How to Include Word Of Mouth Impressions (S1-E000-03)

The third area of experiential marketing impression counting that we want to bring to your attention is Word Of Mouth impressions or the viral spread of impressions generated from the consumer advocacy.

This is Part 3 in a 4-part series detailing the contents of Podcast OOO – Pilot: Defining the Dollar Value of Impressions.
(Go to Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4)

Word of mouth is based on the number of advocates that you create and is a part of your onsite experience. Advocacy is often measured with an exit survey. Above all, if you don’t have an exit survey as a part of your activation, you should consider one.

(You can listen to the full podcast episode below.)

How to Measure Word-of-Mouth

In the absence of an exit survey, you can rely on benchmarks. That is to say industry benchmarks around “recommend intent” at different kinds of venues, markets, consumer types will vary.

PortMA’s Benchmark Solutions

Once you get access to them, these benchmarks will also serve you well. If you have access to any other net promoter score work or basic measures of “recommend intent,” you can repurpose that for your word-of-mouth impressions as well.

For instance, use a recommend intent benchmark as a multiplier against the number of people you engaged in the experience. This will provide you an estimate of the number of advocates that you generated as a part of your activation. And this is going to be a reliable estimate. Let’s say you engaged 100 people and you had an 80% advocacy or 80% recommend intent, then it’s fair to say that 80 people left the event with a high likelihood to recommend the brand.

So, how many people did they tell? How do we know how that translates into impressions?

So, how many people did they tell? How do we know how that translates into impressions? I recommend that you lean on a study that was done in 2006 by the Keller Fay Group. This study was called “The Single Source Word of Mouth (WOM) Measurement.” In this study, they cited research on how often people talk about brands when they have a positive experience and the rate at which they’re talking to people.

As a result, this gives you a multiplier that usually averages somewhere between three and seven people told. You can take your advocates, in this case, the 80 advocates and you can multiply it by whatever that multiplier is to get your word of mouth impression estimate.

Further Reading

The fourth and final article in this series considers how you translate these impression counts into a legitimate dollar value. You can read about this on how to calculate the value of experiential marketing impressions in our article titled, “Calculating the Dollar Value of Experiential Marketing Impressions.”