Powerful Word of Mouth Marketing Tips & Triggers
What is Word of Mouth Marketing? (WOMM)
You’re most likely to trust a word on a product from a person who has tried it.
Word of mouth marketing is honest, shout outs satisfied customers do when they’ve tried your product or service and actually sensed a difference that they felt they need to refer it to their loved ones as well. It’s often shortened into WOMM or WOM marketing. 💬
It’s another synonym for word-of-mouth promotion which is the free brand advertising done by satisfied or loyal customers when you successfully deliver their needs and resonate with them on a high level.
Word of mouth marketing cannot be forced or directly pushed unless you’re 100% sure your brand satisfied your customers’ needs. However, can be encouraged through viral social media marketing or emotional, contagious content.
Encouraging user-generated content (UGC) can imply the same effects of trust and authority that WOM gives.
So you’re interested in word-of-mouth marketing and would like to read more about it.
Let’s cut to the point and set up a working strategy with only 4 pillar tips to boost your branding and generate word of mouth.
The 4 Word-of-Mouth Triggers 🏗️
The foremost and may-seem-obvious tip to generate word of mouth marketing is that once you give an exceptional experience to your customers, they’ll genuinely feel the urge to talk about it. It may not have immediate effects on your sales right away, but it’ll surely all payback eventually.
These word-of-mouth promotions can happen anywhere at any time, they’re unpredictable. However, can be incentivized. People often share their thoughts publicly on social media, either on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, or even other channels like blogs or vlogs. This’s why influencer marketing is so popular now.
Since you’re used to a data-driven side to my blogs. Let’s look at today’s facts and figures. 🆗
Nielsen conducted a survey within 56 worldwide countries about consumers’ trust in the various forms of advertising. They found out that 92% of worldwide consumers trust the word of mouth marketing (earned media) above all other marketing types.
Word of mouth marketing is the king of all advertising forms. On the other hand, SEM or search engine ads got 37% while display ads only 24% making it amongst the least trusted advertising forms.
So, what are the 4 triggers to the word of mouth marketing? Or is there a way to establish a powerful word of mouth marketing strategy?
Planning your word of mouth marketing strategy starts from these four pillar triggers:
- The services you provide:
Continuously improve your services and products to make sure you provide effective and to-the-point solutions to your customers that address their buying needs. Establishing your brand as an authority that provides real solutions, products or services will surely incentive customers to recommend your brand to others. - The quality of your products, brand:
Strengthen the reliability and authenticity of your brand by ensuring the highest quality for your customers. Generate WOM by delivering the WOW factor with the higher than expectations quality. And always provide an after-sale follow-up to thank the customer for their time and asking them for a short feedback. This goes a long way. - The Social trigger:
The most and easiest forms of word of mouth promotion happen on social media platforms. Leverage the power of social media by keeping a friendly tone, answering every question, and staying down to earth with your buyers. - People or staff they deal with:
Have you ever walked out of a store swearing to never go back there because of a rude salesman? It works both ways. People will forget your brand and your products, but will always remember the valuable connections they surprisingly made with the people representing your brand. Work on that. (Both affects WOM marketing highly)
4 Tips to Generate Word of Mouth Promotion
Since there’s no word of mouth marketing strategy that makes you cheat your way into earned media with low quality and bad products, check out these realistic tips to generate genuine word of mouth promotions.
1. Make sure your products are worth the referral
The first thing to check off your list if you’re not getting genuine positive referrals from your loyal customers. Make sure your products speak to their needs.
Conduct a survey within your community, be it by email or FB group, or website pop-up, ask people what are the pain points they’re facing with your products and brand. The best way to improve your brand is by hearing your customers. They’ll also appreciate that you’re considering them every step of the way.
2. Incentive your customers with referral rewards
Once you set the basics right, it’s time to set up attractive referral program rewards. For example, store the phone numbers of customers in a database that whenever they return for another purchase they get rewarding offers and deals that are also available to any friend they bring.
3. Make sure your customer support is first of class
A brand that once suffered from negative feedback over customer support can hardly regain people’s trust. One of the most important triggers to positive word of mouth is the quality of your customer support.
Conduct a customer support rating and analysis on a monthly basis to keep track of your progress.
Impress your customers with a friendly, to-the-point, and always available support team. Your customer service team can flip the winning coin of your whole brand image.
4. Make it easier for people to buy your products anywhere
Your website and selling channels become one of the services you provide besides your products to ease the buying funnel for your customers. More like the frontline of your physical store if you have one.
So it’s important they are optimized to please customers and offer them the best experience too.
Now it’s super easy to streamline your checkouts on several selling channels and manage all from one dashboard using ExpandCart!
No credit card required and no hidden fees.
A stunningly designed online store integrated with social shops such as Facebook shop and Instagram shop will boost your sales by miles.
Let alone driving positive word of mouth marketing towards your smooth, direct, and easy purchasing options.
Tips to increase your chances:
- Optimize your store’s loading time to reduce bounce rate
- Smoothen the user-experience to reduce abandoned carts
- Ease the site navigation. Hire UX writer and designer to fix up any issues (no need for that fuss if you’ll just migrate to ExpandCart)
- Double-check your shopping cart design, see if there any annoying obstacles keeping customers from smoothly checking out
Word of Mouth Marketing Examples
Here are four different situations in which word of mouth takes place to better understand the process.
It’s pretty natural and genuine for the customer to simply refer a store he liked to a punch of his friends. Here it goes:
1- Retail store word of mouth
A friend visits an accessories store near her work that’s dissimilar for you to visit. She seems to like the products and have a fun chat with the salesman = an overall smooth buying experience.
Scene 2: she calls you once she gets out of the store to tell you about it + mentioning a good necklace that you’d absolutely adore and invites you to come with her the next day to buy it for you.
2- A new experience
You happen to get tired in a night’s road trip, find a resort nearby, and decide to stay the night there. (low expectations) You notice immense health care, great staff, and delicious food and spend a great night.
Next time you’re traveling with friends to the same destination, you’re prone to recommend staying at the same inn on your way.
3- eCommerce referrals
Why does everybody trust ExpandCart as the leading eCommerce platform in the MENA region? Every eCommerce merchant has to mention the name whenever a discussion about eCommerce rises up.
Why?
Because of word of mouth. One person trusted the platform, talked about it with another, and his friend talked with another, etc.
But that doesn’t have to be unpaid. eCommerce brands such as ExpandCart, Amazon, and Shopify, and a hundred others have a solid reward system for referrals. It consists of giving rewards to people for referring their brand or services to others.
Read also: Live Commerce in Marketing to Your eCommerce Store
Final Words
After discussing word of mouth marketing examples along with the top tips and triggers to generating powerful WOM marketing, topped with facts and figures.
Let us know your opinion on the matter, and how does your word of mouth marketing strategy work for you? Do you follow any of the above-mentioned tips?
No credit card required and no hidden fees.
