The Power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing and PR: Boosting Success with Customer Conversations

Welcome. This is the Public Relations Review Podcast, a program to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors and others. Now here is your host, peter Wolfolk.

Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast and to our listeners all across America and around the world. Now question would you like people to talk about your brand? How about chat about your products and services on social media and have visibility on e-commerce? Well, i'm certain your response is probably yes. Are you familiar with word of mouth, marketing and public relations? That's right word of mouth. Now, according to a Forbes magazine article, word of mouth is a powerful marketing public relations tool. Why? Because consumers often reach out to friends and other consumers before making a decision to purchase, especially when the purchase is one of major significance or higher value. Now, my guest today certainly has experience in word of mouth, public relations and marketing. He also has 25 plus years of experience in public relations. He has earned two PRSA Bronze and Bill Awards and chaired the word of mouth practice group for Hansen Associates Global Network of Offices. He says most people think it just happens, not so. You must build a strategy for word of mouth, public relations and marketing. So joining me today from Des Moines, iowa, is Ryan Hanser, apr, president of Hansen Associates. Now Hansen Associates is an IPREX partner, a shareholder and a $500 million network of communications agencies with 1,100 staff and 100 offices worldwide. So, ryan, thank you so very much for being our guest today.

Oh, it's a great pleasure, peter. Thank you for having me join.

So let's start with how you became involved with word of mouth, pr and marketing.

Yeah, that's a great place to start, because I think I entered public relations through an academic path. I went to college, i studied journalism and all the forms of storytelling And along the way I think we all knew that quietly, we were all kind of helping each other navigate purchase decisions. This happens, like really early in our lives, right, i'm making the right choice here by the thing and looking for others. So this thing was, you know, organically. it's as old as time, right. But there was this point where I was entering the workforce and the internet was becoming kind of a big deal, and I distinctly remember the Clutrain Manifesto, which is exactly what it sounds like, a whole bunch of theses about how the internet was going to change everything, and in fact most of that is true. but the thing to know about word of mouth is still mostly offline. It's still mostly the conversations we have person to person, either face to face or by phone or text. A lot, you know, the influencing of behavior online pales in comparison to the work we actually do to be helpful to one another voluntarily every day.

So, once you made that discovery, how did you slowly begin to transition to this method of outreach and marketing as compared to others?

Yeah, well, there was beyond my stumbling into the practice. There were people already gathering knowledge. So you had what was Roper research at the time really digging in on influence? and there's still work on that topic today about how with the nature of influence and how does it work and can we activate it. And so there was, across our offices, an effort to kind of build a practice that can show repeatable success, using word of mouth as kind of the touchstone for whether you're basically doing it right. Are people talking about you? Are they saying the things that are helpful? Because, again, to the extent that we share, the word of mouth is a voluntary, helpful thing. The business actions should align with that and that really is the rocket fuel usually for recommendation, referral and growth.

So when you're sitting down with the client I would imagine a lot of clients have not heard about this as well How do you get them into the idea of, or move them toward the idea of, engaging in word of mouth as compared to other outreach efforts, or is this a combination that is included with other outreach efforts?

Yeah, i mean our process on word of mouth, specifically as a strategy, essentially, and then as a way of kind of being in relationship with stakeholders, starts with readiness. So there are organizations and cultures for whom the voice of the customer or the voice of the employee is maybe it might be listened to but it might not be acted on. Those are not organizations that probably can walk this road, because the threshold here is really remarkable, literally. are you doing something that makes me want to talk about you? So, even to get to that point, these can be little things, but sometimes they're whole cloth experiences that are remarkable And the organizations for whom they're either asking for that or we can see that they have the culture and capacity. then it's really about taking them from a place of readiness, where they either are remarkable or want to be remarkable, and then figuring out where the points of engagement are so that they'll hold. there's actually the support and encouragement Because, again, what we're talking about is largely an organic, innate behavior between people and we're trying to encourage it. That word of mouth is this thing that's voluntary and helpful, but word of mouth marketing really is a business action that generates the conversation And so it is the business action. that is usually where the work is done to decide are we taking the right actions? are they triggering the right conversations? that is kind of the anatomy at the front end for the work.

Give me an example, then, of a product or a service that you've engaged in that measured up to or met the requirements for word of mouth. Give me something out there what that product or service was, then how you went about getting it started.

Yeah, yeah, i think for your listeners to understand, like word of mouth is across all categories, it doesn't really matter what business you're in. There's still recommendation and referral. That's moving that market conversation. But in the list of examples, one of our long time clients was actually a bus company. So megabuscom is an organization people might be familiar with. They've done national city to city bus service And you know what was remarkable about them was really the category creation and the value proposition. So if I say hey, we're going to travel by bus, most people will gray hound. Their competitor in their competitive set was top of mind. And the gray hound experience culturally is maybe not like first class air travel, right. So bus travel as a category is maybe not top of mind on how I would get from A to B. But here comes these folks. They brought their business model out of the UK And they did away with bus stations, right, you're not elbow to elbow with folks until you board. You're buying a ticket online And the tickets start from $1. And the experience of a traveler is fast, right. So city to city express instead of whistle stop. So just at the service level, a remarkable delivery, right. So it wasn't so much that there was a lot of engineering required there. It was really about in the launch and in the trial and in the early days of that category creation or remaking of bus travel that we really needed the voice of the customer to essentially prove out that the value proposition was real. Because you know, i'm in Des Moines, des Moines to Chicago for a dollar in the same amount of time it would take me to drive. That's unbelievable. How can that be real? How can that be true? So the skepticism that sometimes comes from first movers really often benefits strongly from that word of mouth, those first customers who can say, yeah, i did this and it worked, it was great right. That helpfulness, not only to their peers There's all the reasons that we have motivations to talk But to the company themselves, who was able to fill bus after bus with eager riders.

And I would imagine, since you said a little $1, that probably attracted some media attention to it.

Yes, yeah, and that's the thing to remember about word of mouth is that it is contextual and constant, and it's something of the indicator species, of whether you're doing it right and you can't ignore the rest of your marketing mix. Again, the business action is the trigger, it's the thing that makes stuff happen. But you'd be foolish not to be amplifying the voices of your employees and customers. You know they're always, they're talking And so permission and encouragement there is part of it. But we're living in a world now where everybody's sharing, retweeting, et cetera. The amplification of those experiences is hard to. It's hard to overstate the value of that work.

So then, talk about, maybe a little bit about activating a word of mouth. How do you go about getting it started? I mean, i think you mentioned, yes, this case you had a $1 charge of fee for that. I mean, that certainly was one way. What are some of the other ways that you might use of getting its word of mouth less started?

Yeah, activation is really encouragement, right. So it's not like not an emergency, you know, it's really an extension of strategy. So there are many forms of encouragement. So you can. You can encourage employees or customers to demonstrate their knowledge, right. Provide the recommendation, to offer suggestions. That's all ways to like sustain their conversation, but that's maybe at the enterprise level. The other way to think about this is just at the business level. You can be really specific. This is like for listeners who have small businesses. Right, there's a restaurant down the street from me here in Des Moines where they are constantly baking chocolate chip cookies and they are constantly putting these warm cookies by the door on your way out, and I cannot tell you how many people you know. They may not know the name of the restaurant, but they know that there's cookies at the door right. Some of these things. they're very small, but they leave a like, a tangible impression and they become the trigger for talking about the experience, right? So the next time I'm looking for a neighborhood restaurant, somebody's going to say, oh, you got to go to the place, right, this is have to be ocean boiling, this can be, very specific things that you know will surprise and delight.

So I guess the one thing I'm getting out of here that it has to be something good, something that attracts people, something that people might want to experience, to make this work.

when we talk about the word of mouth, Yes, the value is the other piece of this. right, we're generally not talking just to talk. There has to be a reason. The value is exchanged and then shared. You know some people need help making a purchase. Some people will share the fact that they've made that purchase And that's really effective marketing reach because it's a network effect. I think that's you know your earlier question about where does this stuff fit in the mix. We know there's research that shows us that advertising actually starts conversations right. So in the context of paid reach, like broad counsel is like, use your ad dollars to start conversations. They can be a little off center of what you're actually trying to move in terms of product and service, but to hold forth and to create conversation is to just earn a bunch of reach on the back of that in every direction I'd offer in that context. the other thing that really is important here is to listen, right. So you know it's the organization set up to be, you know, monitoring online conversation and carefully offline to the voice of the customer and the employees, because that feedback loop is really important for sustaining conversations in a really two way. So sustaining that and also looking for new opportunities, not necessarily shift strategy, but just ways to be again helpful, because that's generally where the remarkable comes in.

So a couple of key things that I picked up from that is that people have to listen to find out if you're being talked about and the platforms and the ways that they used to listen to and pick up on that information to find out if, in fact, it's gaining traction, so to speak, and then other ways to amplify those words, that of encouragement or support.

Yeah, I think that's like a really old school PR approach right, just makes the customer famous Because it shines on the organization, right, Like give them credit for doing good things and write things, and then that shines in turn. This is like we're having like a really high level conversation. I think there is a lot to be. There's a lot of knowledge on the shelf about the science of interpersonal relationships and the reasons why we share things and how influences works. There's a lot of reading that people can do The guy named Chalbini, who actually has a fairly older book about persuasion And the more you understand about the anatomy of these four, these social forces, the easier it is then to say, okay, this is where it fits for us and this is how and why we can make it happen. I think that's where there's usually some bench work to be done. Beyond the knowledge is just to think in terms of how people transmit their values and how to like embrace stakeholder feelings as an organization that is paying attention and being helpful in a way that people wanna talk about.

So there are a number of different things that we have to, as I listen to it. We have to do. We have to look at what triggers the conversation to get people talking. What is it? how do we go about marketing this more, the fact that they've begun talking, and basically, how do we go about measuring how effective this is? Those sort of things are all included in this particular outreach effort.

Indeed yeah, i mean. another way to think about all this is that there's a lot marketing and advertising in PRs, this giant category of a low the line spend. You know we talk about inefficiency and all that and the lack of trust in institutions, and even people Like a stranger on the internet is often as trusted as some folks who probably know what they're talking about. So if we're ignoring what is average, word of mouth becomes really important, because the remarkable thing that is presented when it's relevant, repeated, is that's the role of marketing in this context. for word of mouth And you know you talk about measurement this is one of these things that people will ask me hey, what do you do professionally? And I'll say, well, i have a public relations firm and they don't know what question to ask next. So, like, what is PR right? What's its value? what do you do right? And, i think, similar. so it's early in my career I think I understood that, like measurement, accountability, visibility was gonna need to be foreground to be credible about the value proposition. And I think word of mouth is this thing we swim around in all the time And so we think we kind of know what it is, but to the extent that you can actually attribute investments in that strategy and that point of view to outcomes not outputs but outcomes. that really, i think, can bolster folks to intuit that this is important and begin to kind of dig in on this frame as a way to be in relationship with their stakeholders. There again, there's a lot on the shelf, like McKinsey has this whole like value chain that they lay out about the value for both developing and mature markets for that point of purchase. that includes word of mouth equity. There's lots of math around this. I think I would probably suggest a more simple approach for most businesses is just gonna be about do you have true two-way dialogue? What are you learning from your stakeholders and how are you better because you're in that conversation? And then I think what we know is that there are the operational experience and profitability. Like people will pay more for the remarkable experience, so you shouldn't be afraid to invest in being remarkable because it's going to print, like at multiples probably, of your peers, and so if you want to get specific about measurement, it's really about like in the accountability work for like volume and sentiments. You've got your triggers, you know how are those doing. Are they fading over time? And then we all kind of gaze at the internet, but most of word of mouth is really offline, and so having the ability to not just listen but to be able to chase it in ways that you can show business outcomes offline is hard to overstate how important it is to have the antennas up there. Like people know about, like net promoter score right? Am I likely to recommend? Am I satisfied? Those don't really go far enough in this context. Yeah.

Well, let me ask you now do influencers have some input? Are influencers ever involved in this word of mouth, i mean, because that's basically what they're doing in some cases but do you ever involve them in this outreach effort?

Variably. Yes, i mean, this is the thing We've seen other. So influencers is literally social science right And there's lots of kind of read-in we can do on that, because I think there are things about influence, that the mechanics of it, that maybe aren't well understood. And I think when we talk specifically about like online influence, content creation, i mean that's a place where measurement gets really interesting, because the internet I mean like less than 60% of web traffic is human. So you know, are my stats real? Are my clicks real? Who you know? is it actually down funnel making a difference? I think influencers in the you can't see my air quotes influencers as a long-term relationship probably deliver some value And there are definitely examples that we and others have of like short term tactical influence. But I think the principles of it I mentioned Chalbini earlier, like his book on influence is really important because those forces are not necessarily all at work online in a kind of transactional sort of way. The online influence stuff exists. It's harder, you know you can't put coins in the machine and get the return. I think would be one short-hand way to describe what does and doesn't work about influence online. The other flavor there is ambassadors. These are programs. We've actually stood up for clients because an ambassador is a formal role and it's not transactional right. These are people who, for one reason or another, care enough to kind of be at the table and they're really deputized. They have a list of things they're expected to do and they're often compensated very directly, not for the content that they create but for the formal role that they have. And so they're definitely talking right. They're definitely you would call them promoters, but they're also taking in their listening. Their station in their social networks is such that they're in a good position to be providing that feedback. Ambassadors is another frame for formal roles for people who may be customers, may be employees, may be other stakeholders who are essentially at the table for word of mouth strategy over time. Let me make that real for you. I mentioned the Megabots earlier. We stood up a formal ambassador program that was all customers. Their principal ridership was I'm going to call it college adjacent right People who were often in these campus towns and they had almost street team level work that was being done on a team basis, and so the client has a program that's being managed over time. But the metrics and the visibility were really discreet right. So it is about how are the customers feeling about the service in that town? right, and because they're peers, right, because these ambassadors are people, a person like me, right, that's who we most trust is a person like ourselves. You know, the skepticism is not there. These are very easy conversations for them to have in community on an ongoing basis. Some of the stuff has been driven, but some of it's just person to person And what we found is that where that ambassador program activated, you would immediately see lift And when there were formal like triggering activations, events and such, you would see sales volume in 24 hours. So these were very specific, formal, concrete, actionable and hey, this works. There are certain conversations about people who are influencing behavior in a formal way. It's not a third party situation to the extent that there's an intermediary. This is really the organization and its customers getting after the market making, because, again, they have this remarkable value proposition. That needs a little bit of explaining at intervals.

So perhaps one of the major things that I got out of this is that the person that is being listened to, or that is giving the word of mouth information out, has to be credible and trusted, and people have to be comfortable with them for it to be legitimate.

Yep, and that's a real challenge If you're in a technical field or you are an institutional, you're a government Edelman big PR firm. They've been tracking trust for like two decades now And I remember the point I think it was 2020, it was quite a year where basically globally, and especially in the US, people said, basically you can't be ethical and competent. It's like the shattering of trust, of institutional trust, of individual trust, Because one of the things I mentioned Kutrain earlier we've all become very self-referential. We're going to turn to the corners of the internet and to the people that we know to find our truth, And most of our questions start with an internet search right, And then it trickles from there the people that we know. Yeah, trust is this whole eroding river bank that can make it really hard if you have technical expertise or have an institution that you represent, because it's probably not your executive director or your board chair or your CEO or your principal leader. It's probably the line worker, the clerk, the point of customer contact, who is actually most credible, And so when you can equip those people, often they're in a place to understand where the strongest customers are, where the issues seem to be bubbling up. It's really about. That's the tuning in as well as the credibility for triggering conversation.

Well, ryan, you've provided us with a wide variety of information on this, but give me have any sort of closing remarks that our listeners might be made aware of as they perhaps pursue word of most public relations.

I think there's always more we can learn, always ways to grow as PR practitioners. But to break this down real, simply, word of mouth is voluntary and helpful. If you can engineer business actions that generate that conversation, you're doing it right. Because to be remarkable is to win market And I'd offer that participating in the market conversation, as opposed to maybe ignoring it right, is the fundamental you will learn right. Working to be remarkable is really the, I think the second, just simple. It doesn't have to be big things, but the things that will get people to talk really is where it can start. The other thing about word of mouth is just celebrate your people, celebrate your customers, celebrate your employees, lift them up. They all have networks right. They all have their own reach I mentioned earlier like use any of your paid reach to start conversations. It'll make all that work a lot better. And then, finally, just make sure that you have that. Your measurement includes listening to the market conversation, because there's value to be had in that. Those five things I think will take organizations a long way if they're thinking in this frame.

Good Ryan. Thank you again. so so very, very much. My guest today has been Ryan Hanser. He is the president of Hanser Associates in Des Moines, Iowa, And if you've enjoyed the show, please use your word of mouth to let your friends and colleagues know about this And, of course, we'd certainly like to get a review from you if you've enjoyed the show And again, share this with your colleagues and listen to the next edition of our public relations review podcast. Thank you.

This podcast is produced by communication strategies, an award winning public relations and public affairs firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you for joining us.