Word of Mouth Marketing | Ep. 167 Data Gurus Podcast | Insights on Business Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions, Market Research & Data Collection

Welcome to another helpful and informative episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Sima is excited to have Ed Keller joining her today. Ed is a leading expert in word-of-mouth marketing and social media analytics. He is the Co-founder of Keller Fay Group, the former CEO of Engagement Labs, and the author of the book, The Influentials.



Ed is passionate about word-of-mouth marketing because it makes a huge difference! It is critical to how brands grow and how consumers make decisions about products and the services they buy. In this episode, Ed talks about word of mouth marketing, explains why he is so passionate about it and discusses its effectiveness as a marketing tool.



Intuitive belief 



Many businesses intuitively believe in word-of-mouth marketing but do not fully understand what to do about it or how to use it to grow their business.



Ed’s book



Almost twenty years ago, Ed wrote a book called The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy. He was the CEO of RoperASW, a large market research firm, at the time. Malcolm Gladwell had just written The Tipping Point, and Roper had an extensive database about the people that typified what Gladwell was talking about. So they put all the data together in the book.



The Keller Fay Group



After writing the book, Ed met many budding entrepreneurs in the early stages of social listening. He enjoyed the space and wanted to jump into it as an entrepreneur. So he and a colleague started the Keller Fay Group to become the measurement standard for offline word of mouth.



What is word-of-mouth marketing?



Word of mouth can be technology-driven or with person-to-person small group interactions.



Offline word of mouth happens when people talk face-to-face, over the phone, on a Zoom chat, texting, or IMing. It occurs when people seek advice or want to share an experience with friends and family.



Social media and writing reviews are also forms of word of mouth.



How important is word of mouth?



Word of mouth can explain between thirty and forty percent of purchase decisions. It is not as high as that in fast-moving consumer goods, however.



Covid



During Covid, word of mouth became even more important to people as they needed new products, and new ways of buying came onto the market.



AT&T Mobility



AT&T Mobility was one of their first clients to model with word of mouth data. Word of mouth came in as a close second to paid advertising as a determinant of new subscribers. That was the first time that Ed and his partner had concrete evidence of something they intuitively believed important.



An important factor



After that, they started modeling word of mouth against many different categories. In every case, it proved to be an important factor. It also has an important relationship to the effectiveness of paid advertising.



Research



Their research found that Americans have about ten word of mouth conversations offline, about brands, per day.



Word of mouth marketing



People think about word-of-mouth marketing in several different ways. Word-of-mouth marketing agencies recruit people who love talking about brands and are willing to try new products and share their experiences. In other cases, people are doing different types of experiential marketing, hoping that people will end up energized by the experience and talk about it with others. There are also a growing number of companies thinking about creating earned media with their advertising.



Helping brands quantify the amount of word of mouth lift



Much of the work Ed has done over the years was about helping brands to quantify the amount of word-of-mouth lift they got from their advertising ...