Is word-of-mouth marketing still effective?

Yes. It’s still the best marketing a small business has, and nothing on this page is going to argue you out of it.

What’s changed is what happens after the recommendation. Twenty years ago a friend said “call Dave, he did our kitchen,” and you called Dave. Now the friend says “look them up,” and the person does, that night, on their phone. The recommendation still does the heavy lifting. But it hands off to a search, and the search has to find something.

That’s where a website fits with word of mouth. It doesn’t replace the friend. It catches what the friend sends. A referred customer who types your name and finds a plain page with your work, your area, your face, and your number is done looking. The same customer who finds nothing, or a listing with a wrong phone number, has to decide whether to try harder. Some do. Many go to the second name the friend gave them.

A situation. A church runs a food pantry, and most of the volunteers came through a friend who said to come help on Thursday. A new family hears about it the same way, then searches for the church that night to find the time and the door to use. If the page says Thursdays at nine, back entrance, they show up. If it doesn’t, the invitation goes quiet and nobody knows it did.

Think about it as a ratio. Years spent earning the kind of name that gets passed along. A few seconds for the referral to land somewhere. The website is that somewhere.

So keep doing the thing that earns the referrals. That part is the hard part, and you’re already good at it. Then give the referral a place to land, with the same name and number the friend would have given, so the next person’s search ends where it should. The rest of the answers on carpenterwebworks.com/answers cover what to put on it.