Do a good job of "word-of-mouth marketing" and you can increase visits without any promotion!

The highest level of online promotion is that even if you don’t do any promotion yourself, your popularity and traffic will continue to rise. This is what we usually call “word-of-mouth marketing ”. Word of mouth marketing is about attracting the attention of consumers and the media to the point where talking about your brand or your company becomes interesting, engaging, and media- worthy.

Word of mouth promotion is one of the most important strategies in Internet marketing strategy. A large number of survey reports show that when people want to know information about a product or service, they are more inclined to consult family, friends and other experts rather than through traditional media channels . In fact, surveys have found that up to 90% of people view word of mouth as the best channel for gaining product opinions. It can be seen from this that if word-of-mouth promotion is done well, it can not only enhance brand awareness, but more importantly, it can increase user stickiness and improve brand conversion .

Word of Mouth originated from communication studies. Due to its widespread application in marketing, word-of-mouth marketing came into being. In the Internet age, people communicate and contact with each other more widely, and word-of-mouth marketing is even more of a catalyst for business development. Through effective word-of-mouth marketing, companies can reduce advertising costs, increase the probability of closing deals with potential customers, enhance customer trust, and increase product repurchase rates. This can improve the company's image and strengthen user loyalty to the brand. It is also a clever marketing method to differentiate from peers.

So in this era of mobile Internet , how can we implement word-of-mouth marketing strategies through the online Internet? Is there any way to spread word of mouth about your products, brand, and business so that new customers will come to you and give you money? Is there?

-01-User driving force

In addition to high conversion rates , user recommendations will also increase the recommender’s activity and retention in using the product. Because people will subconsciously constantly maintain that their cognition and decisions are correct. After introducing the brand to others more often, they will become more loyal to the brand. To stimulate more user recommendations, you must first understand why users would recommend it to you? There are three main driving forces for users to make recommendations:

1. Product Driven

Because the product or service itself is very good, users are very willing to share it with their friends; after using it, users often exclaim, "It's so easy to use!", "It looks so good!", "It's so convenient!", "It's a great experience!" and other comments; this requires the product to be significantly better than its peers in one of the aspects of experience, model, service, cost-effectiveness, etc.

Google understands this principle very well: "Focus on the user, and everything else will follow." When Google launched Gmail email in 2004, it relied entirely on word of mouth. At that time, Google only provided a few thousand Gmail trial accounts, and anyone who wanted to try it had to be invited. These limited number of "invitation codes" quickly became popular around the world and were used to exchange for various things, such as a two-night vacation in Dubai or a postcard from San Francisco. Even Gmail accounts are being sold on eBay in the UK for as much as £75.

The traditional business marketing logic is due to information asymmetry, and communication means advertising and public relations. In short, everything is about speaking louder. However, the new social media has flattened everything, the speed of communication has exploded, the radius of information diffusion has increased by hundreds or thousands of times, and cases of "overnight fame" have frequently appeared.

Information symmetry greatly enhances users' ability to vote with their feet. Whether a product or service is good or not, it is not enough for the company to brag about it, it is up to everyone to decide; good news or bad news, everyone can quickly share it through social networks . The fair and equal nature of information also gives the online public space a strong ability to self-purify public opinion. What is false cannot be true, and what is true cannot be false.

2. Spiritual Drive

The reason why spirit-driven is different from product-driven is that it is not the user’s actual needs that are solved, but the spirit of the soul of the product that inspires the user. For example, you may have heard sentences like "This phone is so sentimental!" and "We all owe him a movie ticket!" These two sentences are very familiar. This type of user recommendation comes from the drive to satisfy the user's spiritual needs. Sometimes we hear that "sentiments are rampant" nowadays. On the one hand, it is because many people find that sentiments are very valuable and begin to rely on them. The reason for some disgust is that many founders just "talk" and do not really show "sentiments", but the use of sentiments is still very valuable.

For example, in some entertainment products, "helping celebrities to get on the charts" is also a way to utilize the spiritual drive of fans, and it is indeed quite effective. For example, on Lu Han’s birthday on April 20, Lu Han’s fans spontaneously organized and called on other fans to leave a large number of comments. There were 200,000 comments under a single Weibo post, just to celebrate his birthday. However, the fans were not satisfied with this, and on the Chinese Valentine’s Day, the number of comments reached 13.14 million, which directly broke the Guinness World Record as a fan confession on the Chinese Valentine’s Day! A year later, on his birthday, the number of comments reached 42 million. Then, in pursuit of "one heart, 100 million", the fans pushed the number of comments to over 100 million. Now, the number of readings of the topic #鹿涵# on Weibo has reached over 70 billion!

3. Profit-driven

Because of the recommendation mechanism designed into the product itself, you can gain certain benefits by sharing and recommending friends; such benefits include direct benefits such as cash back, coupons, discounts, free products, etc., as well as the use of some virtual products. For example, sharing can unlock certain functions and extend the VIP usage time.

For example, there are some group-buying products. The price is one for direct purchase and another lower price for three people in a group. This is actually a good way to encourage users to invite their friends to use it together.

-02-How to do word-of-mouth marketing

Usually the sales routine of an enterprise is: advertising, talking to customers, and telephone marketing. The customer base brought by advertising is called the first marketing channel. The significance of word-of-mouth marketing lies in the fact that the customer base generated by mutual communication between customers is the second marketing channel. Although the effect of customers not generated by advertising is not direct enough, it is very profound. New users generated by customer recommendations have a high payment rate, which is conducive to the formation of word-of-mouth. Therefore, it is a relatively effective strategy for companies to conduct word-of-mouth marketing by working with old customers in a targeted manner and making full use of customer word-of-mouth as a powerful weapon to form a second marketing channel. So how do companies currently do word-of-mouth marketing?

1. Lay the foundation for your business, brand, and product through endorsements from authoritative media and celebrities

This move is very important for the launch of new brands and new products. Taking marketing in the fashion industry as an example, major brands spend a lot of money every year to make their products (clothes, bags) appear in the hands of celebrities, and even let celebrities post pictures and texts of the products to their social media accounts (such as Sina Weibo ), and promote them through media platforms such as fashion magazines to highlight the value or nobility of the products.

2. Through the optimization of search marketing, information that is beneficial to the brand appears on the homepage, enhancing consumer confidence

By editing Baidu Encyclopedia , BBS articles, Q&A, Weibo optimization and other means, the comments that appear when consumers search for your brand keywords on the Internet are all content that is beneficial to the brand. In particular, more and more consumers are accustomed to using Weibo to retrieve real information, so Weibo information optimization is also one of the important tasks for companies in word-of-mouth marketing.

3. Use soft articles (news) to interpret the brand from a third-party perspective and enhance authority

Taking digital products as an example, major digital brands will warm up their new products through media reviews before they are launched. When consumers learn about relevant product information through authoritative digital media, they are relatively likely to believe the content written by editors, thereby achieving the purpose of promotion.

4. Viral spread through “topic events”

The essence of a topic event is that a brand plans or entrusts a brand planning company to artificially plan some content with social reporting value or entertainment based on the characteristics of the brand and products, and disseminate it through media platforms, ultimately achieving the goal of viral dissemination.

For example:
A: The 'best job in the world' - Tourism Australia promotes the Great Barrier Reef
B: "Eat Pizza Hut to bankruptcy" - Pizza Hut
C: "Ban Wanglaoji " - Jiaduobao Group, which was Wanglaoji at the time, donated 100 million
D: Luo smashes Siemens refrigerator angrily - Luo's own personal publicity, while also raising the profile of his English institution

Inspiration: Tips for word-of-mouth marketing
1. Word-of-mouth marketing is built on a social basis. To form word-of-mouth, social interaction is necessary. Information is exchanged through social interaction, and this information is screened by the communicator.
2. Drag the public and the media into the conversation, and spread the word of mouth from one person to ten, and from ten to a hundred, until your brand and product information spreads around the world.
3. Six word-of-mouth buttons: taboo (sex, lies, bathroom humor), unusual things, bold and novel things, funny things, eye-catching things, secrets (keep secrets or reveal secrets)