Word-Of-Mouth Marketing: Building A Strategy That Really Works

It’s a known fact now that customers seek the help of reviews, recommendations, and testimonials before making the final purchase online. A whopping 90% of the audience choose to do so. This line of marketing comes under the Word-of-Mouth marketing strategy. 

WOM has been considered as one of the most powerful and economical marketing strategies any company can use to boost its sales manifold. Positive Reviews, ratings, and recommendations have an exponential effect on companies’ brand loyalty and in building the brand image. However, building a WOM strategy that really works is important and beneficial. 

How can you attain that? What WOM marketing strategy you should adopt for your business that really works? What really are WOM marketing strategies? No worries, we have it sorted out for you.

Word Of Mouth Marketing Strategy

Here are some of the Word-of-Mouth marketing strategies any brand should implement:

1. Make proper use of User-generated content:

User-generated content is content created and shared by users itself in the name of the brand. UGC is created when brands carry out certain campaigns and ask their users to get involved in it in return for certain gifts, recognition, and other incentives. 

A UGC campaign is created by creating a unique hashtag and asking users to include the same in their posts and share it online over social media platforms in the form of stories, status, videos, images or others. 

If you want to get a better understanding of how UGC is carried out, look out for brands like Sephora, Crocs, Starbucks, BMW, and others. 

2. Share more reviews and testimonials:

Let your happy customers speak about your brand with their hearts out. Never lose an opportunity to get their point of view and experience with your brand. The way a brand deals with the negative review speaks a lot about the brand. 

As more than 79% of the customers believe in reviews and testimonials as much as personal recommendations, it’s important to make the reviews and testimonials easily visible to your users. They also act as social proof of the brand. 

You can make use of testimonials and embed them on your website’s homepage. Depending on your brand type, you can make use of various review sites like Angie’s List, Yelp and others to pull out reviews about your brand. 

Finally, once you have reviews and testimonials; use them accordingly to make them easily visible to your users by making dedicated posts, landing pages on website and such.

3. Create referral programs:

Referral programs are another effective way to increase your audience and sales. Referral programs coupled with assured incentives can prove to be more successful. There are many referral tools you can use like Woodbox, FriendBuy, ReferralCandy and such that can help you in gaining more users and in the least can spread a word about your brand. 

4. Collaborate with influencers and thought leaders:

Influencers, as the terms suggest, are people that have the power to influence the views and belief towards a specific subject in the target. They have a huge fan following and spreading a word through them means reaching out to people at large. 

As they are recognized well and their opinions are validated among the public, WOM marketing coming through them is valuable. Moreover, there are highly surprising stats that will make you believe in their power of influence. 

• According to stats, about 40% of the users claimed that they bought the product after viewing their favorite influencers using it on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• A whopping 49% of customers believe in recommendations given by the influencers/popular bloggers.
• Also, even 73% of the brands believe influencer marketing is beneficial and allocates a separate budget for it. 

5. Offer an unforgettable and share-worthy experience:

Ever organized events for your audience? Ever provide a share-worthy and an experience to boast about to your customers? If yes, Word-of-Mouth marketing is easy for you. 

Providing a once in a lifetime experience to your customers by indulging them in events, providing them recognition, the realization of being valued can help you gain more customers. The users when enjoying and finding something memorable chooses to share their experience online through photos and videos to their friends and relatives. This, in turn, becomes beneficial for the brand through Word-of-Mouth marketing without asking them to do so. 

So, these were some of the Word-of-Mouth marketing strategies you can adopt. Besides these some of the small efforts you can put to encourage word-of-mouth are:

• Turn your top customers into permanent ones by identifying and nurturing them
• Don’t hesitate in asking for reviews/testimonials from your customers when things are going well
• The referral programs can be elevated through social media channels
• Be a step ahead in providing after-sales services to your customers.

After reading this, we are sure you now have an upper hand in strategies that can be adopted through Word-of-Mouth marketing.