5 Ways to Use Word of Mouth as Part of Your Marketing Strategy

People tend to trust people over faceless companies. This is why, when you’re selling, a good strategy is to be conversational and human, because people feel as though they’re buying from a human being. The same applies to marketing. 

While traditional marketing is a great way to let people know about your brand, people do know that you have a vested interest in making sales. But word of mouth is a potentially very powerful marketing tool because people are more likely to listen to it, even if they know it’s incentivised.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing and similar methods allow you to access a much broader audience, simply by using someone else’s audience. Essentially, you use a third party to advertise your product and generate traffic. With each sale that’s made through that third party, they get compensated.

There are loads of potential third parties that your company could use. Influencers and other content creators are popular options because they already have a wide audience of people who trust them. They’re also often in a certain niche, so you can find an audience that would already be interested in your product.

2. Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are worth their weight in gold. Nobody wants to buy an untested product, so products that have a lot of reviews are much more likely to sell than products that have no reviews at all or just one or two.

Some customers are great reviewers, but it’s good to encourage customers to leave a review with a follow-up email. 

3. “Tell a Friend” Schemes

On a similar note, you can incentivize customers to recommend your company to people they know. One good way to do this is to offer a voucher for each person who signs up or purchases with a unique code. This could represent a discount for the person who recommended the product or even both parties.

Even if people know their friend is incentivized to tell them about a certain product or service, they trust that their friends won’t recommend a product that won’t work for them, even if they get a discount from it.

4. Community Mentions

Community mentions are similar to customer reviews, but are less “official”. A community mention is where someone mentions your company or brand in a forum and endorses it for a specific pain point. 

Sp, if someone asks for recommendations for a certain product in a forum or to help with a problem, a community mention would suggest your company in a less obvious way than other marketing methods.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media is an incredibly powerful platform for marketing. You can pay for ads on social media, as well as create content to let more people know about your brand. 

Using videos in social media is a great way to humanize your business and show people “behind the scenes”. Interesting content can spread and it will encourage people to follow your account and see even more marketing content.