I often hear people say, “We get all our business through word-of-mouth”, and I usually think “Oh you lazy bugger” or that you must be very small because you get all your business through word-of-mouth. It says to me that you don’t do anything else. “We don’t do any other marketing” or “I’m very small and enough comes in to sustain me and I like it that way.” Frankly, fair enough, if that’s your choice, that’s up to you.
Now, I come from a specific perspective. I’m a business coach for trades business owners who want to grow and scale and get to that next level, and word-of-mouth won’t get you there.
Word-of-mouth is a beautiful, delightful thing. It’s a reward, it’s almost a Karmic reward (I live in Byron Bay, remember?). It’s almost a Karmic reward for doing a good job. You do a good job, people refer you to their friends, people come knocking on the door and saying things like, “I’ve heard you’re pretty good. Can you take my money and do some work for me?” Beautiful, but you can’t control it and you can’t drive it and if you want to grow faster than that organic, lovely, slower way, you’re going to have to do marketing I’m afraid. Word-of-mouth will not get you to the next level.
Word-of-mouth will not drive your business larger and give you the money and the resources to grow and scale on its own. So, I’m really sorry, I’m not a fan of word-of-mouth marketing. It’s insufficient.
If you’d like me to help you with how to do the marketing and how not to waste the money that you need inevitably to spend on marketing, of course, do that.
I have very clear ideas on how you should spend your money or your time or your people’s time depending on which segments of the market you serve. It’s very different whether you serve consumers or whether you work with builders and trades as a subcontractor, whoever you work with, to the corporate and commercial market.
You need to do very different types of marketing. There are different videos for that. I’m sure I’ve referred to the way you do those types of marketing is the marketing building blocks in other videos.
For now, word-of-mouth, good for you. If you’re ambitious, you need a bit more.
See you later.