When it comes to BtoB word of mouth, one of the best ways to get stuff shared is to give it away as research. People love to forward statistics, quote research, and cite your findings in their own studies.
Your research efforts don’t have to be complicated. Here are 3 simple steps to creating something worth sharing:
- Get some simple, honest numbers. Poll your customers, ask your fans for feedback, or compile a study by bringing together existing research.
- Put it in an incredibly easy form to share. Email it out as a .PDF file, create a simple YouTube video, or put it up for download on your homepage (but don’t bury it behind a complicated form!).
- Send it out to key talkers. And when you do, don’t just send them the link, send them the full content so it’s ready to pass on.
How a word of mouth marketing supergenius does it:
eMarketer regularly sends out research in a simple email that’s ready to paste into a PowerPoint slide. In addition to their emails, their online articles also include simple graphs and charts that are easy to grab and use elsewhere.
And not only is each graph and chart ready to use in your next presentation, but they all include a link to eMarketer’s website and all are designed in the brand’s signature style — so everyone knows where it’s from.
A study highlighted in Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive — the fantastic book by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini — revealed that companies with names that were easy to pronounce outperformed companies with complicated names on the stock market.
In both controlled studies using fictitious company names as well as real-world samplings of brands traded on the NYSE, researchers Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer found that companies with highly-fluent names consistently outperformed brands with complicated names.
In one experiment using a random sampling of 89 companies traded on the NYSE with IPOs between 1990 and 2004, Alter and Oppenheimer found that if a person invested $1,000 in the 10 most fluently named companies and the same amount in the 10 least fluently named companies, the investment in the first group would outperform the second group by $333 in just one year.
The Lesson: Don’t shoot your word of mouth (and the overall potential of your brand) in the foot by giving yourself or your products names that are difficult to pronounce, search for online, or share with a friend.
Learn More: See the study
[Update: After double-checking the research results, it looks like our original title of "Word of Mouth Research: Brand names that are easy to pronounce are worth 33% more on the NYSE" is at best merely plausible, and at worst, just plain wrong. Apologies for any confusion, here's the actual figures from the study:
"To emphasize just how successful investing in fluently named stocks would be, we calculated how much a $1,000 investment would yield when invested in a basket of the 10 most fluently named shares and the 10 most disfluently named shares. The fluent basket would have yielded a significantly greater profit at all four time periods: $112 after 1 day, $118 after 1 week, $277 after 6 months (all Ps < 0.05), and $333 after 1 year (P < 0.10)]“
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