Word of Mouth Marketing

One of the biggest marketing boosts your brand can receive is from word-of-mouth marketing.

This type of marketing is basically when people talk to other people about your brand, product or services.

It can be in-person, inside an email or on social media.

Person-to-person marketing has ALWAYS been the best way for your brand to drive new business. The personal recommendations for our friends, family or coworkers goes further than anything your marketing department or social media team can produce.

The reason for that is simple — TRUST!

We trust our family. We trust our friends and coworkers. We trust them to give us the best advice on where to eat. Where to get our oil changed or even where to go on our next vacation. It’s THAT level of trust your brand has to be able to tap into and create when it comes to minting your Social Currency on social media.

And I’m not just talking about creating trust for your product or service. I mean you HAVE to be able to create a level of trust with your customers as they have with their friends or family members. Let’s be honest. That level of trust is not easy to earn or create.

You have to constantly track what your target audience is doing on-line. What they’re talking about with their friends on social media and LIVE in your analytics in order to see what type of content they’re engaging with the most.

Trust at its core is the firm belief in the reliability, ability, or strength of someone or something. That’s a LOT to ask for a brand to try and create with their customer base. Especially in the noisy World of social media.

So, how do you as a brand begin to build that trust and generate word-of-mouth marketing for your business? There’s really three levels of helping your brand to build trust with your audience; Emotional, Engaging, Educational and we’ll go over those in more detail in the coming chapters.

But first, let’s talk about what drives consumers to talk about brands, products and services to their inner circles of family, friends and coworkers.

As I touched on in the introduction, people LOVE to talk about themselves and boast on social media what they have, what they bought and how much they saved over others. That’s the beginning of word-of-mouth marketing.

Yes. They are talking about themselves. However — They can’t do so without mentioning the brand, product or service they just purchased. What they’ve effectively done by mentioning that brand, is now they passed along the name of the business and either the product or service they received from that brand.

And the best part? They do it without even consciously knowing it.

You see, people want to brag to their friends. They want to show their family how much better than them they’re doing. It’s human nature. Everyone wants to show off that they got the Popeyes chicken sandwich and their friends didn’t. They want everyone to know they’re going to Disney World on vacation this year and you’re not.

It’s built into our human nature to ‘one up’ others. Why do you think social media feeds are FLOODED with photos of people on vacation, buying new cars, in luxury hotel suites and fancy meals out at fine dining restaurants?

It’s the “look at me, look at me” mentality we have as humans and what social media was built for. Now. As a brand or marketer, it’s your job to figure out how you can leverage that mentality in your audience to create that all so important word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

The funny thing is, it really isn’t all that hard when you know what your audience is looking for and how you can position your brand to go above and beyond your competitors to give them what they need. If, you know how to read, react and understand how your audience already perceives your brand and your products and/or services.

Let’s take the example we used earlier with Popeyes and Chick-Fil-A. Both are fast food restaurants that serve chicken. So why would you go to one over the other? Price. Location. Deals. Menu items. Service.

OR!

Would you go to one over the other because you were able to get something from one that your friends were unable to get?

Look. Whether you’re a Popeyes person or Chick-Fil-A person, there's no denying the craze and word-of-mouth marketing that Popeyes generated during ‘The Great Chicken Sandwich Wars’.

Popeyes KNEW they could instantly start building Social Currency with word-of-mouth marketing when they put their marketing plan into motion. All of that culminated into driving huge revenue boosts to their franchises by having a limited menu item that drove people into a craze to get one.

EVERYONE on social media was talking about it, tagging Popeyes in their posts and pushing more and more word-of-mouth marketing for their brand. All the while providing Popeyes with who knows the amount of (FREE) publicity and marketing.

How much do you think they [Popeyes] would’ve had to spend on social media advertising, television commercials and print based ads to generate that kind of craze if they had NOT gone down the path they did by initially calling out the alpha dog in their space, Chick-Fil-A?

The result ….

Instant. Social. Currency.

Not to mention one of the best word-of-mouth marketing campaigns of 2019 and maybe the decade. This is what your brand has to do for your products and/or services. No matter what your industry is, you no doubt have competitors all over the place. Whether you’re a brick and mortar business or ecommerce brand. You have competitors that are offering the same product or service.

Your job, again, as a brand or marketer is to find that one differentiating quality that makes consumers choose your brand over the competition.