Here’s another piece of research that, although it dates from last year, I thought was worth sharing.
According to a collaborative research on the impact of customer networks on word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, influential customers within branded customer communities can increase the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing programs by as much as 50 percent.
The report, conducted by Social CRM company Lithium Technologies in collaboration with researchers studying marketing and social media from various universities, further found that these influencers within branded customer communities can help accelerate new product adoption.
The report indicated that word-of-mouth campaigns executed across customer networks can increase product adoption by as much as 107 percent. In competitive markets, almost all the value of word of mouth programs originates from accelerated product adoption, Lithium Technologies said.
Influencers also seem to produce high ROI: according to the report, companies can achieve more than 80 percent of the potential value of the word-of-mouth campaign by targeting fewer than 5 percent of the potential audience.
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