The purpose of these articles on small business marketing is to improve your marketing which is often neglected or reduced to secondary importance. An aspect of your marketing that can have a multiplier effect is "customer word-of-mouth". To help you improve your marketing in this area let an expert marketer (Dan Kennedy) with invaluable experience on this topic guide you on towards improving your marketing in this area.

The main objectives of these articles on "customer word-of-mouth-advertising" and customer satisfaction are:

#1: To give you some ideas that may make your contact with your customers or clients more pleasant and enjoyable,

#2: To give you some ideas that may make your job a little less stressful,

#3: To give you some ideas that may give you an added edge in understanding other people and engineering cooperation from them, and

#4: To give you some ideas that may help you in advancing yourself.

These articles focus on you and the customer. Where we believe the action is in business today. The experts and the research behind best selling business books as, In Search of Excellence, have reeducated American business about the value of recognizing the importance of the
customer.

Quality is a frequently used business buzz word and much time and energy is devoted to talking about the quality of a company's products, quality of services, quality control in the manufacturing plant but probably most important is the quality of customer relations.

To begin let's look at the core of the problem then why the solutions are so important. In looking at all the available research data about customer and client behavior, we found that on the average a satisfied customer will tell about three other people about his satisfaction with a particular product, service, place of business or company.

That's often called word-of-mouth advertising and is widely recognized as the most effective kind of advertising of all. Think about it doesn't a trusted friend's recommendation or opinion about a place of business carry more weight in influence with you than all other types of advertising that business or its competitors may do. Obviously what a customer says about a business can have great affect on other people. From a positive standpoint it's possible for this word-of-mouth advertising to make a big contribution to the growth of a business.

Consider this little math game. If one happy customer creates three more who each create three who each create three who each create three who each create three who each create three you've got 2,217 customers.

This story has a flip side though. The same research indicates that on the average a dissatisfied customer gripes to eleven other people. This shouldn't be surprising. Bad news or negativity seems to spread faster and farther than good news. When you're irritated, annoyed or disappointed with a business you probably tend to tell that story to a lot of people too.

This negative or critical word-of-mouth advertising is powerful also. It can stop people from doing business with a company who might otherwise have done so. If you want to think about this in shear numbers it only takes one dissatisfied customer to wipe out the positive affect in the marketplace of four satisfied customers.

All this only serves to reinforce the obvious it's very desirable for you to do everything possible to insure that its customers have satisfactory experiences whenever they call, come in or transact business.

In the next SSuccessful Small Business Marketing Strategies article, we'll pick up with the third fact uncovered by all our research to reveal the truth about how to deliver customer satisfaction and just how challenging it is to do so.

D Kennedy