Influencer Marketing: Win-Win-Win Situation For Fans, Influencers & Brands

by Kuldeep Yadav | Aug 6, 2022 | Marketing

Everyone dreams of starting a business, if you also want to start your own business then our blog on “how to start a successful business?” may be beneficial for you.

Let’s assume after following every step of the blog, you’ve established a business of your own. You’ve developed your products and are ready to serve your services.

But, how do reach audiences?

What are the ways?

There can be many different successful ways to reach out to target audiences such as we, Digiavtar at Gurgaon, have enlisted more than 40 marketing strategies in the blog “Marketing Made Simple”.

But nano influencer marketing can be most successful and cost-effective for your brand if your business is in just the initial phase.

Many brands have already adopted this marketing strategy, and more are still adapting and making it a part of their comprehensive marketing strategy.

Most marketers think that working with an influencer is enough for boosting awareness and drive traffic, but it’s not completely right.

Working with the right influencer should be your goal, and we’re going to discuss in this blog what kind of influencers will be the right fit for your brand.

But, first, let’s get to know about influencer marketing

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing has been made by combining to words “Influencer” and “Marketing”. You already have an idea what is the meaning of both of them, but let’s discuss it for more clarity.

An influencer is a person who’s the power to control the behaviour, interest, and beliefs of the followers. They’ve so many followers who follow what they do and trust what they say. They’ve earned this reputation and trust in people with lots of dedication, effort, and hard work.

Earlier only celebrities were considered the true influencer, and celebrity endorsement was a true form of influencer marketing.

But, not now!

It’s evolved so much, now anyone who has a good following, and engages his/her target audience can be an influencer. Any content creator can provide so much value to brands that are engaging with niche audiences.

We’ve understood the word “influencer”, now let’s understand “marketing” in a single line. Marketing means promoting your products and services through various means such as traditional ways or modern digital ways.

So, influencer marketing is the form of marketing in which a brand collaborates with influencers to promote their products and services to the target audience an influencer is engaging with.

Before moving ahead let’s have a look at some of the statistics;

• 73% of marketers allocate a budget for this marketing strategy.
• 49% of consumers depend on recommendations from influencers
• 86% of B2B are getting success in their marketing campaigns by incorporating influencer marketing.
• 40% of the customers make a purchase after viewing it used by an influencer on SMM platforms such as FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat etc.
• 9 out of 10 brands are using some kind of influencer marketing.
• Generate 18-20x more revenue than earned media on the same budget spent.

Now, let’s get to know what different kinds of influencers we can collaborate with.

Different Types of Influencers

When we talk about influencers, then one name comes to our mind Instagram. Instagram is the most popular platform for influencer marketing so far. Do you know, “Instagram is used by 67% of brands for influencer marketing”

Influencer marketing can be so much value if it’s understood well and implemented properly, according to one of the surveys, 89% of marketers tell influencer marketing better ROI generator than others.

Influencers can be classified into different types, but we’re defining influencers today on the basis of their fan following. On the basis of the number of targeted followers, there are 4 types of influencers that are following;

Nano Influencers

Influencers who have a small following on their platform but with highly engaged audiences. The focus of nano influencers can be on non-traditional topics, interests, products, causes and services but their audiences are always looking for relevant content.

If we work with a nano influencer then our brand can be seen by a small, highly targeted niche at a small cost. The audiences of nano influencers are highly targeted in a particular niche with a good engagement ratio.

Most of the influencers are considered nano when the number of their followers is 10,000 or fewer. It can be from 1000 to 10000. But it may vary, it’s an estimate.

Working with nano influencers has so many benefits;

1. They have a highly targeted audience, so you don’t waste your money.
2. And second, they’re not so big, so their charges are also lower than others, completely in your budget.

If you’re just starting out, then we would suggest you work with nano-influencers.

Micro-Influencers

The target audiences of micro-influencers can differ between 10000 to 100000. Subject matter experts (SMEs) or Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are granted as micro-influencers.

They also have a good engagement ratio with their audiences. Micro-influencers can work on a variety of topics, industries and niches.

Once your business has started generating a good amount of money, you can go for micro-influencers. Micro-influencers charge a decent amount of money as fees for partnerships but in return, they can cultivate real relationships with their followers.

Let’s move ahead and understand Mega Influencers!

Macro Influencers

Macro influencers’ fan following can differ between 1 lakh to 1 million. These influencers charge more than micro-influencers. They can be established thought leaders in their domain.

Mega Influencers

Any influencer who has a 1M+ following is called a mega influencer. Other influencers can be any normal people who are showing expertise in their fields. But mega influencers are trendsetters.

These are the best for big brands to partner with who already have a great reputation and generate a big amount of revenue in the market.

Any A-list celebrities and other well-known public figures are considered mega influencers such as Salman Khan, and Jaya Kishori.

Most of the brands, they’re out of budget because of charging a very much big amount of advertising fees. So, only established business for several years higher them as their brand ambassadors.

After discussing all this, you should have an idea of what types of influencers you should go with. In the starting, it is best to work with a nano influencer and test if this strategy works out for you or not.

Now, the question is how to book appointments with influencers and make them work for the brand by creating a successful marketing strategy with them.

How to create a successful Influencer Marketing Strategy?

Elaborating something in steps makes our work easier and less time-consuming. You need to first decide on which platform your audience is spending time more on, and start with just one platform at the beginning, you can move on to another later on. Just take this whole strategy to work on a single platform such as Instagram, and then further you can replicate it for other platforms.

So, let’s understand step by step process of building a successful influencer marketing campaign;

Determine your goals

Determining goals beforehand keep brands and influencers on the same page. With any marketing strategy, you can’t directly make so many sales in the starting. So, don’t make sales your first priority instead reach new target customers through influencer marketing.

We all know that influencer marketing is all about promoting the products or services to the followers of influencers, it just simply means that expanding the brand reach is the first goal.

So, increase your brand’s followers and make it more reputable with increased awareness with the help of influencer marketing.

Keep only one primary goal aligned with your one influencer marketing campaign, don’t confuse your audience with so many calls to action in a single campaign.

Know Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is better to make contact with the right influencer and promote the right products at right time.

In the first step, we defined a specific goal we want to achieve with the help of an influencer marketing campaign, but if we want to achieve that specific goal then we should have a specific target audience.

Don’t we?

Yes, we need, and to define a specific audience we can build buyer personas based on different pain points and wants of the audiences.

After creating different user personas, we can decide which persona we want to target users.

Now, we need to find the perfect influencer to partner with, so without wasting time, let’s move ahead and find the best-fit influencers for our marketing campaign.

Research Influencers: Compile a list of influencers with their pay

After thoroughly researching the market or Instagram profiles, you can make a list of the Influencer according to their fan following and previously mentioned charges if they’ve been mentioned somewhere. If you’re not able to find suitable influencers then you can try out these platforms to directly connect with the influencers;

1. AspireIQ
2. Shoutcart
3. Upfluence
4. Heepsy

After building the list, you need to filter out the influencers based on several factors such as;

• Is the influencer targeting the audiences that you want to target according to your user persona?
• What is the type of influencer from the aforementioned 4 types?
• Can the influencer fit into your marketing budget?
• Has the influencer worked with brands similar to your brand?
• Are your brand and influencer sharing the same shared values?

On the basis of these factors, you can choose the most suitable influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns.

Influencer Outreach: Reach out privately, and personally

After building a list, it’s time to reach out to them, and see if they’re willing to work with your brands. You need to figure out a way to reach out to influencers in a right and effective way.

First thing first, while reaching out to them, don’t make use of the word “Influencer”, most influencers take themselves as content creators, and they can be offended by the word “influencer”. It may seem to them that you’re belittling their content, efforts and work.

I remember we’ve discussed this thing earlier also that if you are a small brand or start-up, you should go with nano influencers. Because they’ve highly engaged target audience in economical price to your brand. So, they can be the best fit for your brand, the rest depends on you with whom you want to go.

When you want to connect with the influencer, you should check out their profile, most of the influencers don’t prefer DM (Direct Messages) instead they themselves provide some contact details to connect with them.

Successfully connect with them whichever way they’re comfortable with talking to you.

Collaborate with your influencer to define the rules

After making a connection with your desired influencers you can discuss everything, that you want to achieve with your Instagram Campaigns.

It’s time to provide them with information about the brand and what you stand for. As we’ve already discussed influencers want to be called themselves content creators first. So, you need to make sure that your Instagram Marketing campaigns will not only provide them with a chance of getting a paycheck or free products but it is also aligned with what content they’re developing for their audiences.

The influencer may agree to work with you on the following collaboration;

1. Paychecks for sponsored posts
2. Provide reviews on their account in exchange for free product samples
3. Providing affiliate links for them and special offers, discounts or coupon codes for their users so may be valuable for both influencers as well as the target audiences.
4. Or collaborations on some other mutual interests.

So, you can decide now, how you want to collaborate with your desired influencers. Influencer marketing is a win-win-win situation for Fans, Influencers as well as Brands. Influencers get their paychecks or a free product or any other favours, target audiences get discounts as coupon codes, and likewise, a brand gets new highly engaged niche target audiences.

Now, once you’re agreed on how you want to go with each other’s, It is time to decide some rules on what your influencers and brands need from each other and at what moment. Sign a contract with the influencers including every tiny detail such as;

• Frequency of the posts.
• Permissions for reposting.
• Compensation amount if it’s decided.
• Other important aspects such as what’s your goal and how you want your campaign to look.

It’s better to have everything on paper rather than in dialogues. You’ll need permissions for reposting to share the sponsored posts across your online presence and brand channels such as website, SMM platforms, emails, advertising copy etc.

Develop effective content and message

After putting down every term and condition on paper, it’s time for brands and influencers to develop effective content and messaging for the influencer marketing campaign.

You can provide them with what your content should look like a little bit. But, it would be best if you give them the freedom to provide their unique creative spin to the whole influencer marketing campaign for promoting products or services.

They know their audiences better than you do, and it’s not about brands or influencers, but it is completely about the target audiences.

You can develop the following different types of content for your influencer marketing campaign;

1. Blog Posts
2. Social Media Posts (Such as Instagram Posts)
3. Stories
4. Testimonial Videos
5. Unboxing Videos of a Product
6. Webinars
7. Recorded Videos
8. Interviews
9. Case Studies
10. Audios that can also be used in Podcasts.
11. Infographics
12. Live Interactions with Consumers
13. Any other interactive content that depicts that the influencer is so much a fan of the particular product or service, and recommends to others to go for it.

You can see how many options you have to build effective content and messaging for your influencer marketing campaigns.

You should focus on giving your brand messaging a personal touch with personalized marketing and make it conversational with conversational marketing. Also, you should try to represent it as a personal narrative with the help of storytelling marketing with keeping the brand voice consistent all over the marketing channels of a brand.

You need to learn how to manage everything and make a unique marketing campaign incorporating these strategies, they’re not one but still, they overlap with each other. As you also know, you can’t get anything with just a single marketing strategy in this competitive world.

You should have an understanding of what to use and where. You should know to a couple of different marketing strategies for achieving a single goal. Along with all of this make the list of tags you’re going to use in your marketing campaign.

Defining the messaging and content will also help influencers in posting relevant content without making so many efforts. They can easily provide their specific creative unique spin to the campaign to promote the products and services of the brand.

Create budget and management strategy

Well, influencers and you’ve decided what the influencer marketing campaign should look like, and how the communication will be. Now, you need to set a budget for the whole campaign so that later on you will not run out of money.

You can create a budget now as you know now what will the paychecks of the influencers, are and how much it’ll cost to develop content along with the complete advertising. Decide a budget and management strategy, how you’re going to spend it, where, and when!

So, when the time will come, you’ll need not worry about what will be spent, and how you’re going to manage it.

Execute the Campaigns

You’ve come to a stage where you are ready to execute the marketing campaign. You’ve performed market research, defined your target audience, defining your platform, contacted influencers, signed contracts with them, build a strategy with them, and created a budget and management strategy.

Don’t think so much you’ve covered every aspect so precisely!

Just go for it!

Measure your results

You can measure your results in different ways, and UTM parameters can be one of them. UTM parameters include campaign source, campaign medium, campaign name, campaign term, and campaign content.

UTM parameters are called Urchin Tracking Module. It is a simple google analytics code that can be attached to any URLs to generate Google Analytics data for any digital campaigns.

You can provide each influencer with a unique link to share with their target audiences. After the end of the campaigns, it will provide you with a clear view of the results. With the help of this method, you would be able to check which influencer is producing promising results and is good for long-term partnerships.

In the same way, to measure sales, you can provide each influencer with a different discount code or coupon. This way it’ll be easier for you to track the sales.

Apart from getting the reports on reach, engagement and sales from influencers, you’ll have your own reports. You can decide on your own which one is just boasting and which one is really delivering promising results.

Now, you’ve chosen your long-term partner to perform influencer marketing. So, without further ado let’s review and refine the strategy of our long-term influencer partner.

Review and refine your Marketing strategy

You’ve already reviewed and analysed the campaigns of every branded content creator. But as of now, you need a more refined influencer marketing strategy for that you need to have a look closely and precisely at the strategy of our chosen long-term influencer partner.

After reviewing it, wherever you need improvements, you can perform the needful actions to make it better for the next time.

And you should repeat this after every successful campaign.

This is just the beginning of the success of your brand!

Now, let’s move ahead and have a look at some tips to build a killer influencer marketing strategy!

Best Practices for building a Killer Influencer Marketing Strategy

Best practices make you remember those things you’re forgetting because of the pressure of the work. These are like a small checklist to check whether we’re doing it the right way or not. So, let’s discuss some of the most successful tips to remember;

1. Only work with experienced social media influencers that are sharing the same brand values as your business is
2. Using UTM or Urchin Tracking Module Parameters to track influencer marketing results
3. Always be organized and structure everything from strategy to budget, time spent etc.
4. Incorporate Conversational Marketing, Personalized Experience, and Storytelling in Branded Content and Brand Messaging.
5. Document your goals such as building brand awareness, targeting new audiences, and lead generation along with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
6. Don’t expect quick results with this, it’s a process you need to follow just like content marketing and social media marketing are.
7. Work with nano influencers if you’re a start-up or business in its initial phase.
8. It’s necessary to understand the landscape of Influencers rather than imposing our own thoughts.
9. Don’t look only at the popularity of the influencer but also see authority, credibility, and their relationships with their target audience.
10. Always keep in mind the 3R of influencer marketing; Relevancy, Reach, and Resonance
11. Always measure the metrics and keep refining your strategies

We’ve discussed the 3R’s of influence in influencer marketing along with 9 tips, where relevancy depicts if the audiences provided by influencers are aligning with the target audience, Reach and Resonance respectively are the follower base we can reach and engagement we can get with the help of an influencer.

Now let’s see some of the benefits of Influencer Marketing.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

As influencer marketing is about targeting a new follower base with the help of a content creator or an influencer so benefits of it would be aligned to that. Advantages of influencer marketing anybody can get are;

1. Target new target audience
2. Spreading brand awareness
3. Less time in reaching the audiences
4. Cost-effective if we’re working with nano influencers
5. Generates sales with the help of provided discount coupons to the target audiences by the brand through the influencers

We’ve seen the main benefits we can get from influencer marketing. Now, let’s wrap up the blog!

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, the power of influencing the buying decisions of others is influence, and who yields it is called an influencer.

Influencers get this power because of their hard work, authority, expertise, knowledge, position, or relationship with their niche audiences. It takes a lot to become an influencer or I should say an authoritative content creator.

SMM works if you’re having a good interaction with your target audience, content marketing works if you’re providing genuine information to your target audience, and influencer marketing work when both Social media Marketing and content marketing are working in an alignment. Last but not least, it’s relevant to both b2b and b2c businesses.

If you want to scale your brand and reach a broader new highly dedicated, engaged target audience, then influencer marketing or I should more precisely say nano influencer marketing is for you.

Planning to launch your influencer marketing campaign? Please let us know by dropping a comment below.

For more similar blogs, visit our blog

Word of Mouth Marketing: The Best Marketing Strategy So Far

by Kuldeep Yadav | Aug 3, 2022 | Marketing

Today we are going to discuss word-of-mouth marketing. Have you ever heard about it? I’m sure you already have!

We’ll get answers to many questions in this blog such as what is the word of mouth marketing, what are its benefits of it, tips for word of mouth marketing, strategy for word of mouth marketing, and how a digital version of word of mouth marketing can help in business growth.

Before moving ahead, let me ask you a simple question.

Have you ever recommended any products or services to any of your friends, family members or relatives?

I am sure, your answer would be yes, of course, we have!

If you have then you’ve become a part of word of mouth marketing.

How?

Let’s understand!

What is word of mouth marketing?

WOMM = Word of Mouth Marketing

So, womm is an acronym for word of mouth marketing. As its names suggest, in this type of marketing strategy the base of the marketing is words of mouths of people. Means uttered words by people are used for promoting a product or service.

In words of mouth marketing, consumers’ interests in the products and services of a company can be seen in their daily dialogues. Whenever they talk about some products they’ve used earlier, they’ll definitely mention the brand they’re satisfied with.

For E.g. have you ever given a compliment to another person on their shoes, clothes, or watches? Sure, you’ve given someone. When you gave compliments about these things, they must’ve started talking about the brand, and how much they like their products and services. You can yourself think how helpful it can be to the brands.

And did someone pay your friend about appreciating the products and services of the brand? In most cases, no!
But, he’s still believing and promoting the brand. So, it’s completely organic. WOMM is an organic marketing strategy triggered by consumers’ impressions, feelings, emotions, and thoughts.

Word of mouth marketing is the most valuable form of marketing and the most successful form in all marketing strategies. It’s known as the best marketing strategy so far.

As we’ve seen through the example, that one person is praising the products and services of a brand to another person and encouraging him to give that brand a try.

So, it’s also called a process of influencing and encouraging other consumers through organic word of mouth discussion about a brand’s product, resources, services, or events.

But the question is why people are promoting a brand if they didn’t get anything from the brand.

Why do people promote the brands?

Do we promote the other brands completely free? No, that can’t be, you yourself know how human beings are!
Then if the people aren’t getting paid in terms of money, why are they promoting the products and services?
As we know all know that word of mouth marketing is the best way to reach out to your consumers but one of the most untapped and inexpensive marketing channels so far.

People promote the brands because the brands have tapped into their emotions and provided those services or products beyond their expectations. If the brands have wowed their users with the unexceptional consumer experience then they will definitely spread words about the brands to their family, friends and relatives or wherever and whenever the dialogue starts about the brands. And all this happens organically.

When people get an outstanding experience from the brand they feel like they have been listened to and are well cared for by the brand in return whenever they get a chance to talk about the brand, they don’t stop until they praise the brand.

The psychological reason behind this is we all like exclusiveness. We want to feel special. Don’t you?

These are the several reasons people are promotes brands and become brand advocates in no time. Let’s discuss in what ways we can use word of mouth marketing?

Types of Word of Mouth Marketing

On the basis of promotions, we can divide word of mouth marketing into two parts; the first is Organic WOMM and the second is Amplified WOMM. Let’s discuss both of them in detail;

Organic WOMM

Organic womm doesn’t need effort. It occurs naturally by recommending the brand to others while having conversations with them. Whenever the brand name comes up, our mind reminds us of the positive and beyond-our-expectations experiences with the brand. And we start praising the brand and describing the experiences we have had with the brand.

We can see it doesn’t need any type of outside triggers or prompts. Natural triggers such as our experiences and emotional bond with the brand spread the magic here.

We don’t have complete control over this type of marketing, but we’ve control over the user experience we provide to our users. And that’s the place from where we can control organic WOMM by controlling the user experience of the brand.

But organic womm can work negatively and backfire on the brand if people are getting a poor user experience with the brand. Because they want exclusivity, and if they don’t get it, they will definitely not hesitate to disparage brands.

Examples of Organic WOMM are;

1. Sharing of User Generate Content (UGC) spontaneously on SMM platforms
2. Customer Reviews and Comments
3. Organic Sharing of Products or services in any type of ways

So, always keep a top-notch user experience in your brand, and let your customers feel exclusive. Let’s discuss the next womm type!

Amplified WOMM

In the amplified womm organic efforts are given a boost through several other aspects of marketing.

It is called amplified womm, because we amplify organic efforts. Even this time, word of mouth would be organic but it’ll be fast than organic womm.

To amplify womm brands run different types of marketing campaigns to encourage users to promote their products and services. It can be some sort of reward, discount, or freebie that encourages users to appreciate the brand consciously.

The examples of amplified womm are;

1. Contests
2. Giveaways or Freebies
3. Referral Programs
4. Brand Ambassador Programs
5. Influencer Campaigns
6. Any types of campaigns that boost content sharing on different platforms such as SMM Platforms, and marketing groups.

In amplified womm, consumers promote brands consciously, and it’s easy to track because it is tied to the marketing campaigns. While on the other hand, in organic womm, it’s hard to track the performance and consumers promote the brand sub-consciously.

But, don’t you want to know why this marketing strategy is so much effective?

The power of word of mouth marketing: Why does it work so effectively?

Word of mouth marketing is a powerful and important asset in the field of marketing. Whenever someone talks about a particular brand they admire, people start talking about the brand. They get triggered by the positive, outstanding, incomparable, above-and-beyond experience they have had with the brand.

It’s considered so powerful because it not only stimulates people’s emotions but gets people talking.

Let’s discuss the statistics that make this marketing strategy so powerful;

1. Consumers are brand promoters in this marketing strategy. Happy customers and fans promote the brand organically.
2. It’s completely FREE.
3. It can be performed through different media such as images, vlogs, video, audio etc.
4. SDL told that more than half somewhat 58% of consumers share their positive experience after purchasing the products from a brand and recommend the brand to others.
5. 62% of people search for recommendations and reviews online before purchasing the products.
6. According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe in brand recommendations from friends and family over all forms of marketing and advertising and 68% of people believe in recommendations from other consumers. See, how big this is!
7. According to Google, 74% of consumers identify WOMM as a key influencer in their buying decisions and with this, according to Radius Global, Millennials ranked #1 to womm in their buying decisions. WOMM is the biggest buying influencer in all marketing strategies.
8. Word of mouth impression provides 5x more sales than paid media impressions and people are 4x more likely to buy from the brands when they are referred by friends.
9. Leads that have been brought up through WOMM, have their quality has been rated 4.28 out of 5 by marketers.
10. It’s responsible for 25% or ¼ of all retail purchases. So, you can see all other marketing tactics are covering ¾ and WOMM is alone covering ¼ of the total sales.

You’ve seen the statistics and you can comprehend how big a role WOMM is playing in the whole marketing field, and how much beneficial it can be to your brand!

The reason behind all this success and power WOMM brings with it is trust. Let’s understand the marketing funnel a little bit.

Have you ever heard about CATT Marketing Funnel?

The first two steps in this marketing funnel are; content and attention, the rest two are trust and transactions.

So in a way, word of mouth marketing outsmarts the first two steps and grabs the third step directly. It doesn’t mean the content is not generated in word of mouth marketing or efforts are not made to grab the attention.

But, when our friend is telling us about the brand we trust what he/ she is saying because we don’t know about the brand yet, but we trust our friends, and family if they’re saying it’s good then nothing can be better than that brand. This way they’re more likely to buy from that particular brand.

See, how we start trusting the brand even without knowing about it. This is the reason behind the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

Let’s get to know further how to incorporate a digital version of word of mouth marketing?

Digital Version of WOMM

We share our ideas, recommendations and perspective on the brands during the dialogues, but what about when consumers are searching on the internet about the products, brands, and recommendations?

There is a simple solution for this, accepting the digital version of womm. As we already know that 92% of the consumers believe recommendations from friends and 64% of the marketing executives indicated womm as the most effective form of marketing.

But do you know a shocking fact?

It was found in a study done by WOMMA and AMA that only 6% of the marketers said that they’ve mastered it.
You can see a big difference here!

Why?

Because brands are looking for fans in numbers, not for fans who’re so much passionate and loyal to the brands. A big number of followers on social media make marketers and brands feel that they’re doing something, and getting noticed by the consumers.

But to generate the revenue we don’t just need consumers in numbers, but we need the consumers who really believe in the values, cause, and mission of the brand.

So, on any platform of marketing, “focus on connecting instead of collecting.”

This is where we need to incorporate a digital version of word-of-mouth marketing and optimize it for mobile inbound marketing and social media marketing. Because according to statistica as of April 2022, 63% of the total world’s population is using the internet and 93% of total internet users are on social media.

I think it’s a big reason to incorporate a digital version of word of mouth marketing.

Now the question is, how to incorporate it?

It’s so simple to incorporate a digital version of womm. It’s obvious that we need the internet, tools, and technology because it’s a digital version of womm to facilitate word-of-mouth exchanges.

Review platforms such as Google My Business, Trust Pilot etc. You can also visit to have a look at DigiAvtar’s Google My Business Profile.

Social media platforms such as FB, Insta, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp, telegram etc. And popular blogs E.g. DigiAvtar’s marketing blog where you can give suggestions in the comment sections.

You can see how many platforms are there where you can say what you feel about the particular brand, and you can tell about your good or bad experiences with the bands.

It helps other people in making buying decisions, and consumers play a significant role in word of mouth marketing strategy.

So, we’ve discussed how to incorporate a digital version of word of mouth marketing, now let’s have a look at the advantages of word of mouth marketing

Benefits of word of mouth marketing

Being the world’s best marketing strategy so far, it has so many benefits. But the most significant are;

1. Free of Cost: word of mouth marketing is free of cost, we don’t need to spend a single penny to promote this strategy. We just need to focus on providing an outstanding beyond-of-expectations user experience to the users.
2. More Sales: word of mouth marketing brings more qualified auto-nurtured leads to the brand.
3. More & Exponential Revenue: More sales results in more revenue, and after a time you can see exponential growth in revenue in the brand. The reason for exponential growth in revenue is the multiplication of users, 1 told 2, then total consumers are 3, if these three will recommend to 2-2 more, then total consumers are 6…and so on. Now, you can see it all started with 1 and the exponential reached 6 in no time.
4. Build Brand Advocates: people recommend the brand because they believe in the cause, mission, and values of the brand. So, they become more brand advocated in no time. Because if you believe in something, you will definitely promote it consciously or subconsciously.
5. Grows Brand at a Faster Rate: As we’ve already discussed womm provide more sales and exponentially free of cost than any other method of marketing. This way it helps the brand grow at a faster never foreseen rate.

You can see, word of mouth marketing is providing us with what we want to generate from a business. It’s providing our exponential growth and revenue with no time and at no cost. Let’s get to see some of womm examples.

Word of Mouth Marketing Examples

There’re several word of mouth marketing examples, at least big brands are leveraging these marketing tactics. Let’s see how big brands are using these tactics;

1. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” Campaign
2. Dropbox’s Referral Campaign
3. Lush’s social cause-related campaigns
4. Wendy’s Social Media Interaction on Twitter
5. Netflixflim’s Binge-Watching Campaign for User Engagement

Are you being impatient to implement this marketing strategy?

Let’s get to know how to develop a word of mouth marketing strategy!

Steps of building word of mouth marketing strategy

These steps will help you smoothly run on the path of word of mouth marketing. So, without wasting time, let’s get started with the first step!

Beyond-Expectations User Experience

Consumers are everything for the brands, brands exist because they’ve faithful consumers. What if brands are not able to provide them good user experience, I should everything they are doing would be in vain whether whatever amazing they are doing for consumers.

User experience is the first and foremost in perhaps every type of marketing strategy, and it is the soul of word-of-mouth marketing strategy. Provide as much good user experience as you can to your consumers. It’ll help in tapping their emotions, and will become an unforgettable memory for them. So, whenever they’ll listen to the name of the brand, this beyond-their-expectation user experience will provoke them subconsciously to talk about the brand and how the products or services of the brand helped them.

Build Unique Products and Services

Building unique products or perspective about the services help brands in standing out from the crowd. The reason is consumers don’t have any option to compare the brand with other brands. So, you should always focus on building unique products and services.

Tap into Emotions

People respond to emotions more than anything. It doesn’t matter what type of emotions they come along with, they just want to share them with other people. Emotional attachments are the biggest consumer driver in any area of marketing. If people are having strong positive emotions toward the brand, then words of mouths efforts will go a long way, even if there are more logical options available to the consumers.

Having a strong unique brand personality that is solving consumers’ problems with the help of their unique products and services and brand style guide will help brands in tapping into users’ emotions.

Tell Your Story

Stories make sense to the human mind, the biggest examples that can be considered is Myths. Not every myth we’re told by the stories was right, but we still believe that they’re true even after knowing the truth, why?

Because, if we try to tell something through stories, it is unforgettable to the human mind, and myths have been passed through many generations so, they’ve become unforgettable with unbreakable faiths.

So, it’s time to tell your brand story, make it so much compelling to the users by giving the audience what they want, offering value and appealing to their emotions by focussing on their pain points, and showing them a way to achieve their goals.

Incorporate the values, mission, and vision of the brand in these stories, once they become aligned with your values, mission, and vision, they’ll share the stories with other consumers, and this will never stop. Read more on “How to create brand stories?”

Creating Exclusivity

Who doesn’t like exclusiveness? Everyone wants to feel special. So we must create some exclusive materials or products for our faithful consumers. It’ll make them feel valued.

This will turn them into brand advocates and they’ll more likely want to share the brand with others showing other people how important they’re to the particular brand.

You can share the exclusive information directly through WhatsApp or emails.

Appeal to your Audience

There are many ways of appealing to your audiences like a video, creative, short visual, behind-the-scenes video or any secret method or information that’s worth sharing! You can choose according to your target audience what would be worth sharing for them.

People share the things that they believe are true, and with whom they’re sharing should feel like “wow, what a valuable thing you’ve shared with me.”

This will appeal to them to share things with others because it’ll make them look reputable and cool.

Provide Value to Consumers

In our usual life, we talk about the brands and people who’ve imparted something valuable in our life.

Providing value to the consumers will strengthen their faith in the product and services of the brand. We can provide value in different ways such as solving a specific problem with our products or services or helping in achieving users’ goals or desired states in life.

If we are successful in providing value to our users then it’ll appeal to our audience to talk about the brand, refer its products and services to their friends, family, and relatives and maximize word of mouth marketing efforts.

Leveraging Social Media

We already have discussed that how valuable SMM platforms are, and how much SMM marketing can be valuable to the word of mouth marketing campaigns.

We know that 93% of total internet users are social media users, and if you’re not on social media, you’re not doing great and losing so much amount of revenue on the table.

Social media also works like a listening tool, you can learn in what areas of your products and services you need improvement while interacting with your users.

Leverage at least some of the most popular platforms such as FB, Insta, LinkedIn, Pinterest, WhatsApp etc.

So, build a strong social media and web presence!

Create Proper Hashtags in Content

Creating proper hashtags on social media platforms gives you a wider reach on SMM platforms with targeted audiences.

You can also create your unique brand hashtags, like whenever someone searches for #digiavtar in the feed, they’ll find the posts related to only “DigiAvtar: Complete Digital Marketing Solutions”.

In the starting, only the brand is including the hashtags. But slowly other people such as consumers or loyal fans also start using the same hashtags for their posts also. This way hashtags also impart in word of mouth marketing, and soon these hashtags become popular. Having the same brand name as a hashtag will keep the brand’s posts higher than other posts with the same hashtags.

So, build your own unique hashtags without wasting time!

Host Giveaways and Contests along with offering Freebies

Hosting Giveaways and contests can be the best way to boost word of mouth marketing efforts. When we keep a giveaway and contest with some freebies or prizes then it’s definite that our consumers will refer the contest to their loved ones, so that they’ll also have a chance to secure the freebies.

We can also offer freebies on a special occasions like birthdays, special occasions etc. to let our customers know how valuable they’re to us.

Everyone likes to get something for free, that’s why brands always try to provide such an opportunity to increase the word of mouth marketing efforts. Successful freebies can provide repeat sales and faithful consumers to the brand.

Opening a giveaway, hosting a contest and offering freebies will not only increase our consumer base but will turn our consumers into brand advocates. And this is the best way to make consumers share the news about the giveaway, contests, and freebies of the brand.

This way your followers will spread awareness about your brand along with bringing new organic traffic to your platforms.

Leverage and Encourage User-Generated Content

Leveraging and encouraging user-generated content can be so much value for your brand. User-generated content is the content that is created and shared by consumers about brands and products.  Asking directly to your users for developing content for the brand looks pushy, and it can irritate the consumers.

So instead of asking your user directly, you can host giveaways and contests and ask them to develop the content such as posting photos with your products and providing video testimonials about the services to win freebies and tagging your brand on their social media platforms with your branded hashtags.

According to Offerpop, 85% of social media users believe in user-generated content more than the content created by the brand itself. User-generated content is honest, builds trust, and provides marketers extra marketing collateral to work with.

Important things to remember about user-generated content;

• Always have a unique hashtag to identify content created by users
• Offer free gift, discount, or demo sessions of services you provide in return to created content
• Showcase user-generated content on brand channels such as websites, and SMM platforms to create a sense of community among your consumers.

So, are you also thinking to focus on building user-generated content?

Obtaining Reviews and sharing them on Website and SMM Platforms

Obtaining reviews can be very much effective for your word of mouth marketing campaigns. It doesn’t matter if they’re positive or negative, they’re important.

If you get positive reviews then they will boost your word of mouth marketing strategy and if you get negative reviews then you can redirect those consumers to the support team and focus on improving their user experience with the brand.

Once they’re satisfied they’ll definitely leave good reviews. But always let your new consumers be influenced by good reviews only.

New consumers pay so much attention to the reviews, and it takes an average of 7 reviews for a consumer to trust a business.

According to research, 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations by friends or families. Do you know, in 2020, 9 out of 10 people read reviews before making a buying decision?

After obtaining the reviews, you need to showcase them. There are many ways of showcasing your reviews, you can take reviews on Google My Business, Trust Pilot, or Yelp.

You can post your video testimonials on SMM platforms such as YouTube, FB, and Instagram. You can also build a separate page for testimonials on your website, and showcase your testimonials there.

Social proofs represent the quality of the brand. Good reviews help in building a good brand reputation and increasing conversions.

Create a referral or Affiliate Program

Creating a referral or affiliate program will give a boost to your organic word of mouth marketing efforts. It is a form of marketing which is done by encouraging happy consumers to refer products and services to their friends and known in exchange for any kind of financial reward on behalf of the brand.

In simple words, in a referral or affiliate program, you provide some incentive or free product to your consumers as an appreciation for referring friends.

Financial Rewards can be anything such as;

• Discount
• Incentive
• Gift Card
• Cashback
• Products for free as a gift

A good referral program spread the word so easily and quick. It’s easy to measure the results of your referral campaigns. It is also a win-win situation for both brands as well as the consumers. Brands get new consumers as a result and referee gets incentive as a reward.

So, how’re you going to build your own referral or affiliate program?

We’d love to know in the comment section!

Connect with Thought Leaders & Industry Influencers

Thought leaders are those persons who’ve earned a good reputation by an established authority in their field. People want to hear their thoughts, visions and anything they want to share.

Industry influencers is also a self-explanatory word that means people with a strong following have the power to influence the beliefs and behaviours of consumers.

Some of the statistics that need to be looked at are;

• 73% of marketers allocate a budget for influencer marketing
• 49% of people rely on recommendations from influencers while making buying decisions
• 40% of the people purchase an online item after viewing it used by an influencer on SMM platforms such as FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat etc.

After seeing the statistics, are you willing to connect with an influencer?

Well, go for it!

Setting Word of Mouth Marketing Triggers

Word of mouth marketing triggers contains little cues, memorable experiences, and loving emotions or feelings that remind consumers about your brand and make people want to talk about your brand.

You can use different types of word of mouth marketing triggers such as

1. Visual Triggers: For visual triggers, brands should create remarkable visual experiences. These experiences will trigger users to take photos and share those photos on social media with different people.
2. Emotional Triggers: Emotional triggers can be any type of moment that makes consumers happy or excited while enjoying the services or products from the brand.

We’ve discussed all the steps of building a word of mouth marketing strategy. Now, let’s move forward and discuss some tips that will help you in the implementation of word of mouth marketing.

Tips for Word of Mouth Marketing

Tips are that everybody looks for, so without further ado let’s discuss them;

1. The first impression is called the last impression so make it unique and everlasting.
2. Always disclose your relationship with the audience. Let them know who you are representing.
3. Sell Quality & Unique Products and Services.
4. Incorporate an Omnichannel marketing strategy for providing seamless order processing and uniform seamless user experience.
5. Provide above and beyond expectations user experience to the consumers
6. Provide personalized user experience to the consumers
7. Always be honest with an opinion about any recommendations, products or services
8. Spread the words about the business through influencers and though leaders
9. Send freebies to loyal and repeated consumers
10. Keep your true identity in front of the audience. Always be truthful to the audience about who you are because word of mouth marketing is based on trust and loyalty.
11. Connect with a cause to fulfil corporate social responsibility, and implement Cause Marketing tactics.
12. Always solve specific real-world problems through your products and services.
13. According to the word of mouth marketing association, we should show honesty, credibility, sociability, repeatability, measurability, and respectability in word of mouth marketing strategies.
14. Womm contains several marketing tactics such as buzz marketing, viral marketing, social media marketing, cause-related marketing, personalized marketing, mobile inbound marketing and blogs marketing.

Now, we’ve seen the tips we need to remember while implementing word of mouth marketing strategies. Let’s conclude the blog now!

Wrapping Up

We’ve included everything in this blog, it can be called a complete guide about word of mouth marketing. Word of mouth marketing is all about creating buzz-worthy content and encouraging the buzz through different means such as SMM platforms, websites, and other programs.

You can always follow Jonah Berger’s Six Stepps to Virality method to encourage the buzz;

1. Social Currency: people only talk about the things that make them seem smart and cool, so buzz-worthy content should be created accordingly.
2. Triggers: What we talk about is what we think.
3. Emotions: when we care, we share. This is why brands should focus on creating “high arousal” emotions through their womm strategies.
4. Public: Built to show, built to grow.
5. Practical Value: News you can use. Useful things are the most shared content in the digital space.
6. Stories: stories works like a trojan horse. Build a narrative or story that people would want to convey further that also carries your idea along for the ride.

Now you also know the 6 steps framework of making any campaign viral in no time over the internet. According to Forbes, marketers have been focussing on the 4P’s of marketing so far, but now they need to focus on the 3E’s of marketing that are; engage, equip and empower.

Engage with your audience by listening to them on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram etc and be part of the conversations consumers are having about the brand.

Equip is all about giving your consumers reasons to talk about. You can provide anything to them such as products, outstanding service, demo sessions, incredible stories, unbelievable facts or even funny disclosures.

In the Empower state brands to provide consumers with different ways to talk and share. In this step we let our consumers know how valuable they are to us and how much their opinions matter to the brand. It’s all about helping consumers to move their conversations.

We’ve also seen how 3E can help us in word of mouth marketing. It is two-way communication between users and brands along with this womm requires a real and meaningful consumer engagement with the potential customers.

Word of mouth marketing is completely based on user experience and user emotions. If you can under user emotions and improve user experience based on user emotions, then you’re a winner in word of mouth marketing campaigns.

Please let us know in the comment section, how’re you going to incorporate it into your brand. For more similar blogs, visit our blog.

Like For Like Marketing: The Best Way For Business Collaborations

by Kuldeep Yadav | Jul 31, 2022 | Marketing

Want to learn about like-for-like marketing? I am sure that you’ve already used these tactics somewhere in your life.

For example, when we’re doing something for another person, we say to him/her that I’m doing this for you but you’ll have to do something for me.

A similar concept is being used in like-for-like marketing. Let’s go in deep with this strategy.

What is Like for Like Marketing?

Like-for-like marketing is a strategy where one business promotes other businesses for the sake of business terms. In the same way, it happens for freelancers and solopreneurs.

You can take this marketing strategy as an individual case of word-of-mouth marketing. In word-of-mouth marketing, any person or business that has taken services and products from a brand promotes the brand and spread the word about the brand if they’ve appreciated our products or services.

But in most cases of Like for Like marketing, businesses spread the word about other businesses. These are the businesses that have been partnered with other brands, and that they are promoting. I hope you get it now.

In simple words, you promote us, we promote you!

Is Like For Like Marketing A Good Option For You?

I would say it is a very good option if you’re doing it correctly. To implement this strategy you should have good relationships with other businesses.

Once you’ve established good relationships with other businesses, you can propose to them like-for-like marketing. And I’m sure none would say no to the free promotion of services.

It is a very good marketing strategy for businesses that are having complement businesses. Let’s assume there is a social media marketing agency and another one is a website development agency, then both have a different domain of workspace.

If they’re collaborating with each other then they can promote each other like Social Media Agency can tell a social media client to go for the particular website development agency whenever they’ll be looking for development services.

And so as a website development company can recommend a social media marketing agency for the social media services.

You can see how much benefit they can be with each other even without investing a single rupee in advertisement or marketing. It works so well if the domains of businesses are somewhat related to each other and complement each other.

So, do you also think like for like marketing can also be very much useful for you? Willing to go for collaborations? DigiAvtar is also always open for collaborations if it works well and we share the same values. Connect with us for collaborations!

Is Like for Like Marketing and Like for Like Sales the Same?

Absolutely not! They’re two different things, like for like Marketing is the term used in the marketing field, and like like sales is the term used in the field of finance.

We’ve already discussed what’s like for like marketing in the marketing field. Now let’s summarize like-for-like sales in some simple words.

Like for like sales is often called ‘comp growth’, ‘comparable growth’, or ‘organic growth. Like for like sales comparisons of the sales between the current year and the previous year. After comparison, they can tell if some company has shown a decline or growth in the current year by comparing it to the previous year.

In simple words, like for like sales compare sales or financial results between current and previous same period. On the basis of this like for like sales tell us the percentage of growth or decline in the business.

I hope you’ve understood the difference very well between like for like marketing and like for like sales.

Now, let’s discuss some tips to increase the profit from like-for-like marketing

Tips For Like For Like Marketing

There’ve been many things you should consider Like For Like marketing, but here we’ll talk about some precise things that can give you a lot.

1. Build Good Personal Relationships with B2B Businesses the Most
2. Collaborate with the businesses for Like
3. Use Different Campaigns to Promote the Brand such as #FFF on social media for Follow-for-follow and #LFL for Like for Like
4. Incorporate Storytelling in the Content of the Website, Social Media, and other marketing materials.
5. Incorporate personalized messaging in all the brand messaging and marketing materials

We’ve seen some of the tips you can use to give a boost to your brand. I would say you should invest your time in this strategy because it’ll save your marketing costs while building good business relationships and generating more return on investment (ROI).

Let’s conclude the blog here and give it a final thought!

Wrapping Up

Like for like marketing isn’t a popular term used for marketing purposes and like for like sales term is so much popular. When there are two somewhat similar terms but with different meanings being used, then the chances are people will not know much about the second term, because they’re only aware of the first term.

The same is happening with like-for-like marketing, like for like sales are working as a mantle for the shine of like-for-like marketing.

But this doesn’t mean that we’re not using like for like marketing, we’re still using it, even though through the big brands, how?

Do you use YouTube? You must be thinking, what am I questioning, everyone uses it.

But have you used its Featured Section, with the help of that we can show channels of our other business partners as featured content on our profile. You can name yourself what customised name you want to use for them to showcase on your YouTube Profile.

End Cards can also work for the same, for like-for-like marketing.

So, if you want to go ahead with like-for-like marketing, then it’s time. Adopt this marketing strategy at an early age and make the best use of it.

If you agree that it can be so much beneficial for our business then please let us know in the comment section how’re you going to use it for your business.

For more similar blogs, visit our blog

Transformational Marketing: Turn Users Into Brand Advocates

by Kuldeep Yadav | Jul 31, 2022 | Marketing

Do you like transformations? I don’t know about you but I like it so much. Do you want to be transformed into a wealthy person? Do you want to be good-looking? Do you want to be appreciated by everyone? Do you want to get noticed by everyone?

I’m sure for some of the questions, you’d say “Of course Kuldeep, I want!”

For this you need to go through a process, if you want to be a wealthy person, you need to put effort and look for passive sources of income. If you want to be good looking then you need to put your body to work and do the Fitness Training. If you want to be liked and get noticed by everyone, you need to be a humble and sensible person.

Noticed? Everyone needed to go through some changes if they want to achieve something. In the same way, if businesses want to convert their buyers into their brand advocates then they also need to incorporate transformational marketing into their brands.

Wondering what a transformational marketing strategy is?

What is Transformational Marketing?

Transformational Marketing Strategy is the combined efforts that businesses make through different channels to convert buyers into lifelong brand advocates by conveying consumers’ stories.

I hope you get it!

So, we’ve already a good client base. But if we want to convert them into brand advocates then we need to perform some strategies continuously.

Brand advocates are those who promote your business believing with their hearts that your business is providing the best products or services in the particular field. Brand advocates help most in the word of mouth marketing. And the word-of-mouth marketing strategy has been the most successful strategy of all strategies.

So, let’s create a transformational marketing strategy!

How to create a Transformational Marketing Strategy?

So far, only a few marketers have written about it because they are not taking this strategy into so much consideration. But in reality, this is the secret to increasing your success ratio of companies and generating a good amount of return on investment (ROI) with word-of-mouth marketing by creating Brand Advocates.

Even when you’ll see top marketers in the world, you’ll find out that the success ratio of the companies they’ve worked with is not more than 20%, why this is happening? Meaning only 1 out of 5 companies has been able to maintain sustainability in their businesses.

Because, they’ve not performed transformational marketing strategies, and adapted changes according to the environment. So, if you want to get benefitted from this strategy then according to Top Right Partners you need to keep in mind SSS (3S).

Here SSS stands for; The Right Story, The Right Strategy, The Right Systems!

Let’s elaborate on each of them;

Pick the Right Story

There’ve been so many evolutions so far, and many will be brought up! But two things are always common; seller and customers. The stories of both of them are necessary.

But, here is a twist!

Because we’ve to make a Brand’s stories to a customer’s stories. If we’re able to make a brand’s story into the user’s own story, then we’ve just passed the first step of making a transformational marketing strategy.

It means we don’t need to tell the customers what the brand is all about, and what is it offering. But we need to convey the stories of how a brand is helping their customers and in what ways and what types of benefits are they getting from their products and services.

I hope you got my point!

If you want to create an attention-grabbing story then make it simple to understand easily in the context of a general consumer making the consumer hero of the whole story. The reason behind putting the consumer at the centre of the story is, that it makes the story resonate with the target audience and more compelling.

As we’ve discussed that the hero of the story is a consumer, and the story is all about their journey of how they got benefitted from the products or services of a brand.

The only role brand plays here is as a guide to help them navigate through their journeys. The customers will only engage with the story if it is containing their pain points, goals, needs, and their wants.

Basically, your brand story should tell audiences how a common person is achieving their needs, goals, and wants crossing all the pain points with the help of the products and services provided by the brand. This way the story looks bold and audiences will want to learn more about the brand and explore it.

If you want to make your brand stories successful then keep it balanced between creative ideation and artistic expression of the storyteller.

There’s been a belief that you only need 6 seconds to make a connection with the audience. Six seconds are enough to give the audiences a reason to care about the stories and want to learn more about them

Branding is so much important in marketing, and it’s all about storytelling. Your brand, product, consumers and every other type of story should be in a good storytelling way. Read more on “How to Create Stories?”

Let’s discuss the next S which is “The Right Strategy”

Build the Right Strategy

Your strategy matters a lot, if you’re going in a direction but not with proper guidance, and knowledge how you’ll be able to reach your destination?

If you’re telling a story without strategy then it looks like you’re just telling a story to fall babies asleep. It’ll do no good.

But, if you’re going out with a strategy and then telling your brand stories then it is definitely the way of marketing.

Because it’s been said, “Story without strategy is just art and with a strategy it is marketing.”

So, prepare the best one for you, and then follow along with it and tell your stories that’ll transform clients into brand advocates.

Always take help from the latest technologies to promote your products, and services or deliver the stories to the audiences.

You should have clarity on how you’re going to convey your stories. Build your right and perfect strategy beforehand.

Deliver with the Right Systems

You should rely on the right systems. The systems you’re using for delivering stories with the perfect marketing strategy should be in alignment.

They should be adaptable to every coming marketing change. If the systems are working well in alignment in measuring the performances and performing aggressive optimizations, then you’re good to go to implement the transformational marketing strategy.

I hope you’ve understood everything about the 3S of transformational marketing strategy. You need to pick the right story that should be simple, then build the right strategy having clarity about your audiences and brands, and then you need the right delivery system to deliver your stories.

Now, let’s look at the best practices we should keep into consideration!

Best Practices for creating successful Transformational Marketing Strategy

It’s easy and better to remember anything through the tips, it’s human psychology that stories, myths, best practices and myths are comprehended by the brain most. So, let’s discuss the best practices for the perfect execution of a transformation marketing strategy;

1. Choose the Perfect Story and Keep it Simple
2. Incorporate Storytelling in Brand, Product, and Consumer Stories
3. Make the brand messaging personalized with personalized marketing efforts.
4. Build the perfect strategy of how you want to convey your stories
5. Choose the right set of tools to make it more convenient and in alignment.
6. Inspire change and growth through your stories to connect people on the emotional level
7. Focus on building a brand aura backed by unique experiences through your stories, so the sales can happen naturally even without selling.
8. Be unique, if you’re trying to be the best you definitely would be compared to the existing masters in the field. But if you present your ideas with an entirely new perspective then you’ll be welcomed by the audience with open hearts
9. Provide trusted and helpful sources of information within your industry to establish yourself as a thought leader. People will automatically be drawn to you and they’ll definitely see what you’ve to offer.
10. Social Media Platforms are more like a listening tools. On social media platforms, you can find out what audiences expect from their dream products and services. So, make SMM Platforms your brand’s ears to listen about what is inspiring your audiences, what they are aspiring to, and what are the current changes in the industry. Build, your products and services around all the things you’re listening to on SMM Platforms.
11. Be Friend with Transformational Advertising. Making a part of transformational advertising of your transformational marketing strategy will become a milestone in the growth of your business. Transformation advertising is a consumer-centric approach to advertising your products and services. It is a method that enables brands to connect with their prospect and consumers on an emotional level. And having emotional connections with the brands, help in building brand advocates.

We’ve discussed everything about the best practices in transformational marketing that’ll help us in achieving our marketing goals. Transformational marketing focuses on transformations. The goal of a transformational marketing strategy is to create an emotional connection between the consumers and the brands. It can be done through any valuable content, meaningful messages or continuous advertisement, but the right story is the best option.

The connection between a brand and a consumer is based on shared beliefs and emotions that are above just a transaction.

Let’s get to know about some benefits of Transformational Marketing Strategy.

Benefits of Transformational Marketing Strategy

There have been tons of benefits transformational marketing is providing to the businesses incorporating it. Let’s have a sweet and short discussion about some of them that are;

1. Inspire change and growth
2. Boosts storytelling campaigns
3. Boosts personalized campaigns
4. Boosts Word of Mouth Campaigns
5. Spread the word of the faithfulness of the brand
6. Build a strong connection with the users on an emotional level
7. Create True Brand Advocates
8. Provides lifelong recurring income and promotions with the help of brand advocates
9. Increased and continuous ROI

You’ve seen how big a role is transformational marketing playing in other marketing strategies as well while creating true brand advocates.

Now, let’s conclude the blog now.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, Transformational Marketing is all about personalizing the brand messaging in a storytelling way with attaching humanely emotions to the story. The emotions that can be seen in the marketing materials of transformational marketing strategy are; openness, authenticity, empathy, and transparency.

As we all know that transformational advertising is a part of the Transformational Marketing strategy. According to American Marketing Association, transformational advertising is associating services or product usage with certain feelings, images, stories, emotions, or meaning that transforms the experience of using the products or services. The goal of it is to represent and sell the product or service as an experience.

In the end, the content of the marketing materials such as stories, advertisements, Instagram Marketing Materials, and Fb Ads Copy of the transformational marketing strategy is concentrated on creating intangible emotions in a buyer’s brain. These intangible emotions will push buyers to take action. And with the time being, they will eventually convert these buyers into true brand advocates.

So, want to spread the words of trust and faithfulness towards your brand?

Then, it’s time to make a transformational marketing strategy for your brand.

Let us know in the comment section how you’re going to implement it for your brand!

For more similar blog, visit the blog

Outbound Marketing: A Complement to Inbound Marketing

by Kuldeep Yadav | Jul 29, 2022 | Marketing

What do you like the most freedom of choosing the businesses you want to take services from, or businesses telling you to buy products and services from them?

I’m sure most of you will want to go with the first scenario!

Everybody wants freedom of selection. Before purchasing products or services we research a lot about the businesses providing them. Then, we choose one out of them. I’m sure you like this.

What if somebody is telling you that these businesses are providing the best services and products, and you should buy from them? Would you like to go with them on the basis of what they are saying?

I hope not!

Most of you will first research those brands, then you will go with one of the best out of those brands.

But, is the first process isn’t worthy, well we can’t say that! Every strategy has pros and cons so as outbound marketing!

Have you ever heard about outbound marketing?

After going through this blog, you can yourself decide in what ways it can help your businesses and whether should you incorporate this strategy into your brand.

Let’s get started with what is outbound marketing!

What is Outbound Marketing?

On the basis of the discussion so far, you must’ve gotten a clue about what outbound marketing is. Outbound Marketing is when businesses proactively start communications with their target audience and attract them to get interested in the products or services they’re selling.

In outbound marketing, the companies make the first initial contact with the target audience without waiting for their consumers to come to the brands.

For E.g. you must’ve gotten a call in your lifetime from an unknown number. This type of person first greets you and without knowing whether you want to talk to them or not, they start telling about their services or products. This is a type of outbound marketing that is called cold calling.

I think you have a clear understanding now of what outbound marketing stands for. Outbound marketing is often considered as a traditional form of marketing, but it’s not just that. It is evolving with the latest digital world and is still a viable option in moving leads through sales funnels.

Outbound marketing strategy is the combination of different marketing strategies and tactics to simultaneously target a large amount of target audience. This combination of strategies and tactics is initiated by the brands in the first place to make the first contact with the masses. It is mostly done to spread brand awareness and drive traffic along with generating leads at scale.

Some of the outbound marketing examples are; cold calling, cold emailing, advertising etc.

It is a push marketing strategy in which we are pushing our brand messages to the target audiences. Let’s discuss in what ways we can promote our brands in front of the masses with the outbound marketing strategy.

Different Types of Outbound Marketing Channels

As we’ve discussed outbound marketing is the combination of different marketing tactics and we use those marketing tactics to market our products and services. The techniques are following;

1. Social Media Advertising
2. Social Media Post Boosting
3. Cold Calling
4. Direct Mail
5. Email Blasting
6. Email Newsletters
7. Cold Email Marketing
8. Search Engine Marketing/ PPC Advertising/ Paid Promotions
9. Content Syndication
10. Events
11. Tradeshows
12. Television Ads
13. Radio Ads
14. Video Ads
15. Print Ads (Newspapers, Pamphlets)

There are three terms elaborated in traditional advertising; above the line, below the line and through the line. These methods are being used for targeting the masses and conveying the brand messages to them, but these are not so refined.

Above-the-line advertising (ATL) is more effective for TOFU (Top of the Funnel). And we all know that Tofu activities are just for spreading awareness about the brand. The most popular ATL advertising methods are radio, television, billboards, and print ads (such as newspapers, pamphlets, magazines etc).

Below-the-line advertising (BTL) is more effective for BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel). These types of advertising activities help in converting leads into transactions such as retargeting ads, search engine marketing (SEM), Social Media Advertising, Email Ads, and any types of Digital Advertising like FB, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat etc.

These are used because BTL tactics are used to target precisely on the basis of several factors such as interests, habits, demographics, psychographics etc. In simple words, targeting is completely based on customer personas.

Read more here on “How to create user personas?”

Through-the-line advertising (TTL) tactics are used for MOFu (Middle of the Funnel). These are the combination of ATL and BTL. The most famous example of this can be putting the ads on New York’s Time Square, where dynamic ads are put on a static board.

So, we’ve seen different types of outbound marketing channels now, let’s move forward and discuss the steps of creating a successful outbound marketing strategy.

How to create an outbound marketing strategy?

Creating a successful outbound marketing strategy needs time and knowledge about outbound marketing inside-out. It isn’t fixed but dynamic in approach, we may need to make amendments even while performing the marketing strategy. Let’s start it with knowing who are we selling to;

Define Your Target Audience

Whatever the marketing strategy is, this is the initial step you must take. I would say this is the first general step we can take while performing any type of marketing strategy. Defining your target audience filter out the traffic and saves the marketing budget that you were going to waste.

You can make marketing personas of your potential customers. It’ll help in personalized targeting. Everybody wants personalized solutions to their problem, and it can only be possible if we have enough data from their names to needs, desires, and so on. Only then we can deliver our consumers’ personalized experience with the help of the incorporation of personalized marketing with outbound marketing. We can reach out to users through personalized advertising.

Market Research

Market Research is so much important, we should be updated with the things that are going on in the market. It helps us in knowing how big giants are attracting their visitors, what types of offers and services they are providing to their consumers, and what type of strategies are they using for marketing.

If we are aware of our competitors’ tactics and offers then we can design our tactics and offers uniquely to keep them incomparable and easily stand out from the crow and thrive on competition.

Design Valuable and Irresistible Offers

In the first step, defining our target audience, we designed consumer personas of our target audiences. Because of designing those marketing personas we now know the psychology, geography, and demography of our users. On the basis of their pain point, and goals we can design a so much valuable and irresistible offer for our target audience.

This way the conversion of the leads will become easier and we can stand out from our competitors.

Design Brand Style Guide and Keep your Brand Identity Consistent

Designing a brand style guide helps you in keeping brand voice, brand messaging, and brand identity consistent across the channels. Consistent brand identity makes you easily recognizable and increases revenue along with building Brand Loyalty.

This brand loyalty helps us in gaining brand advocates over time. So, read more on “How to create brand style guide”.

Create Personalized Targeted Brand Messaging in Storytelling Way

Every user wants a personalized experience. It makes them feel valued and they feel like they’ve been noticed and listened to by the brand. So, we should always create our brand messaging in a storytelling way. And give this messaging personalized touch with the help of the user personas. We can modify brand messaging according to different marketing user personas and make it personalized.

Choosing Your Channels

We’ve discussed already through which channels we can perform outbound marketing. You need to make sure which channels you are going to prefer based on your target audience. Choose the channels where your target audience lies.

This way, you can save resources, money, and time by filtering out the best marketing channels for your outbound marketing strategy.

Execute the Campaign

Execution is the key to the success of your marketing campaigns. Making plans will not help you in any area of your life but Executing them!

If you’ve performed all the remaining steps well, then I’m sure your outbound marketing campaign is going to be a success.

So, build everything we discussed in these above steps before starting outbound marketing. Once you’re done with it, you are good to go with the different outbound marketing channels we’ve discussed earlier!

Best Practices of Outbound Marketing Strategy

Sometimes we forgot important things but best practices help us in getting out of trouble and remembering everything in no time. Also when you’re reading about best practices it feels like you’re just reading about some fun facts. Let’s get to know what the best practices are for an outbound marketing strategy;

1. Do your research before reaching out in cold calls and cold emails
2. Personalize your outreach with the help of personalized marketing tactics
3. Use LinkedIn for B2B and B2C lead generation
4. Combine Digital and Direct Mail Marketing for getting success in Direct Mail
5. Avoid unethical marketing tactics such as sending unsolicited bulk messages, buying email lists, not providing options for unsubscribing in email, sending messages even after unsubscribing etc.
6. Introduce CRM to build healthier and happier relationships
7. Build a Content Distribution Channel
8. Don’t be too invasive in advertising
9. Track the metrics and analyse insights
10. Track ROI with every tactic and chose the best tactic to lead

We’ve discussed the best practices that’ll save you from taking the wrong decision while performing the outbound marketing Strategy. Now, let’s discuss what good outbound marketing can bring to our business.

Benefits of Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is evolving with the world, and so its benefits are increasing. The benefits an outbound marketing strategy can provide to its consumers are;

1. Boosting Brand Awareness
2. Scales Businesses
3. Instant Results
4. Targets Masses
5. Labelled Advertising
6. Easy Execution and Delivery
7. High Recognition Value because of emotional impact
8. Increase Quality of communication
9. Enables eye-catching formulations

Don’t you want to get these benefits from outbound marketing? If yes, then stick to the blog until the end, and as soon as the blog finishes start building your own outbound marketing campaigns.

I’m not saying it hasn’t any cons but it is with every marketing strategy, we need to learn how not to get affected by the drawbacks. Some of the drawbacks of outbound marketing are;

It’s a little bit expensive but we can cut the cost by targeting on right channels and right users based on the user persona. Outbound is Invasive but we can use the frequency feature so that the users will not see our ads more than the defined times, and also keep the language storytelling and informational.

So, you can see yourself that we can come out of every defect with the right vision and values and incorporating an inbound marketing strategy with it will help businesses a lot because both of them are polar opposite to each other.

Let’s discuss further and know the differences between Inbound and Outbound Marketing!

Difference between Inbound and Outbound Marketing

As we’ve discussed outbound marketing is considered one of the forms of traditional advertising, but it’s evolving day by day.

Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing are directly polar opposites of each other. Nowadays inbound marketing is becoming more popular because it provides good results. But it can’t fulfil the place of outbound marketing that is why outbound marketing still uses 90% of any marketing budget.

Inbound Marketing uses pull methodology, by pulling customers in with interest while Outbound uses push methodology, by pushing products and services onto customers. In inbound marketing, customers come to the brands looking for their services or products attracted by valuable content. But in Outbound marketing brands goes to the customers to advertise their products and services.

Inbound Marketing is permissive in Nature, while outbound marketing is interruptive. Permissive means businesses can’t show users products and services without the users’ consent. And interruptive means whether a user is willing to know or not we are pitching them our products and services.

Inbound marketing provides two-way communication in which brands, as well as users, can communicate with each other frequently. While in Outbound marketing only brands communicate with the users, users can’t connect with the brands.

Inbound marketing is consumer driven means consumers have complete control over the sales funnel and can enter and exit at any step of the sales funnel. But outbound marketing is marketer-driven, which means it is controlled by the marketers, consumers only see what marketers want them to see, and can enter the sales funnel only through the provided methods by marketers.

Inbound Marketing Examples are valuable content, Ebooks, lead magnets, search engine optimization or SEO, social media posts, webinars, videos, graphics, website content, google ads, blog posts etc.

While outbound marketing examples are cold calling, direct mail, cold email marketing, email boosting, television ads, press releases, billboards etc.

Inbound Marketing and Outbound marketing are polar opposite to each other’s so they complement to each other. They both can work well only if they’re being performed together.

Then what is the future of outbound marketing?

The Future of Outbound Marketing: Making the Big shift towards Inbound Marketing

We can see the serious serge in Inbound Marketing strategy in the last few years, but it can’t bring you immediate leads. In addition, outbound marketing can bring you leads but nurture them you need to make use of inbound marketing tactics.

So outbound marketing efforts need to be complemented with inbound marketing efforts for better and immediate growth in the business.

Inbound Marketing is great for nurturing the leads but to let people know that your brand exists in the market you need outbound marketing because people can only search for whom they are aware of.

So, boost brand awareness through outbound marketing, generate leads, nurture them with inbound marketing with valuable and problem-solving content directed to their pain points and goals, and close the deal.

This way, you can create a successful marketing funnel coupling 2 marketing strategies. Always remember, you can’t market just market your products with just one marketing strategy. You should need to learn how to combine different marketing strategies.

Outbound marketing is still relevant, and keeps us at the forefront of customers’ minds, for recommendations, word-of-mouth marketing, and immediate lead generation. It is expensive. But when performed well it can bring good ROI as a complement to the inbound marketing strategy.

We’ve discussed that outbound marketing works well if it is working as a complement to inbound marketing. So, we need to make a big shift towards inbound marketing. Read more on “How to incorporate Inbound Marketing?”

Wrapping Up

I hope you’re clear about what outbound marketing is, and what inbound marketing is, and they can work well if they’re being performed together.

In Inbound marketing, customers visit the brand and keep looking for answers, whereas outbound brands go to the audiences to sell their products and services. But both are important in their places. They both are valuable and should be implemented.

The most effective outbound marketing strategy is cold email outreach with more than 30% engagement ratio, cold calling and direct mailing are second to it with above 15% engagement ratio, then search ads back it with more than 10% and social media ads with only 10%, and at last trade shows and events perform with less than 10% engagement ratio.

You can decide whichever suits you. But keep providing valuable content through inbound marketing channels to the consumers, like blog posts, EBooks, educational content through videos, and webinars for solving their queries.

I hope now you’re ready to start with an outbound marketing strategy.

Are you?

Of course, definitely!

Please let us know in the comment section how you are willing to start with an outbound marketing strategy.

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