How to Drive Sales using Word of Mouth Marketing

Believe it or not, word of mouth is the biggest driver of sales in today’s world. With 1000s of ads from new and old brands alike on a daily basis coupled with the advent of reviews and social media, people do not trust every persuasive advertisement they see. Brands no longer control the narrative of what they want to communicate. Depending on who you speak to or which reports you read, between 30-50% of all first time product/service sales(only first time because your product/service decides whether it is worth a second buy) are influenced by word of mouth. And yet very very surprisingly, no big brand(whenever it launches new products/categories) or any startup gives this even 10% of attention and budget that it deserves. And just to be clear, I am not talking about any referral bonus driven word of mouth. In the world of ROI driven marketing, it is no less than a crime

As of today, word of mouth manifests in 3 different ways.

a)      Public Reviews: You want to buy a product, check out reviews on Amazon. You want to visit a restaurant, check out reviews on Zomato. You want to visit a doctor, check out reviews on Practo. You want to download an app, you check the ratings on play-store. You want to watch a movie, you check the ratings on IMDB( or Metacritic for the elitists). And the list goes on and on. And no brand/service can game it at scale. And people are smart enough to not trust products/services with higher ratings but less number of reviews. So, for any product/service to be successful, it is a mandatory requirement

b)     Social Sharing: Your friend tries out a new cosmetic brand, loves the experience and shares it on her Instagram. This is the ideal scenario and to some extent used to happen a few years back. But more and more people are becoming very conscious of what they post, and they don’t want to be seen endorsing brands publicly on social platforms( unless you are an influencer and get paid for it)

c)      One to one sharing: This is the most important and most difficult to measure way in which word of mouth manifests. You need a new phone and more often than not, you ping the techie of your College gang asking for recommendations. You visit a friend’s house and the friend cannot stop talking about the new smart AC he purchased, and you come back and purchase the same within a few months. These are just some examples in which word of mouth spreads in the literal sense( through chats, calls and Face to Face discussions). And no social listening tool can help you here.

First things first, word of mouth to drive sales is possible only if you have a superior product. And if you have a 100x product( eg- TrueCaller, Zoom etc), you probably do not need to do anything. Word of Mouth will happen naturally. But here I am talking about normal physical products and services which aren’t 100X better. So, as marketers what do we do to drive and track this? Based on my experience of scaling up a start up to a decent scale with cost of marketing is less than 5%( impossible if you do not work on word of mouth), I am sharing 4 pointers which every brand( big or small) can use to significantly increase word of mouth sales:

a)      Clear Positioning- Positioning is the most abused term in our profession. Half the people who use it cannot even define it. And it has nothing to do with communication. It stems from the product/service and communication can only amplify it. At times you do not even need to communicate. Now, why is positioning important? This is because people share things which reinforces the image of themselves which they want to create in society. And if you want to be talked about, people need to be clear if they will get the desired results by talking about your brand. I am someone who loves value for money brands. Someone who doesn’t like to be extravagant. And I want my social circle to know me like that. No wonder the brands which I have talked about most and convinced people to buy are: Decathlon, Sula Wines and Xiaomi. Knowingly or unknowingly, these brands have created a clear positioning for themselves (and I haven’t seen ads of any of them). On the other hand, if someone who loves to be projected as classy would have talked about Adidas, an expensive Champagne brand and Apple.

b)     Give Exemplary After Sales Service- This is one point I cannot stress upon any more than I already do. After sales service eats marketing for breakfast, every single day. And still, people are obsessed about reducing the cost of service. If required, allocate a percentage of your marketing budget to your service budget, but delight the consumers. Go above and beyond what your competitors do. For a small cost, you will get a lifelong brand ambassador. I will give you a small example of what delighting your customers at the moment of reckoning can do. I have a colleague who was owning a Samsonite luggage and the luggage had some issue within the warranty period. He had purchased it from a different city and had also lost the bill. He went to a Samsonite store and narrated his story and asked how much it would cost to repair it. The salesperson told that the issue is beyond repair. What happened next left him dumbstruck. The salesperson offered him complete refund or a new luggage with the price of the old one discounted from the selling price. The colleague has narrated this story 3 times( each with different audience) whenever there was a discussion on luggage. When I was considering purchasing luggage few months back, no prizes for guessing which brand I chose.

c)      Honest and Human Post Sales Interactions- If you want to drive reviews, there is no better way than to request your customers for honest public reviews of the product. A hand written note along with the product signed by the CEO, a text emailer after 15 days of purchase, a reminder email asking product feedback/any possible issues after 90 days of usage. These things go a long way in getting people to post reviews about your products. The only things that matter here is getting the copy right. You should be honest, you should be willing to help the customer in case the product has an issue and you should clearly explain how much his reviews and his word of mouth matter to you. And written in a way that it looks like a one to one discussion between the CEO and the customer.

d)     Create Talking Points around the Product/Service- Create triggers which will make people talk about your product/service. At Atomberg, we sell remote controlled fans. And it is not usual for fans to be remote controlled yet. So, whenever we have one of our customers changing the fan speed using a remote in front of a guest, a natural question comes up, “Wow, fan with a remote, what brand is that?” Now if the customer in question loved our product, he will speak favourably and I will have another potential customer with 0 CAC. Now not every product will have some inbuilt talking triggers. But there are many ways you can do it. Cred used to send cakes to its new members to their office address. And the whole office gets to know about CRED at the cost of a cake. If the person who gets the cake speaks favourably about the brand, again CRED gets to acquire multiple customers at negligible CAC.

So, putting efforts in each of these will definitely result in your reviews going up, more people talking up the brand on social and most importantly more one to one discussions/recommendations around your brand. But how do we track the results?

For Reviews, it is completely quantified. Targets should be set, shared and tracked on a regular basis. Social mentions can be tracked on a daily basis using any social listening tool. But the most important one to one recommendations are difficult to measure. At this point, we do not have a solution to this. Referral code usage, data through periodic surveys of new consumers etc gives us directional data to track performance in that regard.

I would love to hear your views on this, and learn of examples of brands which are consistently putting efforts and leveraging Word of Mouth Marketing to drive sales