5 Tips from Best Buy's Laurie Blum

Word of mouth marketing is effective when it inspires conversations about your brand. It's truly successful, however, when it also motivates people to buy more of your stuff. Laurie Blum, senior digital strategy manager for Best Buy, knows that. That's why this year her team organized a Labor Day weekend promotion that used online word of mouth to drive in-store purchases. "We'd always looked at very traditional vehicles, such as bag stuffers or direct mail pieces, to drive in-store traffic," Laurie says, "and we wanted to give this a try."

To give your own go at boosting brick-and-mortar sales with online word of mouth, consider Laurie's five tips:

Tip #1. Define your target
Finding the right audience is essential, according to Laurie. "We knew we wanted to target a younger audience to drive them into our store over Labor Day weekend, because we knew they weren't in school," Laurie says of Best Buy's recent campaign. "The main thing [that demographic] looks at is entertainment products, so we developed a coupon around those." The coupon was distributed along with copy and banners exclusively to online influencers who were charged with passing the coupon on to their friends and peers -- the very customers Best Buy hoped would use it.

Tip #2. Identify your partners
Most brands need a little help in order to create an effective campaign that's put together quickly and for the right audience. "Identify who can help you and how you want to spread the word," Laurie suggests. She points to existing ad agencies and vendors as possible allies in new word of mouth endeavors.

Tip #3. Watch how your message spreads
Metrics are necessary to all marketing campaigns. Word of mouth campaigns are no exception. "Make sure that you have tracking in place so you can see how [WOM] is being spread," Laurie says. "Internally, here at Best Buy, we make sure we have all our different coupons tracked individually. But we also apply a tracking code that's in the url people visit to download them."

Tip #4. Track online sales
If your campaign successfully drives in-store sales, chances are good that it will boost sales on your website, too. "We saw quite a few page views on our website, so we tracked back to our site to see how many people who saw the coupon made a purchase on our website," Laurie says. "It was higher than we expected. So we did see online results as well as offline."

Tip #5. Play with timing
Scheduling proved critical in Best Buy's Labor Day promotion, according to Laurie, who suggests certain times of year might be more word-of-mouth-worthy than others when it comes to driving in-store traffic. "We're going to continue leveraging online word of mouth moving forward for our second-tier holidays," she says, adding that those days are more ripe for word of mouth promotion, as customers are less aware of in-store sales during those times.

More about Laurie:

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