Entries Tagged 'Buzfactor' ↓

Despite billions of dollars being spent on advertising, direct mail, promotions, and countless other marketing techniques, 78 percent of Americans say word-of-mouth recommendations — especially from family and friends — most influences where they shop and dine.

Recognizing the impact word-of-mouth has on their business, more than 90% of business owners feel customer recommendations are more effective than paid advertising. In fact, almost half of small businesses rely exclusively on word-of-mouth as their only form of marketing.

But businesses face a great challenge in leveraging word-of-mouth into measurable results. That’s why Buzfactor is developing new technologies that let businesses create word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, track their effectiveness, and measure the impact on sales right down to the customer and transaction level.  In effect, we are creating social graphs that map businesses directly to their best customers.

Over the past several months, we’ve surveyed almost 5,000 consumers in 26 major markets to learn more about how word-of-mouth affects consumer decisions. Stay tuned as we’re going through all the data now and will be posting more results soon.