Ask any Irish business owner where their best customers came from, and most won’t say Google. They’ll say a neighbour. A mam’s friend. Someone from the GAA club. From a Facebook group post a happy customer wrote without being asked.
That’s word of mouth marketing working exactly the way it should — and it’s still the most powerful growth tool most small Irish businesses have, and mostly ignore.
Irish people trust their own before they trust an ad. No amount of digital spend changes that. Most business owners know it. Fewer do anything about it.
The mistake is treating word of mouth like weather — something that happens to you if you’re lucky, rather than something you build. I’ve watched small businesses do everything right — great product, fair prices, happy customers — and still get few referrals. Nobody in the business ever gave the customer a reason, a moment, or the actual words to pass on a referral.
A great experience isn’t enough on its own. It’s necessary. It’s not sufficient.
Take a hairdresser I worked with outside Kilkenny. Brilliant at her job, booked out most weeks. When I asked her clients why they’d come, most said “someone recommended her.” When I asked those same clients if they’d ever actually said the words “you should try her” to somebody else — most hadn’t. They liked her. Nobody had asked them to recommend her, and there was no easy way to.
That’s the gap. Liking a business and recommending a business are two different actions. Word of mouth marketing means closing that gap on purpose, not hoping it closes itself.
How do you actually get more word of mouth referrals?
Three things, done consistently, do more than any ad campaign ever will (unless you have a huge budget!).
- Ask, directly, at the moment someone is happiest with you. Not three months later in a generic email nobody reads. Right after the job’s done, the sale’s made, the problem’s fixed — while the good feeling is fresh. Some version of this that sounds like you – “If you know anyone else who’d find this useful, I’d really appreciate you mentioning me.”
- Give them something specific to repeat. “We’re great” isn’t shareable. “They fixed a leak nobody else could find in twenty minutes” is. Customer referrals spread on specifics, not slogans — a business that sounds like every other business in the town gives people nothing to actually say. I wrote before about the cost of blending in with your competitors — this is the next step. Give people something worth repeating, then ask them to repeat it.
- Make it effortless, not just possible. A referral card. A line in a follow-up text. A Google review link that’s one tap, not a hunt through your website. Every bit of friction you remove, more people will actually take the step — most won’t if it takes more than a minute.
None of this is complicated. It’s just rarely done on purpose.
Of course, word of mouth advertising can be digital too — a tagged photo, a shared post, a review left because someone actually asked — but the mechanics haven’t changed at all. People still need a reason, a moment, and an easy way.
You don’t need a bigger ad budget to grow this year. You need the customers you already have to open their mouths.
