5+ Powerful Word Of Mouth Marketing strategies & Examples for Businesses

• 92% of consumers prefer recommendations from their friends and family over other forms of advertising. 

• 74% of consumers believe word of mouth is the primary influencer in their buying decisions. 

• Word-of-mouth impressions result in five times more than a paid ad impression. 

• 88% of consumers consider word of mouth as the highest level of trust from their known people. 

• 64% of marketers believe the word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. 

• 72% of consumers say that positive reviews increase their trust and reliability in a business. 

What is Word of Mouth Marketing? 

Word-of-mouth marketing is also known as word-of-mouth advertising. It is the process of influencing and encouraging positive yet organic conversations regarding a brand, product, resource, organization, or event. 

Traditional vs Modern Word of Mouth Marketing 

In the traditional sense, word-of-mouth marketing is something that spreads from one person to another based on a positive recommendation. 

The modern take on word of mouth marketing is something considered to be both natural as well as a targeted effort towards spreading recommendations about a product or brand to promote it. 

In the modern sense, the idea of word of mouth is leveraged to intentionally promote a brand or product. 

Word of mouth advertising or Word of mouth marketing capitalizes on this concept that comes naturally to human beings. 

Humans tend to share things they enjoy or had great experiences with, so this human and social behavior is turned around to convert into a marketing strategy. 

Organic Word of Mouth vs Amplified Word of mouth 

There are two ways word of mouth happens today in the modern scenario. Either it is organic or through amplifying it with external factors. 

Organic word of mouth simply is something that occurs naturally when consumers become advocates of any brand or product as they are satisfied and happy about using it. 

They support and share it naturally. On other hand, amplified word of mouth is where marketing and advertising strategies are used to amplify the effect of word of mouth. 

Marketing campaigns are launched to accelerate the word of mouth regarding a product or brand. 

There is an organized effort and machinery behind it to make this work. Also, to understand, there is also an overlap that must be registered. 

Sometimes when good organic word of mouth is accelerated or amplified, it turns out to be even better as compared to whether organic word of mouth is not well.

Signs Your Business Need A Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy

Truthfully, any small business can benefit from a word-of-mouth marketing strategy. But there are certain signs it may be time to start getting your clientele to spread the word about your services.

These signs include:

1. You’re spending too much money on marketing.

Whether you’re paying for Facebook advertising or you’re leaving flyers in prospective customers’ mailboxes, those marketing costs may be adding up.

And if those costs are starting to get too high, you should consider investing in word-of-mouth marketing strategies (more on those in a bit!).

2. Nobody’s really heard of you before.

Are you only landing customers through your advertising efforts? Do people mention that they haven’t heard of your small business before?

If that’s the case, focus on spreading awareness of your business, including what it does. While we’ll discuss what some of those strategies look like in a bit, it doesn’t hurt to start looking for ways to get friends, family members, and past customers to talk about your business a little bit more.

3. You’ve got a packed schedule.

This is the plight of so many small business owners: their days are eaten up by busy schedules, project planning, managing employees and vendors, and more.

So there’s very little time at the end of the day to focus on delivering a good marketing strategy.

That’s where word-of-mouth marketing can really help out. Instead of constantly investing your sweat and time into finding new customers, they’ve already found you.

That means you can spend less time looking for new projects, and more time making money!

4. You have very little social engagement.

If your small business’s social media channels seem more like ghost towns, that lack of engagement may signify that not enough people are talking about you or sharing your posts.

Now that we’ve identified just a few of the signs that you need to start investing in word of mouth, let’s take a closer look at the exact strategies you can use to start effortlessly bringing in more customers.

How To First Assure Your Customers Have an Epic Experience? 

Offering Quality Products or Services 

If you want a positive customer experience for your customers, you need to make sure the products or services you are offering are up to the mark. 

The quality of your products or services has a direct impact on the customer’s satisfaction. 

Whether you are able to over-deliver your promises or not, make sure you never under-deliver the expectation of your customers. 

Image Source: Mark Hayward

No matter how much time you spend on your logo, brand design, or even something important as customer assistance but if your product or service is below average, nothing will matter anymore. 

Other aspects even get a space to be negotiated and compensated but never the product itself for which the customer is paying. 

When you disappoint your customers, they are more likely to leave a negative review on review platforms. 

It will result in negative word of mouth for your products and brand. 

Image Source: Write Service Contracts

In fact, you need to focus on offering a customer an extraordinary personal experience with your brand. 

Negative word of mouth is faster to spread as compared to positive reviews. 

So make sure you even if you do not impress someone, at least avoid creating bad experiences for customers. 

This can be a start, then you can focus on improving the quality of the product, and customer assistance, and then, you might come to do something extraordinary.

Word of Mouth Marketing Examples 

Dropbox 

Dropbox is an online cloud storage company that is known for its successful word-of-mouth marketing and referral marketing campaigns. 

In their early stage, they offered free storage space along with bonus free space to those who recommend it to their friends and family. 

Even before they started offering free spaces to new users and a further extra 500 MB to the people referred by them. 

The floodgates were open right at the beginning of their campaign boosting the revenue of the company. 

Pinterest 

Pinterest is a social media platform that is based on user-generated content. They depend on their users to create boards and pins where now millions of users are now on it. 

But, how did they initially begin from 3000 followers in 2010 to now more than 320 million active users now in 2019?

The founder of Ben Silbermann focused on a small yet passionate audience to grow their website. 

Pinterest had a loyal group of people that loved it at the very early stage. The brand focused on those people, organized meet-ups, and recorded feedback to constantly improve. 

They started one of the most successful referral marketing programs of all time.  

The campaign “Pin-It-Forward” made users create various pinboards and invite their friends to do the same as well. 

Casper

Casper is a mattress company that intended to bring its product that was more expensive than its competitor’s or the industry-standard rates.

Now, why would someone buy from a new company with no built reputation or known credibility product which is more expensive than other credible products from well-known brands? 

How you could possibly position your company?

Well, Casper blows up this with their brave and unique idea of marketing. They made an irresistible offer that one buyer never would say no to. 

Casper Mattress company offered people to take their mattress home and sleep on it for 100 days, and then decide whether they want to keep it or return it. 

Such a long trial period cancels out any doubt on the brand where customers see themselves having the upper hand in this deal. 

It will give an ample amount of time to test the mattresses. 

This marketing strategy was so outrageously smart that people started talking about it. It generated a buzz in the market helping the company to reach out even more people. 

Coca-Cola 

Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most popular beverage drinks. They have been running various campaigns over time led by positive word-of-mouth marketing for their brand. 

Their marketing campaign boosted coke consumption around the world. One of their successful campaigns was earlier launched in 2014 was “Share A Coke”. 

Coca-Cola’s marketing campaign made people share a coke with their friends and family. 

It also made customers share their bottles on social media with common names using the hashtag #ShareaCoke. 

It is a great example of a creative word-of-mouth marketing campaign for small businesses to learn from. 

Threadless

Building a community is the most effective way of learning about your audience. 

T-shirt brand Threadless started by connecting all the graphic designers, art, and design fans. 

They encouraged them to create, design, share, and buy their custom products to spread the word about their brand. 

Through this word-of-mouth marketing, the brand attracted more than 10,000 members in just the first two years earning a gross of $6.5 Million in four years.  

What worked for them is connecting and engaging with an active art and design fans and creators to build a loyal community around. 

More than that, they offered value to this community by learning more about their skillset and sharpening them as well. 

The team of Threadless identifies that they are providing a  creative audience, highly active, and engaging.    

Threadless went ahead with user-generated content to attract this audience building a loyal audience in exchange for offering some fun and learning times. 

They were happy about it and never shy away to promote the brand on their own to various social media. 

Threadless was an iconic example of word of mouth marketing for small businesses. 

Word of Mouth Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses 

Ask Your Happy Customers For Reviews

Being a small business owner, you must be always looking for an opportunity to gain positive reviews from your customers. 

It should be on your priority list because every review counts to develop a compounding reputation for your brand over time. 

So, always try to encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews regarding their purchasing experience with your company. 

Online reviews will be the first thing that a potential customer searches for the web in their process to buy from you. 

Image Source: Wordstream

You can leverage online reviews to give social proof for your brand. Your goal is to constantly engage with your customers and make them leave a review. 

To make things even better, you can use these customer reviews and testimonials to put on your website, landing page, sales funnel, checkout page, and social media pages.

There will be bad reviews as well, so you need to deal with it in one way or another.

How To Deal With Negative Reviews? 

Along with positive reviews, you are going to get some negative reviews on the way as well. 

So what you need to understand is that negative reviews are part of running a business. Also, it is inevitable for the most part. 

Negative or bad reviews are only going to give you an opportunity to improve considering your approach towards it. 

Not everyone is going to be fully satisfied or happy with your product or service, and that’s really something you should bother about. 

To begin with, negative reviews give you the opportunity to identify the problems and challenges coming to customers by interacting with them. 

You will get to improve your product or service on the basis of negative or bad reviews. People are still talking about your product, so that’s something. 

The worst-case scenario will be not getting any reviews at all or just the bad reviews, then you got yourself a problem. 

What Is A Negative Review?

Clearly, you know what a negative review is, but there is more to it than you know. 

Customers look at reviews as a part of the research that they do before buying any product or service. 

They check for both positive reviews as well as negative reviews. A negative review is any review that reflects not so good experience with the brand on any or all aspects. 

Now, what more you need to understand here as a small business owner that there are two types of negative reviews – 

1. Good negative reviews 
2. Bad negative reviews 

Image Source: Reviewtrackers

The image above demonstrates a good negative review. It is an example of a detailed negative review talking about 

How Even Negative Reviews Can Be Helpful? 

No business can save itself from negative reviews to a certain extent.

You definitely should try to provide the best customer experience to your consumers but still, there would be some negative reviews to deal with.

It is important to understand the significance and the role of negative reviews in the growth of your business.

Negative reviews can be as useful as positive reviews, it’s just you need to shift your approach towards it.

Negative Reviews Helps Customer Look At Positive Reviews

One of the features of a negative review for your business is highlighting the positive review for your prospects.

It significantly impacts the effect of positive reviews and makes it look better.

Any potential customer can actually see and compare all the positive and negative points to get clarity before making the purchase.

When customers see bad or negative reviews for your business, it increases the chances of them believing in the positive reviews.

If there are all positive reviews, then it is most likely they don’t believe it or find it too good to be true.

Negative reviews also give away all the pros and cons of the product which can be helpful for the customer.

Bad Reviews Helps Small Businesses To Improve Their Product

Negative reviews can actually help you to understand where you are going wrong with your product.

It gives you the room to improve the product and even that accounts to earn more credibility from a customer perspective.

Bad reviews also give you the perspective of a customer which is the most essential aspect of a business’s growth.

You can improve on particular issues and pointers mentioned in most of the reviews. And even get their feedback to see how you can improve further.

Negative Reviews Builds Trust Between Customer/Prospect And The Brand

The very first response for a lot of businesses and brands is to hide or remove negative reviews or feedback when they encounter it.

They prefer to publish only positive reviews so it makes a ‘perfect’ impression about the brand on prospects.

However, this doesn’t work!

A potential customer won’t take any time to think that you are hiding something or there is something fishy when he or she sees only positive reviews.

More likely, they even won’t be give you a chance to prove you otherwise.

So few bad reviews don’t necessarily mean that they will spoil your brand image or prevent people from buying it.

It actually makes them more confident and clear about the flaws of the product. Even most of the time, those flaws are workable with or not relevant to another customer.

Every product or business has flaws or something to improve on. So reflecting that in your reviews will help consumers develop more trust in your brand.

Negative Reviews Give You a Chance To Engage With Your Customers

The more you engage with your customers, the better the trust will be between the brand and prospects.

Bad reviews are actually another opportunity to engage with your customer.

It also gives you a chance to stand up to their expectations and earn their trust. So, it is always great for brands to respond to negative reviews or feedback.

Try to understand their problem with your product and resolve it. In a lot of cases, negative reviews turn out to be even stronger than positive reviews.

Offer them a solution and get the pointers to improve the product depending on their feedback.

Don’t shy away to make an apology, and even offer them a gift card or discount.

Particularly when beginning, verbal referrals are the best method to develop your business. Indeed, even in cutting-edge organizations, having two or three hundred evangelists who can’t survive without your item and will get the message out is staggeringly essential.

An extraordinary item or administration is plainly the main thing you can need to goad verbal development. Number two (and conceivably similarly as imperative as the first) is mind-boggling client benefit.

In any case, past the self-evident, what would you be able to do? Here are a few procedures I’ve looked for some kind of employment well.

Get Word of Mouth for Your Business

Recognize and focus on your influencers.

An influencer is somebody who is dynamic via web-based networking media and writes and can advance your message and brand.

Marketing master Jay Baer most likely put it best when he stated, “genuine impact drives activity, not simply mindfulness.” in all actuality, customers today trust an outsider substantially more than they trust brands.

Getting the correct message out to influencers is another method for marketing that, whenever done successfully, can prompt unstable development for organizations.

Take for instance Reckitt Benckiser’s Dettol, known as Lysol in the U.S., which found that its fluid sterile was attempting to develop in China outside of the most crowded urban areas.

Besides, its TV promotions weren’t building the sort of brand mindfulness Reckitt Benckiser required, also the advertisements were to a great degree expensive.

Reckitt Benckiser in the long run collaborated with Advocacy WOM to design an informal crusade concentrated on influencer mothers.

The organization appropriated 48,000 examples to 4,000 influencer mothers who each gotten one pack for herself and 10 more for her companions. The battle was an enormous achievement, coming to 46 percent of the brand’s intended interest group.

In five months, mark mindfulness expanded multiple times, buy multiplied from 21 percent to 42 percent, and deals expanded 86 percent in just two months.

Heat informal referrals into desires

Numerous organizations wrongly ask for referrals after the item or administration has been conveyed. You can take that course, however, setting desires forthright can be useful also.

Send a fast note advising new clients that you mean to give an inconceivable dimension of client administration and bolster, and that consequently, you and your business truly depend on informal referrals.

Interface with the human feeling.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation is notable for its commitment to giving wishes to kids confronting dangerous sicknesses. Getting individuals mindful of your image is a certain something – remaining in the discussion is another.

To accomplish the last mentioned, the non-benefit association made a convincing occasion for Miles Scott, a 5-year-old malignancy survivor disappearing, who wished he could be superhuman, Batkid, for one day.

On November 15, 2013, Make-A-Wish made one of the biggest and most expound arranged occasions ever, which included investment from President Barack Obama and other government authorities and law requirements.

Indeed, even the city’s principal paper, the San Francisco Chronicle created a “Gotham City Chronicle” release with the feature “Batkid Saves City: Hooded saint captures Riddler, salvages maid in trouble.”

Because of its phenomenal verbal crusade, Make-A-Wish got 1.89 million social impressions, 555,697 #batkid hashtags, noteworthy press inclusion including a Buzzfeed article that created 2.5 million hits inside three days, more than 21,683 Instagram and Twitter photographs posted before the day’s over, and, obviously, expanded gifts.

Offer time-bound referral rewards

Clients will regularly document your referral offer in the back of their brains on the off chance that they know about somebody who they think would function admirably.

That doesn’t generally work, as individuals get occupied and overlook it. It’s regularly more powerful to offer a reward that is time-bound – say, a fourteen-day window – with an explicit markdown or blessing offer.

That way, your clients can take several minutes to thoroughly consider who could utilize your administration and make presentations immediately.

Accomplish something surprising after the commitment.

Regardless of whether your association with a client has eventually hit a tangle, the last impression you leave with is frequently the longest enduring.

Like an eatery that gives you a free box of chocolates toward the finish of the supper, give something startling and unpaid to after your time together.

For an administration business, this could be a free extra 30-minute counsel on a related issue; for an item-based business, this could be a reasonable adornment you locate that numerous clients require.

Be fantastically grateful

This appears glaringly evident, yet many organizations forget about it, except if your value point is low, having somebody on your group put a call, send a transcribed note or send a present for a referral is quite often justified, despite all the trouble.

(Truly, a manually written note – when was the last time you got one of those?) It’s anything but difficult to send an auto-produced email – the fantastically appreciative part is making that additional stride.

Persistently include networks.

Individuals constantly talk about Red Bull in light of the fact that the caffeinated drink organization truly hosts constantly bubbly occasions that get individuals included.

Among a portion of the activities that keep Red Bull as the business’ market pioneer may be:

• A Red Bull Wings Team that drives around Red Bull marked vehicles appropriating tests while having a ton of fun and producing buzz.
• An understudy mark supervisor program that supports understudies to manufacture mindfulness at occasions close to their grounds.
• A Red Bull room stick which has ability indicate occasions that objective understudies.
• A Red Bull correspondent program that supports news coverage and film understudies to make stories and buzz for the brand.

Another case of a verbal battle that included networks adequately is when Vail Resorts made an on the web and versatile application that associated skiers with their systems on the mountain.

In 2010, Vail propelled EpicMix, which utilized RFID innovation implanted into season passes and lift tickets to enable riders to realize where they rode, when they rode, and how far they voyaged, which inspired and tested riders to propel themselves while imparting their accounts and accomplishments to their loved ones.

In the wake of going live in December 2010, 100,000 visitors – or 15 percent – of aggregate qualified visitors actuated records on EpicMix and produced more than 35 million social impressions.

Robotize all updates and referral forms

This appears to be outlandish, yet it’s vital. Customized expressions of gratitude, messages, and updates require significant investment.

While managing ordinary emergencies, onboarding new clients, and managing a thousand different things, it tends to be anything but difficult to forget about referral forms.

Ensure that your CRM or logbook creates suggestions to get all that you require out at the perfect time.

Give a fantastic client benefit

The mystery here: treat your clients and prospects the manner in which you’d get a kick out of the chance to be dealt with yourself. A couple of rudiments: Smile at clients when you converse with them.

Be respectful. Answer their inquiries. Try not to keep them holding up pointlessly. At whatever point conceivable, have a genuine individual pick up the telephone.

On the off chance that you should send guests to a voice message, have something in your voice message declaration that tells them how soon you will restore their call.

At that point, restore their call inside the expressed time period. If you give an administration, complete the clients’ ventures on time and inside their financial plan. Keep them educated about changes, delays, or other data they’d need to know.

Make it simple for individuals to leave audits

One of the most exceedingly bad things you can do in an informal crusade is made it troublesome for shoppers to leave surveys, and proposals and speak with each other about your image.

Disentangle the procedure for clients to communicate with brands, like the way 3M ESPE, a maker of dental items, did when it made its survey procedure so straightforward that the organization expanded client audit volume on its items by 200 percent in three days.

Verbal exchange is the most seasoned type of publicizing; it’s as yet instrumental to getting your message out there in the present innovative, quick-paced world.

What matters is how would you motivate individuals to mind when you’re not giving them the message vis-à-vis. The above models are amazing go-to contextual analyses of effective informal marketing efforts.

At the point when all else comes up short, consider what individuals are discussing. What’s in the news? What are individuals sharing via web-based networking media?

Consider concocting a crusade to piggyback off of discussions that are as of now occurring, as Starbucks did when it declared its baristas are urged to discuss race with clients.

Regardless of whether this was a decent or terrible move for the espresso goliath, it produced gigantic media inclusion and got general society talking.

Regardless of how best in class we move toward becoming innovative, it’s vital for brands to comprehend that despite everything, they’re interfacing with people.

At the end of the day, disregard the adherents and “preferences” every other person is endeavoring to pick up, yet center around more profound knowledge – consider what individuals need to discuss and distinguish the general population who can enable you to get your message out there.

Conclusion

Informal marketing is definitely not another marvel, however, has as of late been characterized, considered, and investigated top to bottom.

Be that as it may, one reality that has unmistakably surfaced is that this sort of marketing ought not to be faked or organized yet rather energized and helped along.

The reality which can’t be overlooked is that individuals will discuss a brand or organization regardless of whether an organization utilizes formal verbal marketing efforts;

accordingly, it is advantageous for an organization to monitor what is being conveyed about it and in addition attempt to guarantee that such correspondence is certain and gainful for the organization (Young, 2008).

A painstakingly structured verbal marketing effort can not just spare a considerable measure of cash that would have been spent on publicizing, but also be a powerful way to draw in new buyers while holding the more established customers.

There are many ways to get word of mouth for your Business. It’s a really easy way to reach different Customers without spending more money. Here are the Powerful strategies to get huge words that can market your business easily. read below

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