8 Effective Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Ideas To Grow Your Business Online

Generating website traffic and boosting eCommerce sales is becoming challenging every day. The competition in the market has become cutthroat. Having a pretty website and excellent products is not enough to make the brand stand out from the rest of the market.

To generate more sales and increase brand awareness, marketers try to grab every single marketing opportunity to achieve their objectives.

Businesses make a fantastic website, create social media profiles, run paid ads, work on their SEO, etc. However, they tend to neglect one potent tool to market their brand and reach their prospects: Word of mouth marketing.

Word Of Mouth Marketing

Word of marketing is a marketing strategy where the brand’s customers promote and spread good things about the company and its products or services due to their satisfaction with its products.

Word of mouth marketing strategy is deployed in many forms, such as video, vlogs, blog posts, images, or simply a short review. The best thing about this marketing strategy is that it is usually a free form of marketing. Companies don’t have to spend a fortune to make their customers talk. All that they have to do is deliver quality products and provide impeccable customer service to their buyers. The happy and satisfied customers will rave about the company in their social circle.

When customers advocate the brand’s products, the brand gets a free marketing ambassador and additional sales generated due to the word of mouth marketing by its customers.

Types Of Word-Of-Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth marketing can happen in 2 ways:

Organic Word-Of-Mouth

Organic word of mouth marketing occurs when people talk about the brand and promote it on the internet or in their social circle because they are happy with its products. Consumers have the natural desire to express their views on the company and its products.

Amplified Word Of Mouth Marketing

Amplified marketing campaigning occurs when brands implement marketing strategies and launch campaigns to encourage people to talk about the product or company. For instance, a restaurant can run a contest where the person who expresses their best moment in the restaurant will win a free dinner. People will talk about their experience not because they want to, but to enter the contests and get a chance to win a free dinner at the restaurant.

Many famous brands deploy the amplified word-of-mouth strategy to become the talk of the town. However, bear in mind, amplified marketing will only work if there is enough organic word-of-mouth marketing. The absence of the latter will not bring effective results for the previous strategy.

Benefits Of Word-Of-Mouth Marketing 

Word-of-mouth marketing offers a good number of benefits; making your brand the talk of the town is the least of all.

After reading the following benefits, we are sure you’ll want to implement word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

Don’t worry; we have great ideas on word-of-marketing strategies. But first, let’s read its benefits.

Free Marketing 

The first benefit that a brand receives from word-of-marketing is free marketing of its products. When people are happy with your services or products, they’ll share their positive experiences with their friends and family.

Customers talking about your brand and promoting your products won’t cost you a dime. Hence, provide your customers with an unforgettable experience, and get ready for your company to be recommended to a bunch of new prospective customers.

Boost In Sales 

When your happy customers recommend your brand in their social circle, people are enticed to try your products to reap the same benefits as them.

For instance, people will try a specific ice cream flavor of a brand if their friends or family members love it or have said good things about it.

The company enjoys new customers, increased sales, and as a result, profit is maximized.

Builds A Stronger Community 

Having strong word-of-mouth marketing helps the brand to build a strong community of loyal customers. The brand and customers can move one step further and create a long relationship based on customers’ loyalty and highly welcoming service from the business.

A large community opens the gate to welcome more audience, increased brand awareness, and ultimately, grow and success the business in the long run.

We hope that these benefits must have pushed you over the fence to start word-of-mouth marketing right now!

Don’t worry; you don’t have to open more tabs on your browser to search for ideas on word-of-mouth marketing. Bookmark this page so that you never have to hunt for ideas to start your word-of-mouth marketing.

Ready? Let’s dig in!

Increased Brand Awareness 

The more customers talk about your brand, the more people will be introduced to your brand and your products.

Your happy and loyal customers can increase your brand awareness and convince the prospective audience to visit your website, engage with your social media posts, or buy your product.

A brand with increased brand awareness and a large audience grows faster than a brand that is known to a smaller audience.

8 Effective Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Ideas To Grow Your Business Online

1. Sell Quality Products 

If you want people to go crazy over your products and spread good things about you, ensure to deliver high-quality products that make them happy and provide a good value for their hard-earned money.

Selling low-quality or sub-standard products to your customers will not generate a mind-blowing response from them.

Hence, if you want your customers to rave about your products and recommend them in their social circle, deliver them good and reasonably priced products.

Similarly, if someone is running a restaurant, salon, or even a clinic, it must give customers a pleasant and comfortable experience. Failure to welcome the customers or accommodate their needs can result in negative word-of-mouth marketing, which is disastrous for the brand.

Thus, before implementing any other ideas from the list, focus on improving and delivering a high-quality product or service to your customers.

2. Provide An Extraordinary Shopping Experience 

Would you recommend a shop to your friends that are awfully crowded, mismanaged, and have a rude and unwelcoming sales staff? Of course not! Forget about recommending it to your friend; you won’t enter that shop again. Besides, you will warn people around you to stay away from the shop that gave you a pathetic shopping experience.

Your customers will behave in the same way if you fail to provide them with a fantastic shopping experience. If you want people to spread good things about your brand, give them an extraordinary shopping experience that they’ve never had before. 

Train your sales rep to be polite, helpful, and welcoming to the customers in the physical shop. Treat them with respect, and provide satisfactory answers to their concerns and queries. 

Provide a smooth shopping experience at your website too. Create an easy-to-navigate website, integrate live chat software, and provide seamless checkout from the website to give the customer a pleasant experience.

3. Use Visual Triggers

Create videos, infographics, or capture high-resolution pictures and share them on your social networking profiles to attract your audience. People love to share interesting and informative content on their social profiles. If your business has uploaded stunning pictures or awesome informative videos, people would love to share them on their profiles or stories so that their friends can also view them.

We are emphasizing the creation of visual content because the human brain processes it 60,000 times faster than textual content. If you have something interesting to share with the audience, create an engaging infographic or video for it. Your audience would love to see the content instead of reading a long paragraph conveying the same piece of information.

You can also create engaging games crossword, word search, spot the difference between 2 images, etc. Customers love to interact with such content and share it on their feeds.

4. Create Something Unique 

Did you know that there are around 24 million eCommerce websites worldwide? If you want your brand to shine its way through the crowd, it must give something different to the audience.

People love the brands that offer something unique to their customers and do not follow the bandwagon of delivering the same types of goods in boring packaging and marketing it the same way. In the era of social media, people love things that are out of the box and exciting. Thus, live up to people’s expectations to encourage word-of-mouth marketing.

Think of an exciting way to package your goods. Starbucks is the perfect example to give in this scenario. The baristas of Starbucks write the name of the customers on the glass of their ordered beverages. People click the picture of their drinks and post them on their social accounts. Starbucks gets free marketing from the customer.

5. Leverage User-Generated Content And Reviews

Another idea for effective word-of-mouth marketing is to use the content created and published by your customers for your products or services. When prospects see the pictures of real people using the company’s products, they are less hesitant to trust the brand and try its products.

For instance, if a person has shared a picture of himself wearing the shirt he bought from a brand and described how comfortable he feels wearing it, the brand can repost it on its profile as social proof. The followers of that customer will learn about the brand, and on the other hand, the brand will have the content to post on its social profile.

Apart from using user-generated content, don’t forget about the customer reviews and testimonials. Customer reviews are a powerful tool in today’s era; do you know why?

Because of the following reasons:

• Online buyers read around seven reviews before trusting a brand.
• 85% of customers trust online reviews as a recommendation from family or peers. 
• 49% of buyers need a minimum of four-star ratings before they purchase something from the business.

Thus, encourage your customers to review products and their overall experience with the business. You can even ask your customer to give you a review; just don’t force them to leave a positive review, or else it’ll creep them out. Simply direct them where to leave the review. They won’t mind spending a few minutes writing a review for your brand.

Once you have customer reviews, just don’t keep them with you. Instead, display it on your website, and social media handles to let the audience read what people have to say about your brand.

6. Get Social On Social Media

Having a business profile on social media websites is a must. Popular networking websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., have millions of active users each month. It gives the perfect platform to marketers for promoting their brand and growing their business.

Hence, if your business is not social media, you are doing a massive disservice to it. Thus, join the famous networking websites right now and connect with your audience to incite word-of-mouth marketing.

Post engaging content, conduct a question and answer session, host contests, giveaways, etc., to encourage your audience to engage with you. Respond to your customers’ reviews and concerns raised by them. Use a polite and professional tone while responding to your customers. Responding harshly or rudely to negative feedback or review can tarnish your reputation in the market and trigger negative word-of-mouth marketing. 

7. Collaborate With Influencers

Social media influencers have a massive following of organic audiences. Collaborating with an influencer can give the company exposure to a vast new audience, resulting in increased followers on the business’s profile, boost in website traffic, increased brand awareness, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Collaborating with an influencer, blogger, or YouTuber is an amplified word-of-mouth strategy. Businesses pay the influencer to talk about their products on their social media handles and encourage their followers to follow companies’ social accounts and visit their websites.

70% of teenagers trust social media influencers more than celebrities.

Look for the micro-influencers in your niche, collaborate with them, and make them talk about your brand to promote word-of-marketing.

8. Surprise Your Customers With Free Goodies 

What would you do if you received an extra item with your order one day, labeled as a gift?

Get excited, right? You might even take a picture and upload it on your social media profile, or at least send the gift’s photo to your friends or family members, right?

Your customers will also do the same upon receiving a gift from your side. Thus, surprise your customers by sending small gifts or discount coupons on special events like their birthdays. You can also send gifts to your regular customers to make them happy and get them to talk about your brand with their friends and family members.

In A Nutshell

Creating a word-of-mouth eCommerce marketing strategy can help the company establish brand recognition and boost its sales in the long run.

Turning your customers into your fans and brand advocates is a long-term process and will not happen overnight. We sincerely hope that this article will help you collect ideas on word-of-mouth eCommerce marketing strategies.

This guest post was written by Ricky Hayes of Debutify.