How Does Word-of-Mouth Advertising Work?

Word-of-mouth advertising (word of mouth, or WOM) has been, to this day, an extremely effective marketing strategy for boosting trust with your community and increasing your sales.

To implement it, you need to create a great buying experience for customers so that users feel comfortable recommending the brand to friends and family. 

What is word-of-mouth advertising?

It's a marketing strategy that uses your customers' experience and motivates them to share it with their friends, family, or coworkers. People trust and rely on these opinions when it comes to buying a product or hiring a service because they come from a close, direct source with no vested interests.

According to a Nielsen study, Trust in Advertising 2021, conducted in Latin America, “‘word-of-mouth’ advertising generates 65% more consumer trust.” 

Even though it's a strategy that requires little financial investment, word-of-mouth advertising requires combining elements of inbound marketing, such as product marketing, content creation, and social media marketing, all with the goal of improving the customer experience from the first connection until after the sale has been made.

Here are 3 tips to get everyone talking about your brand:

• Connect with your community on social media

Build trust and show commitment to customers by providing excellent service and building loyalty. Brands that manage to connect with their community through tools like loyalty programs get three times as much word-of-mouth advertising. Building a community on social media requires paying attention to the smallest details. You need to know the right voice for the people who read and listen to you. Monitoring and interacting with the community you build on social media should be part of your daily routine, practically like being friends and knowing everything about them. That's how you'll earn their trust and get them to give your product or service the best reviews. 

• Find the ideal influencer

Once you've built a solid community on social media, identify the people who stand out from the group and can make an impact on others. We know them as “Influencers.” Offer them some of your products or services for free, with a coupon or discount, so they can try them and then share their experience with their community on social media. The goal is to be as real and organic as possible. Here, you'll also be able to identify the strengths and areas of opportunity your product or service may have throughout the buying experience and make improvements at the right time. 

• Use exclusivity to your advantage

Create exclusive meetups or membership groups that allow our customers to get to know each other and build bonds around your brand. Planning for not everyone to be able to use your service or product when it first hits the market is one way to take advantage of exclusivity. Your exclusive customers can have the ability to invite their community or more influencers, and in turn make the product or service go viral. Remember that people want what they can't have, and if they also get a recommendation from someone they trust, many of them will want to try it, even if just out of curiosity.

Some examples of word-of-mouth marketing:

• Tajín: Much of its growth was made possible by a marketing strategy that also included word-of-mouth advertising, thanks to the use of social media to share recipes and new ideas for enjoying this spicy powder beyond a plate of fresh fruit.

• Jeep: Based on what it knows about its community, it creates events and invites Jeep owners to join trips lasting a few days along wilder roads. This works very well for word-of-mouth advertising because during the Jamboree (as the event is called), participants eat, sleep, and essentially live inside their Jeeps. This generates organic content for social media and new stories.

• Nike: As part of its strategy, it pays attention to new talent that gets people talking on social media, identifying people whose work has a special connection with their followers. For example, it collaborates with fairly well-known illustrators to design some models and share them on their social media. That creative freedom speaks directly to the collaboration's followers and is embraced as an invitation to buy Nike products.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, we've learned that we can't leave this valuable tool out of our strategies, and we can confirm it with these examples of large companies that, to this day, strive to know and connect with their audience and, as a result, get word-of-mouth advertising. 

If you're interested in how you can complement this strategy with the inbound methodology to connect with your ideal audience, write to us here: hi@digitalegia.com