Word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful ways to spread your ideas, products, and overall message. The more people there are talking about you, the more you will spread. Spreading farther allows you to get more subscribers and customers. Friends tell their friends about you, and those friends tell their friends about you, and the cycle continues.
Before people can talk about you and spread your message, they need to know who you are. In order to spread farther, you need to optimize these 8 word of mouth marketing tips.
#1: Utilize social media
Social media is a powerful place to connect with more people. There are millions of people on various social networks, and with this big of a selection, there will be thousands or even millions of people who will be a part of your target audience. The people in your target audience will be the ones who talk about you the most.
In order to boost the chances of these people talking about you, you need to do two things on social media. The first thing you need to do is share valuable content. Sharing valuable content will make others see you as a credible expert in your niche. The second thing you need to do is interact with your followers. Interacting with your followers will allow you to build strong relationships with those followers. Those strong relationships may result in people spreading your ideas, products, and overall message through word of mouth.
#2: Post valuable content on your blog
Although it is great to share valuable content on your social networks, it would be ideal to post valuable content on your blog and share that content often. Sharing your content with your audience allows that audience to paint a better picture of who you are. If you are constantly promoting other people’s content without promoting your own, your audience will not know much about you.
The content on your blog is your unique voice on the web that people talk about. When people talk about the Huffington Post article you tweeted out, most of these people will only reference the Huffington post article, not the tweeter. If you tweet your blog posts, and your blog posts spark up a conversation with a group of people, you will get referenced. Then, some of the people listening will ask who you are. The person who talked about your blog post tells them who you are, and word of mouth marketing continues to spread your message far.
The more someone visits your blog, the more inclined that person will be to tell their friends about you. The best way to keep someone on your blog for a long period of time is by writing valuable content. It may take more time to write valuable content than the content that anyone could create, but the extra time you invest in making your content valuable is well worth it. In fact, if you keep someone on your blog long enough, that person may become a subscriber and/or customer.
#3: Over deliver
We like to talk about the people who put in 110% in their expertise because we want to give that person kudos. We like to talk about the people who influence our decisions and how we act. We like talking about these people because we want others to get influenced as well, and it allows us to show off our intelligence.
Over delivering is something that few people do. Over delivering means going the extra mile that others have deemed as unnecessary. Some of the people who talk about your niche will talk about you with their friends. Just as bosses like to reward the good employees with raises, we like to reward the over deliverers by spreading the word about them.
#4: Have a compelling story
Your compelling story is another factor that determines how conversations about you develop. There will be people who have not heard of you before. When a friend asks who you are, the person who was talking to you needs to be armed with the appropriate knowledge to answer that question.
Your compelling story is what the people talking about you need to know in order to advance the conversation. A compelling story allows people to know
- Who you are
- What you have been through
- What your mission is
- A simple, general idea on how you plan on accomplishing that mission
- Your credible accomplishments.
While including this knowledge in your compelling story, it is important to write a compelling story that people would want to read. A compelling story is not the opportunity to go on a boring rant about how awesome you are. A compelling story conveys those five main points in a way that makes people want to read from the beginning of the compelling story to the end.
The compelling stories all have those five main points, but there are slight differences for how a compelling story is written based on the niche you are in. If you want to create a compelling story, I recommend looking at the stories that other individuals and businesses have on their websites. While reading the stories, ask yourself whether they were compelling or not. If a particular story was compelling, ask yourself why you thought that story was compelling. Then, use that knowledge to add elements to your story so you can make it compelling.
#5: Turn yourself into someone worth talking about
This phrase simply means to accomplish goals and do things that people would want to talk about. You want to be remarkable in your niche and stand out of the crowd. We like talking about well-known people who have a lot of credibility.
Even if you have many credible accomplishments, you should always strive to boost your credibility. There is no limit to how much you can boost your credibility. The more things you do, the more things people can mention when they tell their friends about you.
#6: Reward your returning customers
Your returning customers are the ones who may end up buying your products for years to come. In order to strengthen those relationships and turn customers into the customers who will buy your products for many years to come, you need to reward the returning customers.
You should offer returning customers an exclusive deal, or better yet, an exclusive product. The more you reward your returning customers, the more likely those customers will be to buy your products over a long period of time.
#7: Create a referral program
A referral program is a great way to get more people to spread the word about you regardless of how strong your connection with that person is. These people will promote your products and services so they can get a small cut for each sale they make. You will make an overall profit, and there will be one other person promoting you.
Creating a generous referral program (as long as you are still making a profit) may entice people with big email lists to promote your product. This will result in more people knowing who you are, and then word of mouth marketing will continue to allow more people to know who you are.
#8: Be nice
When people talk about you, it is ideal for those people to be saying good things about you, your expertise, and what you stand for. Having influence is not enough. You need to have a good influence on the people you impact.
There are nice people and mean people all over the world. Many of us enjoy talking and hearing about nice people, and they are the ones who remember in a positive way. Many people remember Chesley Sullenberger III for saving all of the passengers on a U.S. Airways airplane by crash landing into the Hudson River. Derek Jeter is another person who we will remember very well.
These people have a good influence and are embedded in our memory because they were nice people who we admire because of the actions they took to make a goal happen. When we talk about these people, we enjoy talking about them. We talk about how Chesley had to land the plane so effectively that it did not hit land. We talk about how Jeter got 3,000 hits and was the icon of his era. We talk about the nice people, and those are the people who easily have a strong influence on others.
You can utilize the other seven methods to get people to talk about you, but being nice is what will result in people saying good things about you.
In Conclusion
Word of mouth marketing is a powerful way to spread. In high school, rumors fly around at a crazy rate, and if one person discovers the rumor, everyone knows about it the following day. That’s word of mouth marketing at its best.
The more accomplishments you have, the better people will be able to talk about you. Therefore, any type of mediocrity that you have must come to an end for you to be influential in your niche.
Which tip was your favorite? Do you have any additional methods for effective word of mouth marketing?
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