Word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing tool that helps spread the word about your product or service. It leads to increasing the number of sales and business growth.
However, there is only one problem - you can't control it. The success depends on how your overall marketing strategy works.
In this guide, you will get familiar with word-of-mouth marketing and how to execute it correctly.
What does Word-Of-Mouth Marketing mean?
First of all, the term "word of mouth" differs from the process of "word-of-mouth marketing."
- Word of mouth is vocally spreading the word about a product/service or a brand by people.
- Word-of-mouth marketing is the process that helps business owners influence others to actively talk about their products or brand positively.
Why is Word-of-Mouth Marketing Important?
Statistics show that 83% of people tend to trust the recommendations on the products from their friends and family members. It means that you're barely influencing their decision-making using traditional marketing tactics.
Likely, you can impact your target audience in a slightly different way. Build marketing communication with niche thought leaders or influencers. These people have a huge army of followers who consider and act on influencers' words.
People listen to them, and your product or brand will get the recognition you seek. Let's consider word-of-mouth marketing as a flywheel principle.
Word-of-mouth marketing doesn't happen overnight, so don't expect to see an immediate positive effect. It will take some time before the first results appear.
You can speed up the process, however, by combining your marketing strategy, quality content, and SEO strategies.
8 Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Tips to Take Into Account
Of course, word-of-mouth marketing can suggest different tips to use in practice. However, not all of them will be a good fit for your business.
Nevertheless, here are five tips that you should take on board. And some of them will definitely help you.
1. Brainstorm ideas on how to offer your product
The first rule of word-of-mouth marketing to make it work for you is that your product must be awesome. Otherwise, it won't help push your business proposal ahead.
For example, one of the leading brands in the content design market is Visme. It entered the game back in 2013.
Afterward, Visme continues to create new content design tools to satisfy existing customers and attract new ones.
Another thing that matters is product positioning. Think about how you describe your product to potential customers. Start with market research first. It will help you know your target audience better.
2. Manage your brand
If people don't like your brand they won't recommend its product (even if it is great). It’s a no-brainer!
It leads to the conclusion that if you want people to recommend your product, you should invest in brand-building in the first place. Therefore, try to invest 60% into brand-building and 40% into campaigns that boost sales.
A great way to boost your brand is to place it on any link you share. This is possible with Rebrandly custom URL shortener.
Including your or your company's brand in any shared link leads to many immediate benefits like Increased brand awareness, improved click-through rate, and enhanced message deliverability.
Thus, focus on investing in your online reputation. And the more time, effort, and money you put into this, the more benefits you will get from word-of-mouth marketing.
3. Create product-led content
The most straightforward way to present your product is with the help of content marketing. Content is one of the most powerful and resultative assets in the marketing arsenal.
For instance, the Visme blog drives 654K organic visits per month.
It means that 654K people read Visme's content, explore information about content design tools, and get converted into paid customers.
What's more important, people tend to share, like, repost, and suggest content materials across social media channels.
Plus, don’t forget about the flywheel principle. The more traffic your blog gets, the more people know about your product.
So, how do you create product-led content that would force people to talk about it?
4. Keyword research
You have created a product. You know what issues it can help solve. The majority of problems are obvious. But there are issues that you can't come up with by yourself.
That's why you need to identify them using specific SEO tools.
In this case, this tool is Keywords Explorer from Ahrefs. The service can let you know how many searchers a certain search query has.
For example, the keyword "content marketing strategy" has a search volume of 1.8K monthly.
If you decide to write a piece of content on this topic, you can promote your content design tools gently. But make sure you add some unique and fresh information.
Otherwise, people won't read it and share it on social channels. By following this scheme, analyze keywords and focus on the most promising ones.
5. Target topics with a high level of business potential
There is no point in creating content blindly without certain content goals. Yes, you can cover each and every content idea but if it doesn't meet your business needs - it is useless.
To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, focus on targeting topics with a high level of business potential. The following three criteria will help you move in the right direction:
- Cover topics with a high business potential (to pitch your product)
- Cover topics with a high traffic potential (to drive more traffic to your site)
- Cover topics with a low Keyword Difficulty score (to rank easily for niche-related keywords)
It should be stated that it is pretty difficult to fulfill all three criteria. Thus, focus on topics with high business potential.
Your content must promote your product. Otherwise, word of mouth will work on boosting your content, not your product.
6. Distribute content properly
Content won't work without your help. If you don't promote it, no one will see and interact with it. It means you should create and apply a proper content distribution strategy.
Here are some ideas that you can use:
- Share every blog post you publish across your company's social channels
- Send newsletter
- Repurpose content (it may require using additional tools, like video creator)
- Promote your content using paid ads
Besides, don't forget about old-fashioned outreach. It helps promote content massively and builds links to improve its rankings.
7. Work with brand ambassadors
It has been mentioned that niche-related influencers can help you with word-of-mouth marketing. Thus, if you have a brand ambassador, it will be much easier to spread the word about your product or brand.
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What is a brand ambassador?
Brand ambassadors are people who are in the spotlight. They can be seen on events, podcasts, shows, etc. If you build a long-term relationship with a brand ambassador, the last one will promote your brand here and there.
For example, there is a well-known influencer in the Digital Marketing niche - Neil Patel. He has 451K+ followers on Twitter.
If Neil Patel mentions your brand during one of his conference performances, lots of people will find out about it and might turn into your customers in the future.
However, business owners who don't cooperate with brand ambassadors - can work with their loyal customers as well.
Talk to them and ask them to spread the word about your product. Don't forget to offer some reward in return.
8. Create a community
If you have lots of followers or subscribers on your social media channels, it doesn't mean that word of mouth will work for one hundred percent.
To make it happen - engage with your audience. Create conditions where each member of the audience would have a desire and opportunity to communicate with the other peers.
Review the following tips on how to create a community and power up a word-of-mouth strategy.
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Creating a community group on Facebook
Visme VIP Lounge is a private group on Facebook. The members of this group are mostly Visme users. There are 2.2K members today.
The purpose of this group is to share knowledge related to content design, ask questions/get replies, and discuss Visme's toolkit. It helps have an impact on word of mouth positively.
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Notify your community with the latest product updates
When you release some new product update or feature, your community should know about it straight from the horse's mouth. Use all possible channels to let your audience know about the updates.
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Run conversations between community members
Initiating conversations within your community allows you to unite people and engage with each other. It powers up word of mouth drastically as well.
To initiate a conversation ask members of the group questions about the issues they might face using your product. Don't shy away from asking them to share their feedback.
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Behave yourself friendly with the community members
It is strictly important to speak with the voice of your company to your audience. The tone should be friendly. Your goal is to make interactions more personal.
To Sum Up
Doesn't matter what business you run. You can get lucky with a word-of-mouth marketing strategy for sure. Just make sure you have a full digital marketing strategy that you can incorporate it into, a superb product and research your target audience perfectly.
Use suggested tips and succeed with your word-of-mouth marketing strategy. Eventually, people will start to talk about your product and recommend it all around.
If you think this guide needs more tips, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
