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!

Table of Contents

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;

Sharing of User Generate Content (UGC) spontaneously on SMM platforms
Customer Reviews and Comments
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;

Contests
Giveaways or Freebies
Referral Programs
Brand Ambassador Programs
Influencer Campaigns
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;

Consumers are brand promoters in this marketing strategy. Happy customers and fans promote the brand organically.
It’s completely FREE.
It can be performed through different media such as images, vlogs, video, audio etc.
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.
62% of people search for recommendations and reviews online before purchasing the products.
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!
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.
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.
Leads that have been brought up through WOMM, have their quality has been rated 4.28 out of 5 by marketers.
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;

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.
More Sales: word of mouth marketing brings more qualified auto-nurtured leads to the brand.
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.
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.
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;

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” Campaign
Dropbox’s Referral Campaign
Lush’s social cause-related campaigns
Wendy’s Social Media Interaction on Twitter
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

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.
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;

The first impression is called the last impression so make it unique and everlasting.
Always disclose your relationship with the audience. Let them know who you are representing.
Sell Quality & Unique Products and Services.
Incorporate an Omnichannel marketing strategy for providing seamless order processing and uniform seamless user experience.
Provide above and beyond expectations user experience to the consumers
Provide personalized user experience to the consumers
Always be honest with an opinion about any recommendations, products or services
Spread the words about the business through influencers and though leaders
Send freebies to loyal and repeated consumers
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.
Connect with a cause to fulfil corporate social responsibility, and implement Cause Marketing tactics.
Always solve specific real-world problems through your products and services.
According to the word of mouth marketing association, we should show honesty, credibility, sociability, repeatability, measurability, and respectability in word of mouth marketing strategies.
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;

Social Currency: people only talk about the things that make them seem smart and cool, so buzz-worthy content should be created accordingly.
Triggers: What we talk about is what we think.
Emotions: when we care, we share. This is why brands should focus on creating “high arousal” emotions through their womm strategies.
Public: Built to show, built to grow.
Practical Value: News you can use. Useful things are the most shared content in the digital space.
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.

Word of Mouth Marketing: The Best Marketing Strategy So Far