean, the the problem we have in digital marketing these days is that there are so many different types of tactics, tools within each of these tactics. And the athletes, our clients have a really hard time navigating that universe of digital marketing and but what we do very well, and what I urge every Digital Marketer to think about is, you know, how do you bring all these different tools to gather in kind of packages or, or you know, that that really are going to work for your marketing strategy?

David Bain 19:40
I tell you, I was just thinking of well, while you were sharing that, and you mentioned Google ads, I was thinking if you’re working very effectively together and an omni channel approach, and you’re maybe emailing people at the right paint time asking them to leave a review and they don’t leave a review, perhaps you can then automatically add that person. onto a retargeting list to show a Google ad to them to ask them to leave a review for a certain period of time. And then hopefully they’re slightly more likely to do that. Have you seen a strategy like that before?

JP Clement 20:12
Yeah, definitely Actually, we do something a little bit similar for for our clients where but we don’t. In this case, we wouldn’t use Google ads. But we do remarketing via email marketing. A lot of people in the marketing world forget that email marketing is still probably the highest ROI of any type of digital market marketing. It works very well, your email list is a very, very strong asset that you know, every company should consider, especially in the in the B2B space. So what we do is like if our clients don’t hear back from their clients, you know, we have post sale, marketing campaigns, email marketing campaigns that connect with, with at least have clients that they have, and ask them to do different things.

David Bain 20:58
Have you ever tried to define a financial value of a review to a business?

JP Clement 21:05
Honestly, I’m sorry to disappoint you, David. But no, you know, we track a lot of things. It’s, it’s it’s a little bit, it’s a bit harder for some other of the things that we do, but I could conceive of ways of doing that. Definitely.

David Bain 21:19
Okay, sure. Okay, I’ll stop going down that rabbit hole. Let’s segue into part two of our discussion. So it’s time for JP, his thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE, so JP share a lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing you a lot of value at the moment and why that tool is important for you.

JP Clement 21:37
Yeah, so there’s one tool we use, it’s called Asscher Connect. But we, we white, label it from the people who, who have created a tool. And we actually like it so much that we’ve partnered with them over at white label kind of type of partnership, and we are working hand in hand with them to make it even better based on what we do and what we know. And it’s a tool that helps you generate leads connections, first bad leads and nurture those those leads within LinkedIn.

David Bain 22:15
Wonderful. We’re just looking it up. It’s Afro connect.com, isn’t it?

JP Clement 22:18
I think so To be honest, it’s a no, the parent company is called unroll did digital But yeah, I scholarship. I think it’s actually yeah,

David Bain 22:28
it must be because I should connect.com has a strap line saying your sphere of influence growing daily. So

JP Clement 22:35
but they’ve, they retaken a very simple tool and made it into a really powerful lead generation and nurturing tool on LinkedIn, that actually can even replace your CRM, they can link to do directly to your CRM, your customers, but measurement software, but you can also do most of that stuff in initial Connect. And we are very heavy users. As I say we rebranded to our customers, but it’s, it’s definitely a secret tool that I highly recommend.

David Bain 23:10
Great. Sure. Okay, well moving on from something that you currently use to something that you’re going to use, and that is NEXT ON THE LIST. So what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to try it in?

JP Clement 23:20
So there is there are two tools that we’ve been looking at very, very closely, and we’re about to test it on ourselves, and therefore try it try to test those waters. One is called web to web Oh, the other one is, if so, honestly, don’t know what the domain names are. But those are very interesting tools that enable you to based on a series of kind of tag, no algorithms that they have, where you can present a dynamically very, very customised content to visitors on your website. Very, very interesting tools that I think, for people like us for sure, because we know we have strengths in specific industries. You could literally, you know, you can on the fly, have a visitor, they’ve figured out who the visitor is based on some criteria. And then what industries were from what company they’re from, maybe in some cases, if there is a static IP address, and then you can generate on the fly content that will speak specifically to their industry or their company. Very, very powerful tools. I think every believing in the concept that at least but we’re trying to, we’re trying to figure out internally at runtime, how to use them, whether what kind of trying to measure what kind of value is going to bring, but there is definitely a pretty significant there’s a pretty significant technique that Technological kind of threshold or barrier to overcome, let me use your website has to be ready to do those kinds of things. But I’m really excited about the prospect of testing them and hopefully rolling in my toric lines

David Bain 25:13
superable I think of phones, both domain names, web and web I o.com. Wherever your supercharges customer engagement, so I’m pretty sure it’s that one there. And if so, that was more of a challenge to find. But if hyphen soul.com the number one WordPress personalization plugin, so I presume is that wins? Oh,

JP Clement 25:34
yeah, exactly. Okay, good. First up. Really good sniffing there, David.

David Bain 25:40
Oh, I’m a professional sleuth. Let’s move on to this or that route. So this is the quick response range. 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to say the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready? I am. Tik Tok or Twitter.

JP Clement 25:59
Tik Tok,

David Bain 26:01
Facebook or LinkedIn, LinkedIn, YouTube or podcast.

JP Clement 26:06
YouTube,

David Bain 26:07
traffic or leads, leads, paid search or SEO, SEO, ads or influencers?

JP Clement 26:20
influencers

David Bain 26:22
Google ads or Facebook ads, Google ads, email marketing or check mark marketing?

Email, Mar tech stack or all in one platform?

JP Clement 26:40
All in one platform,

David Bain 26:42
one to one or scale?

JP Clement 26:44
scale?

David Bain 26:48
We got there? Certainly there were a couple of answers that surprised me. He probably paused a little bit longer than I thought for YouTube or podcasts? And was that bit of a struggle to define the right one for that one.

JP Clement 27:00
And now it’s because, you know, we put all we feel all our podcasts, for instance, and we put up on YouTube on our YouTube channel as well. So I think to me, you know, I really do believe in podcasts, obviously. And I didn’t want to offend you, either. But, you know, look, I think, you know, YouTube is such a great reach. And as such, you know, it’s the second largest search engine in the world, you know, after Google, so they’re just, I mean, there’s literally billions of searches on YouTube every day. If you if you do your YouTube marketing? Well, I think you know, you can, you can have video podcasts on YouTube, that’s probably going to generate more traffic and more engagement than just a straight regular podcast. So yeah, it’s a hard one, because I really do believe in both, but I think YouTube just because it’s so all encompassing, you know, probably is a better choice,

David Bain 27:59
and email or chat use, you’re both there. So are you actively using chat message marketing at

JP Clement 28:04
the moment? Not? Well, actually. Yes, we are. And, you know, the, it’s just that, you know, III, really believe in email marketing, but you know, it’s not really the sexiest thing, it does work very well, though. And in some cases, I think, you know, chat as a place, especially for the type of clients we have, where being being be being able to engage your customers, like really address, you know, when we’re on your website, for instance, of places like that, I think is is really a powerful way, especially, and, again, is driven by by the fact that our clients tend to have very high CLV. And typical, typically a pretty small addressable market. So, you know, being able to connect one on one directly with those potential leads, or prospective clients is really critical. Okay,

David Bain 28:54
so let’s move on to the $10,000 question. If

I was to give you $10,000, and you had to spend it over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on? And how would you measure success?

JP Clement 29:06
That’s a very hard question. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot. And, you know, I, as we talked about, I really believe that, you know, you should, you know, there is no, there’s no more silver bullets in in the digital marketing world. You know, back in the days, maybe 20 years ago, there were but today they’re not. I think I would, I would do, I would spend that money generating advocacy for our, from our current clients. That’s proved to be really in the biggest differentiators for ourselves and happy clients. But I see really good things about us and there are tools that you can buy that we’ve been looking at that kind of really manage that process and those interactions with the clients and generate the kind of advocacy basically, advocacy programmes in the box. They are not very cheap. So I would do that. And I would, you know, I mean, the the, the ROI would be pretty easy to figure out, right? It’s like how many leads or referrals do we get from that programme? And we know what the CLV of our customers is. So, you know, pretty easy to compute that for itself.

David Bain 30:19
Okay, well, to finish off, let’s focus on someone else who deserves it. So that is a MAGICAL MARKETER. So who is an up-and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to? What can we learn from them? And where can we find them?

JP Clement 30:31
Yeah, so I would say that Wes limos, l e. Mo s, you can find him on LinkedIn. He’s the creator of that Asher Connect software that we use. And he’s as much a technologist as a marketer. But he’s a brilliant young guy, who, who have created a great product but also kind of matches that great product with some very interesting marketing tactics, which I think are very organic and very, very interesting. His company is called roll digital. There definitely are under the radar. But Wes and I have had many meaningful conversations one on one he he has a very interesting approach to doing word of mouth marketing on LinkedIn.

David Bain 31:18
Wonderful. Well, I find his profile on LinkedIn as well it’s just west Lamaze is the URL on LinkedIn so that was easy enough to find this was Episode 241 of Digital Marketing Radio where JP Clement from boom time shared very specific tips about word of mouth marketing I love your focus on reviews and reviewing at the right time. So ensuring that you define it could be three months into your cycle as it is with yours JP when you should actually ask that for review and also consider retargeting to encourage that as well to optimise improve the number of customers doing that as well as your SECRET SOFTWARE software you shared Asscher Connect as your NEXT ON THE LIST he shared webydo and if so, if I console.com and as your mark MAGICAL MARKETER was lemme so everything that you mentioned, JP in the show today will be listed below the video on YouTube and in the podcast show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. jp what was the best social platform for someone to follow you and say hi.

JP Clement 32:22
It’s really LinkedIn. We know I’m a very heavy serving to myself. You can find me@linkedin.com slash in slash JP Clements. So pretty easy.

David Bain 32:31
Superb. Okay, well, I’ve been host David Bain. You can also find me producing podcasts for B2B brands over at Casting cred.com. Remember, wherever you’re tuning in, feedback is fantabulous. Until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

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