In an age of endless marketing strategies, it has become extremely difficult for any business to attract new customers and encourage them to buy using traditional marketing methods.
These strategies have become so common that they are becoming unremarkable and unremarkable for a large segment of customers. Therefore, it is necessary to add an additional advantage, especially regarding trust and credibility.
One of the most prominent marketing methods targeting this point (i.e., trust and credibility) is word-of-mouth marketing. It is a marketing method that requires almost no separate costs in exchange for the benefits it offers.
Therefore, in this article, our primary goal is to explain word-of-mouth marketing in detail, highlighting all its advantages and disadvantages, as well as the methods and strategies for implementing it so that you are aware of everything related to it and can implement it in the best possible way.
What is Word-of-Mouth Marketing?
The meaning of word-of-mouth marketing is clear from its name. It is marketing that does not take place through a digital platform or social media site, but rather through user-to-user conversations.
It primarily relies on encouraging your buyers to market your product again to their relatives, friends, or anyone else close to them, or even to other online users through positive reviews.
This method is highly beneficial for its users, as it's easy to create a strong connection between the consumer and the store or service provider without ever having dealt with them even once before.
It's easy to conclude that this type of marketing primarily depends on making your customer completely satisfied with the purchasing experience, so they can take it upon themselves to personally market your product or service, along with many other factors we'll mention below.
Advantages of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
1. Increased Sales: This point is largely self-evident: the more widespread you are in any form, the greater the likelihood of them purchasing from you.
However, word-of-mouth marketing has an additional advantage: a customer who receives your product through someone they know and trust is more likely to purchase than those attracted through any other marketing method.
2. Increase Brand Awareness: Increasing brand awareness can be summarized as a customer thinking about you directly after hearing about your product. This means you become the primary purchase point for your potential customers.
What word-of-mouth marketing offers you is that it increases consumers' knowledge of you and your product, which in turn leads them to share this knowledge with each other, ultimately increasing brand awareness as a form of viral marketing.
3. Low Cost: There's no comparison between word-of-mouth marketing and any other marketing method financially. After all, customer satisfaction is free; you don't have to pay a cent to obtain it.
However, all the costs you can incur will be spent on getting your core marketing campaign on the right track. Even if you pay customers directly to implement any of the strategies, you won't spend much money compared to the return.
4. Increase the credibility of your products: You've probably been wondering what to buy one day, and a friend or relative recommended a store that sells that item. You remember how safe and reliable that store made you feel.
This is exactly what happens when you use word-of-mouth marketing. It creates the best possible impression of you. Statistics indicate that more than 90% of people trust their friends' recommendations about products.
Disadvantages of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
1. Spreading negative experiences: While word-of-mouth marketing provides a space for spreading positive experiences, it also provides a space for spreading negative experiences that can negatively impact your brand.
You can't control what people say about your product, so the spread of multiple negative experiences is a major threat to your credibility, even if those experiences are few and far between.
2. Setting expectations too high: Some people exaggerate their experiences, especially if they happened recently and they haven't given much thought to them. This often happens immediately after a purchase.
This can give users an overly rosy image of the product, raising buyers' expectations and leaving them dissatisfied after purchase. Therefore, make your description of all product details clear to avoid any such problems.
3. It's difficult to measure results: Most marketing methods provide you with data to measure the success or failure of a campaign.
However, with word-of-mouth marketing, the situation is slightly different. You won't be able to identify which customers came from that particular method, and therefore, you won't be able to differentiate between the effectiveness of the different methods you use.
So, try to diversify your marketing strategies as much as possible to ensure the greatest possible chance of success.
How to Use Word-of-Mouth Marketing to Increase Your Sales
1. Put the Product First: Whatever service or product you offer, don't expect customers to market to you if they don't receive value first. Value here includes quality, pricing, service, and other factors. If you're not the best in the market, at least be reasonably positioned among your competitors.
2. Facilitating the user experience: After you've verified the quality of your product or service, there's a very important element that can easily ruin it all and bring you back to square one: the experience.
The user experience should be seamless and simple, and you should strive to ensure the customer completes as few steps as possible. You should also provide good customer service to ensure that any customer problems you encounter are resolved. You can do this by understanding the customer journey.
3. Showing appreciation and care for your customers: Showing appreciation and care simply means gaining their trust.
This can be done in countless ways, such as giving your customers unexpected extra gifts or any kind of personalized discounts. All of these methods will leave a positive impression of you and your brand.
4. Integrating some activities into the purchasing process (in the case of online stores): First and foremost, your store must be attractive and professional. Then, to take it a step further, it's a good idea to include some interactive activities that can engage the customer and increase their connection to the store, such as reward systems that award points to the customer with every purchase.
5. Creating shareable content: Here we begin to enter the marketing area, where one of the essential elements of successful marketing is that the product content itself is viewable and shareable by the user.
This isn't just done by creating content about the product itself, as that is rarely shared. Rather, it's more about content directed at potential customers, intended to help them and provide them with value and benefit.
6. Use the right strategy: Just as product categories and types vary, so do customer categories and types. Therefore, there's no one fixed way to get customers of any category to engage in word-of-mouth marketing.
However, you should consider focusing on what specifically appeals to your customer group and sticks in their minds to achieve the best possible results, whether through your own personal experience or even by examining and analyzing competitors' methods.
Word-of-mouth marketing strategies
There are a number of word-of-mouth marketing strategies that will help you in this area, including:
1. Influencer marketing: Any field that has influencers with a large number of followers can easily add a very large fan base to you and your brand.
Influencer marketing involves having one or more influencers market your product in exchange for a certain amount of money, a commission percentage, or even providing them with certain products on a regular basis.
As for the word-of-mouth aspect of this strategy, it considers this influencer a highly trusted individual among their followers. They are considered the most qualified user to offer their opinion on the product and recommend it to others.
Influencer marketing has clearly proven its worth in recent years, as it is very rare to find an influencer or content creator who doesn't have a specific product they advertise from time to time.
However, for this word-of-mouth marketing strategy to succeed, you must connect with influencers trusted by their followers to prevent the campaign from backfiring and causing them to lose trust in you completely.
2. Referral Programs: Referral programs are one of the most effective methods of word-of-mouth marketing. Unlike most other strategies, you directly provide value to the buyer in return.
They are simply similar to affiliate marketing programs, where the marketer takes a percentage of each purchase made through them, but in this case, the user is a regular user.
Referral programs work by having buyers share your products or services with their friends, who in return receive a reward for each purchase, whether in the form of discounts, gifts, or other items.
3. Give gifts: No one doesn't like gifts, especially when they're given out of the blue. One of the easiest ways to engage in word-of-mouth marketing is by giving gifts to buyers.
These gifts can come in many forms. They can be an additional item linked to the original product or service, or they can also be free shipping, a discount, or something else.
You can almost guarantee that these customers will tell others about their experience, which will ultimately make your marketing successful.
It's also a good idea to send these gifts to existing customers who regularly buy from you, especially if you know some personal information about them, such as their birthdates.
4. Ask for reviews: If you've ever tried shopping online, one of the first steps you took was to check out the product's reviews.
You've also likely rejected many products that initially appeared to you simply because they had poor reviews or no reviews at all.
To get the best results from word-of-mouth marketing, you'll need to leverage these reviews as much as possible, primarily by requesting them from customers in a smooth and unobtrusive manner.
Then use them on your various marketing platforms to emphasize the reliability of your product.
As we mentioned before, try as much as possible to satisfy buyers. Any negative review, especially in the beginning, can significantly damage your brand.
5. Build a Community: People generally like to feel connected to a specific entity that represents them, and that's the core of this strategy.
You'll try to create a community for those who use your products, which will most likely be through social media.
You can also take this community a step further and bring it to life through exhibitions, events, or other means.
Of course, this method isn't suitable for all types of stores and brands, as it requires a strong connection to the product first and foremost. However, if you can implement it efficiently, you'll have a great chance of spreading the word through word-of-mouth marketing.
6. Encourage user content: One of the most reliable methods of word-of-mouth marketing is user-generated content about your product, regardless of its type.
This can come in many different forms, whether in the form of reviewing the order they received, taking photos with the product or at the point of sale, documenting the purchase journey and how easy it was, or even the simplest form of user content: written reviews.
This method is not only important because it gives the buyer a sense of security about the product, but also gives them a sense of the complete experience of owning and purchasing the product without spending any money.
Even if you need to pay some money or give gifts to obtain some of this content, definitely do so.
7. Content Marketing: Marketing content is one of the most important elements of brand success in general, and it can also be used effectively in word-of-mouth marketing. Content is king.
This is primarily achieved by creating valuable content that is worthy of being shared among people, thus increasing awareness of your brand among a wider audience.
Valuable content is not limited to high-quality content or content that requires a large investment; it also refers to content that resonates with users and encourages them to share it with their friends.
These methods are currently very popular through short videos on TikTok. Not only does this method increase brand awareness, but it can also put you at the forefront of the market and search engines if used correctly.
Conclusion
Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most overlooked marketing methods that I rarely see anyone talk about, despite its immensely beneficial and effective nature. There's nothing more reliable than a friend recommending a product they've already tried.
However, it's also a double-edged sword. It can be used to attract more customers, but it can also permanently damage your brand's reputation if, for example, an influencer posts a negative review of your product.
To avoid any of its downsides as much as possible and get the most out of it, we've provided you with everything you need to do to create a successful, fully-fledged word-of-mouth marketing strategy.