Most of our work comes from word of mouth

Read time: 4 mins

Morning — here's this week:

I spent a day last week at a workshop on email newsletters. Which is a slightly odd thing for someone who's been doing digital marketing since 2012 to admit to.

I went because most of our own work comes from word of mouth, and I've been trying to fix that.

Something got said in that room that I haven't stopped thinking about.

Nearly every business I sit down with tells me the same thing at some point in the first ten minutes.

"Most of our work comes from word of mouth."

And it's always said with a bit of pride. Fair enough. It should be. If people are recommending you without being asked, you're doing the job properly. You can't buy that.

But here's what struck me at the workshop.

Word of mouth isn't a strategy. It's luck you've earned.

And earned luck has three problems nobody talks about.

It's random. You get mentioned when somebody happens to be having the right conversation at the right moment. You can't schedule that. You can't forecast it.

It's capped. It grows to roughly the size of your existing network and then it stops. That plateau most businesses hit and can't explain? That's usually this.

It's invisible. You can't see it coming, so you can't plan around it. Hiring, vans, capacity — all guesswork.

The bit that stuck with me was the follow-up thought.

Word of mouth works because of three things happening at the same time. It usually comes from someone who is trusted. It arrives at the moment of need. And it's specific — "they sorted my mum's boiler in an hour," not "they're good."

Anything that reproduces those three things does the same job. At scale. To people who've never met you.

Which is the honest answer to why this email exists.

I can't be in the room when someone asks their mate for a recommendation. But I can turn up in your inbox every Tuesday with something useful, something that gives you value, so that when a marketing question does come up, I'm the name you think of.

That's word of mouth, engineered. And it's the same thing I'll be showing you how to do for your own business, most weeks.

I heard this twice last week.

Both from businesses that are genuinely good at what they do. Both with a website. Both convinced the problem was the website.

In neither case was it the website.

Here's what's actually going on for most businesses that say this.

You type your own company name into Google and there you are, top of the page. Looks fine. So the assumption is that you can be found on Google.

But nobody looking for you searches your company name. They don't know it yet. That's the whole point.

They search for the thing they need, in the place/location they need it.

"We did search for what we do, and we came up."

Maybe. Try it again on your phone, on mobile data, signed out, standing somewhere that isn't your own office.

Google doesn't show everyone the same results. Where you're standing matters most — the local results somebody gets three miles up the road can be a completely different set of businesses. And you've visited your own website more times than anyone alive.

You're the worst possible person to check your own rankings.

And more and more of them aren't searching at all — they're asking. ChatGPT, Gemini, the AI summary at the top of Google. "Who should I use for X in Y?"

Then they get an answer. Three names, usually.

If you're not one of them, you were never in the running. No enquiry, no missed call, no bounce on your website. Nothing to see in your analytics at all, because it never happened (for your business).

That's the uncomfortable part. Being invisible doesn't show up in any report. It looks exactly like a quiet week.

There's a version of this problem that's about SEO, and it's the one everyone talks about.

But the version that matters more right now is simpler.

You can't fix a problem you haven't looked at.

Almost nobody has actually checked what an AI assistant says when someone asks for a business like theirs. I've started doing it for every business I sit down with, and the results fall into three buckets.

Sometimes they're named. Good — now we work out why, and protect it.

Sometimes a competitor is named. That's useful, because we can go and look at what's on their site that isn't on yours.

And quite often nobody local is named at all. It defaults to directories, aggregators, national brands. That one's the biggest opportunity of the three, because the space is genuinely empty and whoever fills it first gets a long run at it.

You don't need an agency to find out which of those three you're in.

Ten minutes. Do it before Friday.

That's it. You now know something about your business that most of your competitors don't know about theirs.

If you're in there — worth knowing why.

If you're not — at least you know the gap is real, and where it is.

P.S. Whenever it's useful, three ways I can help:

— Score your website in 2 minutes. We built it for trades, but it works for any service business that relies on enquiries. https://bamsh.co.uk/website-score

— Watch: what AI search means for your business. 12 minutes on where your next enquiries are actually going to come from. https://youtu.be/QXCk1NYG-Kc

— Stuck with your marketing? Book a 15-minute call, and we'll diagnose the problem and the opportunities. https://bamsh.co.uk/15-min

This week's prompt: find out who AI is recommending in your area instead of you. Paste it in, swap the brackets for your trade and town, and read the answer.