Word of Mouth Marketing is, essentially, people recommending products or services to other people. It can happen in ways as diverse as your brother-in-law mentioning that he likes his new camera or seeing someone post a positive review of a restaurant on their Facebook profile. Anytime someone who doesn’t directly work for a company recommends their product or service, that’s word of mouth marketing.
So why is this important?
WOMMA defines Word of Mouth as: “The act of consumers providing information to other consumers.”
This is particularly important in the age of social media. The emergence of social media as a way for people to communicate with each other and a reliable, go-to method for product and service recommendations means that it can be an effective an vital tool for any marketing campaign. Not only do people use social media to talk with friends, family and their extended personal and professional networks about products and services, the things they say remain on the internet and, in many social networks, become searchable and the basis for further conversation.
WOMMA further defines Word of Mouth Marketing as: “Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place. It is the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications.”
That art and science of giving people a reason to talk about you, and then making it easy for them to share that information, is the core of what drives Word of Mouth marketing.
Word of Mouth Marketing happens on several levels:
- Researching and studying where people talk about your products/services.
- Informing consumers about what you do and how you do it.
- Creating and disseminating tools and messages that help people share that information.
- Being part of that conversation, both online and off.
Ask yourself and your company when thinking about word of mouth marketing:
- What sets us apart? What do we offer that is unique or note-worthy?
- Where are people talking about this already and how can we get them to talk about us?
When you decide to get active in the word of mouth marketing world, there are many resources on the web where tools and conversations that can help you happen, like the Word of Mouth Marketing Blog. Before jumping in without thinking, start your research on where and when relevant conversations are happening, and how those relate to what your company is doing in the near future. And remember that word of mouth marketing is less of a campaign and more of a commitment- it’s something that is always happening and will continue to grow in influence.
Then visit somewhere like the Word of Mouth Marketing Blog and start learning as much as you can.
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