A Guide to Word of Mouth Marketing - PART 2

How do you measure word-of-mouth marketing?
It can be easier to track the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing with large-scale, expensive market surveys.
You can also ask customers how they heard about your brand and use that as qualitative data. Email marketing can be helpful with this, as you can send a message to existing customers or engaged prospects.

3 great examples of word-of-mouth marketing
An effective word-of-mouth marketing campaign needs to be believable and shareable. You also need to be able to measure its effectiveness, whether that’s through social media engagement or brand mentions.
Let’s look at three great word-of-mouth marketing campaigns to give you some inspiration.

1) Threadless
Threadless competition: Threadless started as a place to sell t-shirts and has evolved into a commerce marketplace for a range of products. Its success is down to its Artists Shop community, where individuals make money by sharing their designs and selling products. With an audience that values creativity and embraces fun, the company hosts challenges and contests that pit artists' designs against each other. This encourages its audience to participate by voting, sharing the contest amongst its social circle, and building a community around the brand.

2) Sozy: Sozy is a women’s clothing brand with a difference. It’s committed to making a difference and donates 10% of its profit to survivors of sexual violence, with a further 10% going to other charitable and environmental initiatives (along with being environmentally responsible in its clothing production).

3) Canva: For you, B2B marketers, the online graphic design tool Canva uses word of mouth to show how effective its platform is. They started off by targeting a specific audience—people with no design experience who wanted to create great designs. From there, the company has grown by creating an active community (plus free sign-up to try the product). The word-of-mouth strategy that’s proved successful (in addition to customer reviews and UGC) is their ‘Design Stories’ series.

Top 10 tips for generating positive word of mouth
According to SEMrush, nearly 50% of brands rely on word-of-mouth marketing, because of its low cost and its potential for enhancing brand reputation. What steps can your business take to generate positive word of mouth? Here are our top ten tips.

10 quick tips for word-of-mouth marketing

1. Offer exceptional customer service: Always keep the customer front of mind. Provide excellent customer experiences that leave a lasting impression, prompting customers to share their positive encounters with others and amplifying word of mouth. If a customer gives a bad review or makes negative comments online, treat this as a learning opportunity. Don’t ignore negative word of mouth. Engage with it and show people that you are responding.

2. Use referral programs: Incentivize existing customers to refer friends and family by offering rewards or discounts for successful referrals. This creates a mutually beneficial cycle of word-of-mouth marketing.

3. Engagement with influencers: Collaborate with influential individuals in your industry or niche to leverage their reach and credibility. This can increase the likelihood of their followers spreading word of mouth about your brand.

4. Create shareable content: Rand Fishkin alluded to the problems that arise when you try to build organic traffic with great content. However, to encourage positive word of mouth, you are going to have to create content that people are likely to share and enthuse about.

5. Foster community engagement: Build a sense of community around your brand by hosting events, online forums, or social media groups where customers can interact with each other and share their experiences with your product or service. Or collaborate at events that are likely to appeal to your target audience.

6. Encourage user-generated content (UGC): One of the most powerful forms of word-of-mouth marketing is UGC. Encourage your customers to create and share their content related to your brand. This could include reviews, testimonials, ‘unboxing’ videos, or creative uses of your product.

7. Leverage social proof: Highlight positive reviews, testimonials, and endorsements from satisfied customers prominently on your website and marketing materials. This social proof helps to bolster credibility and encourage word-of-mouth recommendations.

8. Offer exclusive sneak peeks or trials: Provide early VIP access or exclusive trials of new products or features to loyal customers or brand advocates. As well as fostering exclusivity, this can spark excitement and encourage people to spread the word to their networks.

9. Hosting contests or challenges: Organize contests or challenges that encourage participation and sharing, such as photo contests or social media challenges. These challenges can generate buzz and word-of-mouth engagement around your brand.

10. Get in touch: Contact customers directly through personalized communication channels, such as email or direct messages. This is a great opportunity to express appreciation, address concerns, and cultivate a positive relationship that can lead to organic word-of-mouth referrals.

Use digital channels to drive brand awareness and generate leads.

CONCLUSION
With so many brands competing for the eyes and wallets of customers, it’s important to leverage digital channels to stand out. It will also explore how AI is changing digital marketing. You will also explore key areas such as content marketing, social media, SEO, strategy, PPC, email marketing, GA4, and much more.