Last time I gave you a laundry list of tips and tricks you can use to make your
Word of Mouth (WOM) program work for you. Hopefully you’ve had some time to reflect and identified the ones that are the best fit for your company, products, services and target customers, so you can put them to work in your WOM campaign.

We will conclude this series on WOM with the specific steps to create a WOM campaign. These steps are:

1. Seed the market. Find some way to get the product into the hands of key influencers;
2. Provide a channel for the influencers to speak and get excited about your product;
3. Offers lots of testimonials and other resources;
4. Form an ongoing group that meets once a year in a resort, and once a month by teleconference;
5. Create fun events to bring users together and invite non-users. Saturn, Harley-Davidson, and Lexus have all been successful with this approach;
6. Develop clips on your website featuring enthusiastic customers talking with other enthusiastic customers;
7. Hold seminars and workshops;
8. Create a club with membership benefits;
9. Pass out flyers;
10. Tell friends;
11. Offer special incentives and discounts for friends who refer their friends;
12. Put the Internet to work;
13. Do at least one outrageous thing to generate word of mouth;
14. Empower employees to go the extra mile;
15. Encourage networking and brainstorm ideas;
16. Run special sales;
17. Encourage referrals with the use of a strong referral program;
18. Use a script to tell people exactly what to say in their word of mouth communication.

These are all amazing ways you can spread the word about your products and/or services and start a WOM campaign that takes on a life of its own. Before you are ready to launch your WOM campaign to the world, you must go through the checklist to make sure you’ve covered all the essentials.

Here’s your WOM campaign checklist:

1. Are all of your communications sending the same simple message? If it can’t survive word of mouth, it’s not a compelling story.
2. Is your product positioned as part of a category? For example: “A dandruff shampoo that doesn’t dry your hair.”
3. Are your examples outrageous enough to be shared?
4. Do you enhance your materials with success stories from real people?
5. Are you using experts effectively and in an objective manner?
6. Have you created mechanisms so people can follow up on the word of mouth they hear, as well as creating simple ways to inquire or order?
7. Have you made the decision process easy for customers?
8. Have you created events and mechanisms so that once a year your prospects hear about your product, and it is easier to try or buy?

These are all essential elements to keep in mind when taking a second or even third look at your WOM campaigns. I hope you’ve found this series on WOM to be a great resource and are getting ready to put it into action for your own products and services.

Remember, if you need help with anything in this series, I am here to assist you every step of the way.