All global businesses have become very competitive in recent days and the business owners are trying to find some or the other new methods for promoting their businesses internationally. Word of Mouth Marketing, though a traditional method, is being believed to be an effective way to promote business and create more number of potential customers. This method of marketing is defined as passing positive or negative information orally through the social network or social media. But, today with the advancement in technologies and usage of internet e-mails and text are also considered to be an effective method of word of mouth marketing.

The word of mouth marketing is being considered important for any businesses by the entrepreneurs. Though it is a free method of advertising, customers gets more satisfied and trust over the company, products and services. However, even though the word of mouth marketing is strongly believed to be an effective way to develop business, it does have some drawbacks and flaws that could affect the business in an unbelievable way. A statistics on word of mouth marketing show that only 15% of this type of marketing is proving to be productive and the rest passes only biased information about the products to others. This type of marketing is mostly done offline by passing the information to each other among friends, family and known people around. Though the companies believe that this method of marketing could build up the trust among people and generate many new customers without advertisement cost, there is nothing to guarantee that only correct and unbiased information are passed.

Word of Mouth Marketing will happen only when a customer gets satisfied with the company’s product and service. If the product does not suit that particular customer, then he may start passing wrong or negative feedback about the product to others. Remember, the negative feedbacks are very effective in reaching more number of people than positive feedback.  This in another way through which the sales of the products are affected dramatically. When a company makes some media advertisements, it has some control over passing the marketing message to the customers. Whereas in the word of mouth marketing, it is absolutely with the customers who tell about their personal benefits which they got from the product. If that is going to be an incorrect or negative one, then the company will have no control over this and this may create a very bad image for the business.

But off-course, Word of Mouth Marketing has an advantage of spreading the information about products quickly. On the other side, the business owners may find it difficult to have a track about how many potential customers did this word of mouth marketing reach. It cannot be structured like in the e-mail marketing where it can be rated and media marketing where the listeners or viewers can be estimated.

Word of Mouth Marketing has the probability of creating 85% of flaws and therefore business must be built on a structured foundation which is trackable and effective method of marketing that allows in a steady growth of business. This absolutely means that the business owners must be very active.