One of my favourite and the most obvious lesson about running roomsXML for five years in Australia is that referrals are the highest quality leads you can get.

Over the past 18 months I've been working with Martin Bailey from Business Networking Strategies who is one of Australia's thought leaders on word-of-mouth marketing. He's got a book coming out soon and he's been kind enough to provide me with some gems relevant to the travel industry.

Martin suggested ‘Do you realize that customers and potential customers are discussing you as we speak’? Word of Mouth is going on all around us all the time and your business is part of the conversation.”

There are several reasons though why you should give serious consideration to this approach :

• Research undertaken by NOP World shows that 90% of customers identify word of mouth as the best, most reliable and trustworthy source about ideas and information on products and services.
• It's extremely cost-effective
• McKinsey states that 67% of all consumer decisions are primarily influenced by word of mouth. 

So in the modern day, are we just talking about Facebook?

“No not at all. Most Word of Mouth occurs face to face. For example, one of the things people love to talk about is their holiday. Whether they are in the process of booking it or have just been and are sharing their memories and photos.

“The question is likely to arise, ‘sounds great, where did you book your holiday’ which is when they mention the agent.”

This is the “experience process” and customers like to listen to other peoples experiences. Now they will speak about whether they enjoyed the process of booking a holiday through you and this is where a large portion of Word of Mouth business will come from.

So now that we know people are talking about you, the next thing we need to do, next week is identify who they are.

This article is the first of five from Martin's book about word-of-mouth marketing.