How To Utilise Word Of Mouth Marketing Online
How can you motivate your audience to do your marketing for you?
Online word of mouth is a great way to share your product or service across the world with minimal effort from you. The trick with word of mouth is how you get customers to talk about you.
People listen to other people more than they listen to a business, in fact people are 90% more likely to trust and buy a brand recommended by a friend*1. By encouraging people to recommend your brand or offering them an incentive they are more likely to share their purchase on their social media.
Companies like Dropbox and Raiz have cracked open the market using word of mouth with a few tweaks to the traditional strategy. Using a process of customer reward to incentivise people they encourage customers to share a customised link. Dropbox gives users extra data storage for every user that signs up using their personalised link. Similarly, Raiz gives a five dollar bonus to both invitee and recipient when the recipient signs up for a new account.
These ideas disguise your marketing as an opportunity to get extra benefits or rewards for not only you but also your invitees. Your audience is more likely to trust your company and signup hearing about your business from a trusted friend.
What we can gleam from these companies is that word of mouth marketing can be successful with the right incentives. What you offer customers must be valuable enough that they will feel happy to share their affiliation and enticing enough to make them want it. A few of the more popular examples of offerings are money/vouchers, free subscriptions, gifts or discounts. Small but free rewards are most successful because they offer instant recognition and allow compounding of many small rewards into one large one as they recommend your company to all their friends.
How can this benefit you?
Online word of mouth can be automated to link together potential and existing customers in an infinite loop of recommendation and reward with almost no effort from the marketing team. Once this function is setup the customers become your marketing team making this perfect for businesses of all sizes. You can make this work for you by:
- Think of a small incentive that works for your business that could benefit your customers such as vouchers, free subscriptions, gifts, discounts or waiving of fees.
- Add a ‘Share’ button to then end of your customers purchasing journey to help them share their experience with their friends on social media.
- Create a ‘refer a friend’ campaign for your business that sends rewards to your customers when their friends purchase from you online.
For more information on online word of mouth marketing or how it can be used to help your business please contact us at [email protected].
Reference’ *1 invespcro.com
Source: https://www.focusedmarketing.com.au/utilise-word-mouth-marketing-online/