5 Proven Free Advertising Techniques – How to Create Word-of-Mouth Marketing for a Small Business

Knowing how to tap into word-of-mouth marketing effectively can be the most powerful free advertising tool for your growing business.

Therefore, learn how to create word-of-mouth marketing as customers favour opinions of friends, family, and others just like them. The best way to create word-of-mouth marketing is through developing products that customers want to tell their friends about or developing an effective plan for implementing word-of-mouth advertising techniques.

For instance, as referrals or testimonials. Make sure your customers are satisfied, then they can share their experience with your product or service with others.

It has become a very powerful tool for generating business, which makes it important to develop an effective plan for word-of-mouth marketing. It generates business because it’s inexpensive, trusted by customers as the most credible form of advertising, and it makes a lasting impression on your customer.

It’s extremely effective at generating sales and referrals. Word-of-mouth advertising is most effective when it is natural or organic advertising.

What is Word-of-Mouth Marketing?

Before the digital business landscape arose, word-of-mouth marketing was the best and main way for your business to gain traction. As businesses began moving onto the internet, some forgot the importance of word-of-mouth marketing and instead focused on big online ad campaigns without engaging the customer directly.

Then, they wondered why the number of customers they had were not improving. Although it can be easy to get distracted by other perceivably speedy marketing methods, these all lead back to how effective your word-of-mouth marketing is.

Word-of-mouth marketing remains king and the most untapped marketing resource. Social media has only improved the ability of word-of-mouth marketing to spread like wildfire resulting in products going viral in the blink of an eye.

How to create Word-of-Mouth Marketing

An essential marketing tool, word-of-mouth marketing accounts for $6 trillion in annual global spending, according to Semrush. This amount could be higher if businesses maximized their returns by using simple techniques. Effective word-of-mouth marketing is rooted in trust.

All the techniques of creating a word of marketing mentioned below serve to grow the trust between your business and your customer. One of the best ways to increase word-of-mouth marketing is to get people excited and create buzz related to your product and business.

1. Develop a plan

The best way to create word-of-mouth marketing is through creating products that customers want to tell their friends about or developing an effective plan for implementing word-of-mouth advertising techniques such as referrals or testimonials.

2. Find Talkers

Talkers are the individuals who will spread the word about your business and surrounding events. Examples of talkers for your business are volunteers, fans, customers, bloggers, influencers, and journalists. These individuals can help your business in a multitude of ways.

These interactions interconnect like a web resulting in the word of your incredible business being spread rapidly and influencers further promoting it. According to Edelman, 63% of consumers between 18 and 34 years old said that they “trust what influencers say about brands much more than what brands say about themselves in their advertising.”

Tips on How to Create Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Examples):
Facebook and other social media are excellent mediums for talkers to share businesses with their followers, family, and friends. Features like Facebook and Instagram live to strengthen word-of-mouth marketing and allow potential new talkers to interact with existing talkers that, bring them on board.

Having customers and fans of your company spread the word could potentially connect you with influencers. These influencers could then be paid to spread written publication to their larger fanbase. A potential beneficial connection that could result from talkers is to a newspaper correspondent or writer.

These individuals can provide exclusive stories and content to your customer base and individuals outside of it. Provide newspaper correspondents or writers with ready-made write-ups, projects, detailed data, progress reports, company news, pictures, and flyers that are ready to share.

Social media is the best place to locate ambassadors. Ambassadors can give potential customers a reason to trust you. They can also boost your brand’s presence on social media and educate unsure buyers.

3. Create Topics

You cannot have talkers actively promoting your brand if you do not give them anything to talk about. That is why you need to provide topics. These give people a reason to talk.

A few examples of these could be special offers, great service, big innovative ideas, an interesting brand, cool product design, a neat ad, or a new feature.

Tips on How to Achieve This (Word-Of-Mouth Advertising Examples):
First and foremost, you’ll want to have an awesome brand and plan for your marketing, such as: beautiful but functional. A solid company brand will fuel all the other ways you obtain word-of-mouth marketing and benefit from free advertising. From there, you can create cool ads and include offers that could benefit the first 100 buyers, for example.

A good example of a topic to provide your customers is having an elevator pitch. This is extremely easy for fans to spread. Viral ad campaigns can be useful tools if they are fun, buzzworthy, and unique. You’ll also want to provide the public with free, accurate information such as reports, newsletters, and webcasts.

Finally, incredible customer service is always noteworthy. Great customer service could be the make-it-or-break-it-for positive press. For example, if a customer has a negative experience with a product, they could spread this bad press about your company. However, if customer service can resolve this and leave the customer happier than before, they’ll likely be ecstatic about your business.

4. Use Tools

There are so many more tools available to businesses today to utilize word-of-mouth marketing to its fullest. Being sure you use the full arsenal of tools ensures that your message is spread quicker and farther.

Examples of using all the tools available could be encouraging customers to tell a friend on your website, sending a mass viral email, having a blog, giving handouts and samples, utilizing coupons, and providing online discussions.

Tips on How to Achieve This (Word-Of-Mouth Advertising Examples):

A mass email sent to all customers can inform them and provide them with information to spread. You should always be collecting emails to build up an email list. All emails sent out should be forwardable so that customers can easily pass the info to someone who may not yet be a follower of the company.

You’ll want to be sure that the emails include as much information as possible and do not exclude anything. Throughout your website, you should include some form of a reminder to tell a friend. This could be a form or a link on every single page of your website.

This makes it very easy for members to share with friends and actively reminds them to. You could also send customers feedback requests. This discussion forum should be easy to send to multiple recipients, be able to be filled out in 15 minutes, and have no passwords required.

Related: Word-of-mouth marketing factors

As a business, you should be starting discussions throughout all your channels. These channels should become a community; the best channels for this are a blog or forum.

In starting these discussions, it is first important to ensure that your customers know you respect their privacy and will not use collected emails or feedback from them for any other purpose.

An essential tool is simply buzz. A simple incentive tool to create buzz could provide customers with brand swag to display. This could be free t-shirts, hats, or bags- anything with a company logo.

The goal is to have many individuals share the brand logo. Another form of creating a buzz is to have exclusive stores with specific media networks or provide sneak previews of new products and incredible testimonials.

An easy tool to spark word-of-mouth marketing is to ask people to spread the word about your company and ask them to connect on all network channels, such as a Facebook group.

Some companies shy away from outright asking this, but in fact, many customers would love to do so for your brand, especially if you provide them with some form of value.

Lastly, social media provides a bounty of tools and is one of the central hubs of word-of-mouth marketing in this day and age. You’ll want to be sure that you’re being social media-friendly and utilizing tags.

Having great social media skills can result in more individuals finding your content and brand.

5. How to create word-of-mouth marketing – Join the Conversation

Once you implement your talkers and the topics and utilize all your tools, you need to also be present in the talking part. Word-of-mouth marketing will only work for so long before customers expect the business they’re promoting to give them feedback and communicate with them directly.

You’ll need to reward your talker’s hard work positively. You can do this by replying to feedback, participating in social media, and joining discussions.

Tips on How to Achieve This (Word-of-Mouth Advertising Examples):

Locate where the conversation is and join in by sharing logos and information with all participating parties. If discussions occur in a blog channel’s comments, reply.

You’ll want to engage the customers in conversation as much as you can without being too overbearing and answer any questions they have. If customers are offering input, accept it.

If you have other employees that will be making conversation with customers, implement guideposts, guardrails, and training to be sure that a customer is not driven away by a poor interaction.

What to Do if You Receive Negative Word-of-Mouth: Don’t Panic
There are many ways to combat negative word-of-mouth and many things to do before you even receive it for the first time. Negative word-of-mouth will be easily remedied if your brand is credible and honest.

After you receive it, however, be sure to respond as quickly as possible to its location: website, forums, or media networks. Even if the negative word-of-mouth angers you, it is crucial that you respond calmly and offer all the help you can provide.

Do not get into a fight. Instead, show that you are a human and respond like a regular person with a real name. After doing so, it is important to follow up and potentially be sure that other readers can see you’ve done this.

Related

6. Track Progress

Congrats! You’re well on your way to reaping the free advertising benefits of word-of-mouth marketing. However, the last crucial step is to be sure you’re tracking it.

Tracking your progress by measuring what people say can help you strategize further and ensure that your business receives good press.

You’ll want to search blogs, read online discussions, listen to any and all feedback, and use advanced measurement tools such as social media analytics.

Tips on How to Achieve This (Word-Of-Mouth Advertising Examples):
In order to ensure you’re tracking your progress, you’ll need to find out who the talkers are. Then, find out what’s working and join the conversation. Actively reading and responding to customers will allow you to be up to date with anything occurring.

Review the discussions on social media pages. This will allow you to monitor the level of discussions to see if all your implemented techniques are working. You’ll always want to read customer feedback regarding your products or service.

Conclusion to how to creat word-of-mouth marketing

Hopefully, this article has enlightened you about a fresh way of creating word-of-mouth marketing. As a business, never overlook the power of free advertising.

Customers ultimately will favour the opinions of their friends, family, and others just like them. According to Neilson, 83% of 30,000 survey respondents claimed they trust the recommendations of friends and family. 66% also stated that they trust online reviews, whether they be from a happy customer or a dissatisfied one.

Word-of-mouth marketing ensures brand loyalty, builds trust, increases conversions and sales, and fosters an incredible online community.