Recently my Word-of-Mouth Marketing company, BNI, cooperated with Steve Brewer, a graduate student from St. Thomas University in the United States, as part of his Masters Thesis in Marketing. As a result of this research, we have acquired an interesting picture of the type of business person/entrepreneur who joins a word-of-mouth marketing group.
Based on this study, we learned that over 76% of all networking group participants we surveyed came because they were invited by someone!
OK, that's not a big surprise since networking is a "word of mouth" function; however, it is excellent reinforcement to what we already know - namely, that people mostly join word-of-mouth marketing groups through the "invitation process". Amazingly, only 24% came to their particular networking group from all other forms of marketing and advertising combined (including the internet, tradeshows, calendar listings, newspaper articles, etc). Traditional media exposure definitely supports recognition of the importance of word-of-mouth marketing, but what brings most members in is one person asking another person to visit.
According to the study, 74% of all networking group members surveyed identified themselves as business owners (entrepreneurs) and 23% said they were employees.
The overwhelming majority of those surveyed, or 70%, first visited because they were interested in some type of networking group. Roughly 6% were encouraged by their company to attend. But what's most interesting is that 5% of the people who visited and joined, didn't want to offend the person who invited them by not joining!
One of the questions asked in the study related to how comfortable people felt when they first visited. An astounding 93% of all people who joined felt welcomed by other members of the group they first visited.
An impressive 79% of all networkers surveyed reported that the business they generated from the organization had either met, or exceeded, their expectations.
Once when I was visiting one of my BNI Regions, I had a prospective member who was a local business owner who tried to tell me that the organization was made up of youngsters (which according to him were people under 30!). According to our survey, over half of the members, 58%, were between the ages of 30 – 49, with approximately 32% being over 50 and only 10% being 29 years old or younger. Now, I understand that one group may vary from another, but from my experience, most groups had a fairly even age distribution. As it turns out, the results from this study clearly conclude that roughly 90% of members participating are over 30 years old. The actual graph is a classic bell curve with the under 30 and over 60 ranges being the low ends of both sides of the curve.
Finally the last statistic from the study that I'd like to share in this article is one that has remained fairly constant over the last decade. The study found that roughly 41% of networkers in the survey were female and 59% were male. This roughly 60/40 split, was virtually identical to previous studies done in the past. Although some specific countries may vary substantially on this one area, we have found most networking organizations have this general distribution of men and women networkers.
So, what have we learned from this study?
Well, we've learned that the overwhelming majority of business people joining a networking group joined because someone invited them. We found that almost all of them found the group they visited to be very friendly.
We discovered that a very high percentage of these networkers generate as much, or more business from word of mouth than they expected and that over 60% of the members have been involved for more than one year. We learned that close to ¾ of our networkers surveyed are business owners between the ages of 30-50 and that approximately 40% are women and roughly 60% are men.
I believe this is valuable information for entrepreneurs who are considering becoming involved OR already actively participating in networking groups to have. If you are in a group already, I hope that you take the opportunity in the near future to discuss these survey results within your networking group.
As business people, we like to have the hard facts, the statistics, to support our actions in developing our new businesses. These stats clearly support word-of-mouth marketing as a viable, productive and effective way to market ourselves in our business environment today. As businesses become increasingly informed and educated about the tangible benefits of growing their businesses using a structured word-of-mouth program, I feel that these positive numbers will only increase!
Called the father of modern networking, Dr. Ivan Misner is a New York Times bestselling author and Founder of BNI (www.bni.com), the world’s largest business networking organization. His latest book, Truth or Delusion can be viewed at www.TruthorDelusion.com. Dr. Misner is also the Sr. Partner for the Referral Institute, an international referral training company (www.referralinstitute.com). He can be reached at misner@bni.com .
Who Joins a Word of Mouth Marketing Group - To learn more about this author, visit Ivan R. Misner's Website.
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Ivan R. Misner
(Visit Ivan's Website)
Dr. Ivan Misner is the Founder & Chairman
of BNI (Business Network Int'l.). BNI (www.bni.com) was
founded in 1985. The organization has over
4,200 chapters throughout every populated
continent of the world. Last year alone,
BNI generated millions referrals resulting
in billions of dollars worth of business
for its members.
Dr. Misner’s Ph.D. is from the University
of Southern California. He has written
eight books, including his New York Times
best seller, Masters of Networking and his
#1 bestseller, Masters of Success. He is
a monthly columnist for Entrepreneur.com
and is also Chairman of the Board for the
Referral Instititute - a referral training
company with trainers around the world.
He has taught business and social capital
courses at several universities and is on
the Board of Directors for the Colorado
School of Professional Psychology.
Called the "Father of Modern Networking"
by Ecademy.com and the “Networking Guru”
by Entrepreneur magazine, Dr. Misner is
one of the world's leading experts on
business networking and has been a
keynote speaker for major corporations and
associations throughout the world.
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