Two years ago I read a detailed study by MarketingExperiments.com where they compared the hiring an employee to blog, create content, and in general work to drive traffic to sites, with the much simpler approach of using Google Adwords to drive targeted traffic to the web site.

The research took place over 12 months and in summary the research showed that the blogs / text / discussion approach yielded more than 93,000 visits to the site.

This was compared with a 30-day test of Google Adwords, bidding up to 75 cents per click on a variety of keywords related to the test websites which drove 2,047 users to the site at a cost of $1,250, So this compares with the “word-of-mouth” efforts which yielded 93,207 unique visitors at a cost of $3600.

Thus as Marketing Experiments.com points out, the word of mouth approach yielded a 1427% greater return on investment than the GoogleAd approach.

As the report says, however, pay-per-click advertising was a much easier to run and was much quicker, but it was much more expensive and gave a much lower return on investment.

I’ve just done a survey of my own. As with my previous surveys of this nature I have chosen an area of work away from my company, so that we can see the results without any sort of interference from other advertising.

What I did was to seek out any references to the phrase “Woolwich Arsenal” via Google Alerts.

Of course many of these were irrelevant to me because they related to property in the area, or events concerning the Docklands Light Railway, which has a station of that name. Today I read the awful news of a terrible murder in the area.

But each day I also got hits relevant to my interest (which was the football club of that name that existed until 1913), and I was able to reply to these blogs and articles with a message answering or expanding on their point or question, and then going on to say there was a book “Making the Arsenal” which dealt with the topic in more detail – leading the reader to a web site www.woolwicharsenal.co.uk where the book is described.

In terms of hits on the site it has been very successful – and of course what one does get is some of these replies of mine being picked up and printed on other web sites.

It is slower than Google Adwords, but much more effective I have proved to my own satisfaction that word of mouth advertising in this way really does work. If you would like to talk about it, or explore it in relation to your work, please do email me or phone 01536 399 013.

And indeed if you have any experiences yourself of successful word of mouth advertising, please do write in and share. Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.