Put Your Word-of-Mouth Marketing On-Hold

"76% of consumers don't believe you. Well, not you specifically, but they don't believe the information in your advertisements. 68% of consumers do trust product advice from their peers."*

Marketing On-Hold, when done correctly, has the ability to generate word-of-mouth marketing. As seen in the example below:

“Our biggest success story has been with the kick off of the Safe Sitter program through our Women's Services Department. We listed the class schedule on On Hold and the classes immediately "sold out" not only with Granbury residents, but also with children from the Metroplex and from surrounding communities - Glen Rose, Stephenville, Burleson, etc....

Parents and grandparents who were "on hold" waiting to be connected to their loved ones' patient rooms became interested in the class while on hold. The classes were for boys and girls 12 and older who wanted to learn how to become babysitters. ‘The’ advertising efforts for Safe Sitter classes were only done in the Granbury market so we were pleasantly surprised. The classes were an excellent way to introduce families to our hospital and staff. In addition, the hospital received special recognition from Safe Sitter's national organization for number of programs delivered and students trained - we outperformed all the other certified sites.”



*http://buzz.ducttapemarketing.com/2006/07/word_of_mouth_m.html

Marketing Responsiveness

Almost over-night your marketing advertisements can become outdated and irrelevant if you are not paying attention.

Take for example the following FreeCreditReport.com commercial:



“Check it out gas prices blowing up sky high” is the opening to this ad and it was great just a few weeks ago when people could relate. But when it aired 2 days ago gas prices had fallen under $2 a gallon.

And they’re not alone in overlooking economy sensitive advertisements. Just yesterday I called a local automobile mechanic to get a price quote and when I was placed on-hold they were also talking about soaring gas prices with no end in sight.

As a business you need to take control of your advertising and marketing to ensure it's always current and relevant, otherwise you could be sending your customers the wrong message.

Does Marketer of the Year = President?

As some of you may already know Sen. Barack Obama won Ad Age's Marketer of the Year Tonight will present us with not only a new President but also some additional insight into the correlation between winning "Marketer of the year" and the overall effectiveness of the campaign's related this coveted title.

Whats New!?

I have been watching and reading a company’s e-newsletter for about 12 months now. And in those 12 months the content has never changed. Seriously, nothing has changed! The words, the images, the layout are the exact same thing every month.

And the reason appears to be this company see’s their mailing as a sales piece. It is based around a theme of “buy from us” instead of supplying its readers with any relevant content. I can only imagine the readership of this newsletter is very low and probably has been added to many spam filters by now.

Many businesses will do the exact same thing to those customers who call their business and are placed on-hold. Customers are treated to irrelevant content in a poorly designed and implemented way that is usually outdated.

Any interactions you have with your customers is an opportunity to leave a lasting impression, but you have to remember not to ignore the obvious. If you make every customer experience through every outlet consistent, relevant and positive your customers will notice and tell others!

My call is not important to you

GraphJam.com is a site dedicate to fictional graphs designed by random users at their leisure. Below you will find a graph comparing the credibility of a company to how many times a caller hears "your call is important to us" while on-hold.

As you can see below the more often a caller hears that statement the less credible your business is in the eyes of the user who developed the graph. And as funny as this graph is it actually appears to be true. The comments found on this site support the graph and there are even other sites dedicated to this same theory.

The callers your business places on-hold do not want to be thanked repetitively , told you will be with them shortly or informed how important there call is to you. They would prefer relevant and current information that matters to them and demonstrates to them that they actually matter to your company. Actions speak louder than words ... even on-hold!


more graphjams charts

Overlooked

I recently called a popular restaurant to place a to go order. And it's brand is soaked with a young, upbeat, cool, fast paced sports vibe. Which is great because it fits the atmosphere and the food. Everything from their website and commercials to the take home menus have the same feel. But when they placed me on-hold before taking my order the brand was missing and ruined the experience.

When placed on-hold I was greeted with some sort of upbeat jazz and a male and female announcer that were obviously trying way to hard to sound excited. It was like a bad used car commercial. And the content of the messages were odd, including the bit where I was told they play everything from NFL to NASCAR at their restaurants. And when you consider it is sports bar/restaurant, it just made for an odd announcement because everyone already expects you to be playing sports on the TV.

Instead of treating me like I was on an elevator they could have matched the music to the feel of their restaurant and made me feel like I was already there. And instead of sharing irrelevant information with me they could have told me about the new burger they have or any one of the other specials or maybe an appetizer, anything that would have enticed me to place a bigger order with them. And if they wanted to talk about the sports they play over-head, they should have been talking about the specific games, races, etc they were playing and when!

When I asked the manager how they generated the on-hold audio I was informed they receive a cassette every so often from a vendor the corporate office uses. A cassette, I didn't even know you could still buy blank cassettes. It is amazing that a large corporation who has there liqueur measured automatically to save money from over pours would be wasting the time of their employees to update a poorly designed campaign provided on a cassette of all things.

We often talk about "on-hold" being an overlooked medium for many businesses and this is a prime example of how the content used was NOT in-tune with any other campaign and had little to no thought put behind it.