Word of Mouth (WOM): Definition, Benefits, and Implementation Strategies

Word of mouth marketing is one of the most effective inbound marketing techniques to attract consumers. Basically, this one technique focuses on providing the best possible service to consumers.

If satisfied, consumers are expected to spread testimonials to other people. But how to implement this strategy? What are examples of word of mouth that can be applied? Watch this article to the end.

What is Word of Mouth?

Word of Mouth is a marketing strategy used to generate natural or natural discussions or conversations about and recommendations for a product or brand. In essence, the main goal of a Word of Mouth strategy is to make your product, service or brand talked about by people/consumers.

Products or brands that are talked about by the audience will drive business. In accordance with the results of the Nielsen survey that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends or family more than advertisements. From this survey it is clear that Word of Mouth can influence purchasing decisions and maintain customer loyalty.

According to Sernovitz, Word of Mouth is divided into two, namely:

• Organic Word of Mouth, is customer talk or discussion that occurs naturally because of the positive qualities of your product or service.
• Amplified Word of Mouth, is a customer conversation or discussion that occurs because the brand deliberately runs a campaign that invites conversation.

So, this WoM strategy doesn't just happen naturally, you can also create campaigns, advertisements, or programs that can invite positive talk from your audience.

There are 3 things that can be done so that other people talk about products or services in Word of Mouth Marketing (Andy Sernovitz, 2006), namely:

1. Be Interesting - By creating a product or service that is interesting and has a difference, and sometimes even though the company creates similar products, these products and services will have their own characteristics or be different to make it interesting to talk about. This difference can be seen from various things, for example packaging or guarantees for the product or service.


2. Make People Happy - Create awesome products, create excellent service, fix problems that occur, and make sure the work the company does gets consumers talking about the product to their friends. They will help the company, support the company's business and will invite other people to try a product or service that is offered. Word of Mouth will easily occur if the company can make these consumers feel happy.


3. Earn Trust and Respect - Companies must earn the trust and respect of customers. Without trust, people are reluctant to recommend products or services that companies provide, because this will harm their self-esteem image. Commitment to the information provided and make them feel confident to talk about the product or service, such as a short message so everyone can easily remember it.

The benefits of word of mouth

In research conducted by Nielsen, it is known that 92% of people will trust recommendations from friends and family more.

So, this type of marketing has indeed proven to be very profitable. Apart from that, there are still other advantages of doing word of mouth marketing, including:

1. Increase trust

The first advantage of doing word of mouth is to create trust between products and consumers.

Word of mouth will occur when there is a customer who is very satisfied with using a product.

So, by increasing the satisfaction received by the customer, he will trust the brand more.

In fact, it made them dare to recommend it to other people so that in the end more people believed in the product.

2. Increasing brand popularity

If consumers talk about or tell other people about your product or brand, then other people who don't know your brand before will be curious and find out. You can even make purchases because you get recommendations from those closest to you. This of course can increase the popularity of your brand or product positively and for free.

3. It doesn't cost much

Another advantage of word of mouth is that the cost is very affordable. Companies do not need to continue to spend a lot of money on marketing.

As mentioned above, this marketing strategy is quite affordable because it only utilizes the experience that customers get.

However, in order for this marketing strategy to work effectively, of course, the company still needs to make several other efforts.

Strategies to Improve Word of Mouth

Even though Word of mouth marketing does not require a lot of money, you still have to prepare an effective strategy to be able to attract customers. The following are some of the most effective ways to run Word of mouth marketing:

1. Create a quality product or service

The strategy for creating Word of Mouth is to create something that is worth talking about, be it a product or a service. You can also provide training for service staff who work such as shopkeepers, customer service, sales, and others so they can provide good service and satisfy consumers. Creating, maintaining, and developing the quality of the products or services you offer, is the same as maintaining customer trust and satisfaction.

2. Create a Campaign that Touches the Emotional Side

One method that you can use to be able to improve this Word of mouth marketing strategy is by creating an advertising campaign that touches the emotions of your prospects if you want to maximize wom marketing.

Customers who are touched by their emotional side will talk about your product, so that trust and a desire to buy it are formed.

3. Ask for feedback from consumers

You can use feedback from consumers as evaluation material to continue to innovate and develop products. In addition, by asking for feedback from consumers, they will feel involved in the product development process. It also shows that your brand cares and values ​​the feedback they give.

You can collect consumer feedback through surveys, providing suggestion boxes, through interaction on social media (live, question box), or using other media that consumers like.

4. User Generated Content (UGC)

User Generated Content or UGC is various content such as videos, photos, writings, or reviews created by consumers or followers. Later, the content that has been created by followers or consumers will be reposted by brands on their social media by including credit in captions, photos or videos.

5. Use the services of influencer Marketing

The development of social media has made influencer marketing also increasingly popular.

You can take advantage of this one thing to develop a word of mouth marketing strategy to reach more customers.

Using the services of an influencer, of course, can also help the branding process because he already has a lot of followers.

However, it's best to do some research before starting to use the services of an influencer.

6. Focus on Maintaining Good Relationships with Customers

The last way you can do to increase word of mouth is to always maintain your good relationship with customers. Even though this sounds trivial and simple, this method must always be done by every item if you really want to have loyal customers.

Reporting from The Balance SMB page, a close relationship between a brand and its customers will make it easier for customers to recommend it to those closest to them.

Conclusion

If a company is able to apply word of mouth as one of these marketing strategies, it is not impossible that the company's profits will increase and the company will grow. However, you must continue to be able to record company profits more neatly and accurately so that the company's financial cash flow can be maintained.