Word of mouth marketing has been the stock in trade of local builders since, well, probably since anyone started building anything.
Inevitably you end up asking your neighbours who built their extension, and if they’re happy with it, you ask the builder to do the same for you, only maybe slightly bigger.
We’ve been renovating a property recently and went down that time honoured road and our builder is brilliant. They say 70% of people trust in word of mouth compared to just 15% for advertising and with the large sums building works suck up, you need trust and lots of it.
Our builder doesn’t have a website, he doesn’t need one, he’s kind of off-line local social in new media terms but building products, now that’s another business. You might ask your neighbour where they got their materials from but you’ll certainly shop around to find the best price.
And so we arrived on the Wickes website looking for a new front door. New front doors are important and they can cost a lot and frankly Wickes, isn’t the first place we’d look. But through the magic that is Google we arrived at some handsome traditional doors, more expensive than you’d expect to see at Wickes but extremely good value compared to door specialist’s prices.
The doors came with customer reviews, which were all very favourable which made up for the absence of a reputation for good front doors, we suspected we might be getting a bargain and bought. And we weren’t disappointed.
The moral for brands on the web is if you’re confident enough in your products and services to allow customer reviews you can actually widen your product offering and sell things your brand is not traditionally known for.
