Word of Mouth Marketing
Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing is a strategy that leverages your real customers’ organic advocacy to acquire new customers and foster loyalty in existing customers.
Driving Acquisition Through Word of Mouth
Word of mouth marketing is the art of connecting with your most engaged customers and rewarding them for their advocacy. Offer management platforms that deliver incentives in return for customer advocacy can help you do this at scale. Combined, they connect you with your customers and encourage them to spread positive information and recommendations about your business. This inspires their friends and others to buy from you and increases your reputation and visibility.
To work effectively, word of mouth marketing involves connection — between you and your customer, and between your customer and their friends. It relies on your customer being incentivized to share recommendations with their friends.
WHY REFERRAL PROGRAMS WORK
The power of word of mouth and referral marketing is in the “filter” it provides. We’re all bombarded every day by messages and advertising — it’s everywhere, traditional media, new media, newsfeeds, native advertising. We’re so accustomed to it; we block almost all of it out.
In this environment, it’s incredibly hard for brands and advertisers to get noticed. But, everyone trusts their friends. If they say something positive about your business, your friend has already done the filtering. They’re speaking based on their experience, and that gives their recommendations much more weight. Consumers take word of mouth advertising seriously, and you can benefit. That’s the real power of referral marketing.
How to Launch a Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign
Give Your Customers a Reason and a Way to Recommend
It makes sense to use referrals to leverage the organic WOM already happening around your business. Here’s what to do to help ensure success:
Understand the Principles Behind Great Word of Mouth Marketing
Every good word of mouth strategy needs to be authentic, credible, and measurable. At its core, word of mouth marketing is about amplifying the genuine goodwill your customers have towards your business. Empowering your customers to share their positive experiences begins with actually creating experiences worth sharing.
Create Positive Customer Experiences
Celebrate your customers with targeted offers and incentives, send them personalized messages to thank them, and make them feel like they are a part of a larger community of loyal advocates. When they ultimately choose to share your brand with friends and family, make it as simple as possible for them to do so—every step of the journey should be seamless and on-brand. This will enhance the reach of your referral marketing and ensure positive word of mouth.
Driving Sustained Word of Mouth Growth
Launching a campaign is just the beginning. Sustaining and scaling word of mouth growth requires a deliberate strategy around delivering personalized, highly-targeted incentives at the right time. The brands that consistently win with WOM treat it as an always-on channel instead of a one-time activation — backed by the right tools to track, optimize, and reward advocacy over time.
Incentivize Your Customers to Spread Positive WOM
You can’t rely on customers to share when they have a great experience with your business. To grow word of mouth, offer customers incentives in return for their advocacy — whether that’s a referral reward, early access to new products and services, discounts, or something else.
Use Extole — the AI-Powered Word of Mouth Marketing Platform
Great word of mouth marketing relies on having the leading WOM and offer management software. Next to your overall WOM marketing strategy, the right referral platform is one of the best investments you can make.
Extole can help — our AI-powered offer management platform makes it easy to deliver powerful, personalized incentives that motivate your customers to action. Powerful analytics give you real-time visibility into program performance, making it easy to track participation, conversions, and ROI. Request a demo to see how Extole can elevate your word of mouth marketing strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions about Word of Mouth Marketing
What is word-of-mouth marketing?
Word-of-mouth marketing is when consumers share information about a product, service, or company with others, and brands actively encourage this communication through referral programs, incentives, and creating shareable experiences.
What is an example of word-of-mouth advertising?
A bakery offering free samples of a new dessert to passersby creates an experience worth sharing, prompting customers to naturally tell friends and family about their discovery.
Is word-of-mouth the most effective form of marketing?
64 percent of marketing executives believe word-of-mouth is the most powerful marketing available because people trust recommendations from friends more than traditional advertising.
What is the marketing term for word-of-mouth?
Word-of-mouth marketing is also called WOM marketing, WOMM, or word-of-mouth advertising, and includes buzz marketing, viral marketing, blog marketing, emotional marketing, and social media marketing.
