The ultimate goal of any given business should be to attain word of mouth, plain and simple.This is entirely due to the fact that once your company operates using word of mouth, sales will commence without having to do any additional high-cost advertising.  However, if you conduct word of mouth research, you’ll receive an additional benefit with the same amount of buzz: the opportunity to evaluate your customers’ mindset.

So, how do you go about conducting word of mouth research?You would be wise to understand what it involves.Word of mouth research is when you set up a marketing campaign to determine what the drives your customer's actions.Surveys are a great way to do this, especially when you give your customers a reward or some form of compensation to participate.

In fact, in my opinion, surveys without compensation are useless because they have no word of mouth value.Instead, there is an expectation that the individual, is going to be self-motivated and fill it out.That will not happen unless they are genuinely engaged with you or sold on your company’s objectives. 

However, things are different if you give your customer money or a free product in exchange for their participation.This is really the case if the compensation is given up front, without the participant having to worry about entering a sweepstakes, for example.This is not to say that sweepstakes or free trials will not work, it would still be beneficial if your name is more well known.When you are just starting this method, you will want to avoid that and give your customer a more immediate incentive.

Anyway, after giving your customer decent compensation, you need to concentrate on the next step associated with good word of mouth research; making sure your survey questions promote an honest response. 

In certain cases, when your customer is getting money or a free product for spending the time to fill out your survey, there is a potential risk that they could fill it out blindly to save time and just to get their gift.  To prevent that, you might want to consider giving surveys that require more detailed feedback from the participant.  Require them to actually write a sentence or two of why they felt the need to answer as they did.  And don’t let them proceed with the survey until they’ve completed this portion.

In some cases, people will not want to spend time doing your survey because they feel that they have to put in too much work.So, to counteract that feeling, you’re going to have to try to award a larger incentive.If your survey awards the participant $5, consider giving them a bit more, like $10.  And if you can’t afford to do that, you may sell advertising space on your survey, (especially if it is online).