3 driving factors and 6 factors of user recommendation and several misunderstandings of word-of-mouth marketing

Word-of-mouth marketing is to promote and grow a product through word of mouth spread by users. So what is the point of word-of-mouth marketing? What are some common misunderstandings? The article explains it for you.

These days, due to the great success of word-of-mouth and box office of "Wolf Warrior 2" directed by Wu Jing, the next ones to appear will be "War Tiger" starring Donnie Yen, "War Leopard" starring Zhao Wenzhuo, "War Girl" starring the young actors, and "Standing on the Street" starring Ma Rong! And Bai Baihe 's "Standing Stick"! "All of this clearly shows us the essence of good word of mouth, word of mouth and the contempt chain, these twin brothers, in one sentence: "worthy of imitation , never surpassed"!

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?

1. Worthy of imitation: 3 driving forces of user recommendations

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:

01Product 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.

02Spiritual 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, there were 42 million comments, oh my god! Then, in pursuit of “one heart, one hundred 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! I was also shocked when I saw it. This is what we call the power of the ancient times!

03Profit-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.

2. Never surpassed: six elements of user recommendation

When it comes to word-of-mouth marketing, many of our companies have misunderstandings. Some companies think that manufacturing good products and satisfying consumers, thereby establishing a good reputation and letting consumers spread the word, is word-of-mouth marketing. In fact, manufacturing high-quality products and satisfying consumers is only the basic guarantee for successful word-of-mouth marketing. This is essential, but it is far from enough. As a form of marketing, word-of-mouth marketing naturally includes many marketing tactics and implementation techniques, among which the design of word-of-mouth marketing content is particularly critical. A successful word-of-mouth content should include six elements: leverage, benefit, novelty, controversy, privacy, and storytelling:

01Take advantage of the situation

The characteristic of word-of-mouth marketing is to use small to achieve big results. When operating it, you must be good at using various powerful potential energies to your own advantage - you can use the laws of nature, policies and regulations, emergencies, and even the potential energies of competitors.

When Pepsi was first founded, it encountered resistance from the old beverage giant Coca-Cola . Coca-Cola used its long history and traditional American culture as selling points, mocking Pepsi as a newly born brand with no history and no culture. In its advertisements, it used various methods to compare its own "oldness" with Pepsi's "newness". Indeed, such advertising has led many consumers to believe that Coca-Cola is the more authentic cola.

As a startup brand at the time, Pepsi did not have the strength to refute or confront Coca-Cola through advertising wars, so they came up with an idea - to use Coca-Cola's "new and old theory" to establish Pepsi's brand image. As a result, Pepsi launched an advertisement with the theme of "New generation of cola, new generation of choice" to preach the benefits of new cola and target young people who like to try new things. As a result, Coca-Cola's overwhelming advertising helped Pepsi establish the brand image of a new generation of cola.

02 Self-interest

In life, what we pay attention to and talk about the most are various topics related to our own interests. For example, the fact that people's livelihood issues were rated as the most discussed topic among the people in 2008 proves this point. Therefore, word-of-mouth marketing must directly or indirectly link the content of the dissemination with the target audience based on interests, which is particularly important in the Chinese market. For example, the success of "Super Girl" is due to the fact that the disseminators are the beneficiaries of the event, which makes them not only pay attention to and participate in it themselves, but also actively spread it and invite relatives and friends to pay attention to and participate, thus creating a strong multiplier effect.

In order to defeat its competitors, a biscuit manufacturer in the United States launched a campaign to give away large quantities of biscuits for free. Its competitors accused it of unfair competition, and the industrial and commercial department began to investigate. Because giving away cookies was related to the interests of consumers, the development of the incident attracted widespread attention from consumers. The company mobilized consumers to win sympathy and support. This move was indeed effective, and some people even supported the company through a march. Although the giveaway activity was eventually stopped, the company’s visibility and reputation increased significantly, and product sales also increased significantly.

03Novelty

In today's era of information explosion and media proliferation, consumers are highly immune to advertisements and even news. Only by creating novel word-of-mouth content can we attract public attention and discussion. The Zhang Ruimin refrigerator smashing incident was a hotly debated topic at the time, and Haier gained widespread publicity and high praise. However, when similar behaviors of other companies were reported later, almost no one paid attention to it, because people are only interested in new, occasional, and first-time things. Therefore, the content of word-of-mouth marketing must be novel and unique.

Today we are all accustomed to the buy-one-get-one-free promotional format, and its effect is no longer obvious, but the earliest buy-one-get-one-free format achieved unprecedented success. In a small town in England in the 16th century, fruit farmers planted a large number of grapes and had a good harvest. As a result, the price of the grapes was very low. Even so, they could not be sold and rotted in the orchard. A landowner came up with an idea. He bought a batch of apples from other places and offered two apples for free for every 3 kilograms of grapes bought by customers.

In Britain at that time, apples were already a very expensive fruit. Since this town was not an apple producing area, the price was even more expensive. Due to the difficulty in transportation, apples were almost unavailable in the local area. The owner of the manor did not do any publicity but it triggered a rush to buy among the townspeople. Everyone spread the word and the manor was packed with people. Although giving away apples increased some costs, the price was not high because they were purchased directly from the main apple producing area. The grapes that were bundled with apples were also sold at a relatively high price. In the end, not only did they sell out all the grapes, but they also made a lot of money. This was the earliest buy-one-get-one-free sales model, but later on, everyone adopted this method and consumers became accustomed to it, and it lost its original powerful effect. Therefore, novelty and uniqueness are important factors for the success of word-of-mouth marketing.

04Controversy

Controversial topics can easily be spread widely, but controversies often carry some negative content. Companies must grasp the scale of controversy when spreading word of mouth, and it is best to allow the controversy to develop between two positive opinions. In order to attract public attention, a certain company used a strange trick during recruitment : it only recruited employees whose zodiac sign was dog. As expected, this attracted widespread attention and discussion from the public and was reported by many media outlets. However, the incident did not bring any positive benefits to the company. The public accused the company of employment discrimination, feudal superstition and other issues, which brought extremely serious negative effects to the company.

In order to attract media attention and spread word of mouth among the public, another company planned to use the Qilin as the symbol of China during an exhibition and intended to make it the mascot of the exhibition. It solicited opinions from the public, which also attracted public attention. The company added fuel to the flames and guided the public discussion: Should China use the dragon or the Qilin as its symbol? The company found several reasons why the Qilin symbolizes China. There were many supporters, but naturally there were also opponents. During the discussion, everyone knew about the exhibition, and in the end the Qilin and the dragon appeared as mascots at the exhibition, and everyone was happy.

05Private

Many of the most widely spread events in the world were once secrets. This is because each of us has an interest in prying into private matters. The more private things are, the more they arouse our interest in exploring and discussing them. A British scholar conducted an interesting experiment: he mysteriously revealed a piece of news to two neighbors, saying that a strange bird had laid a huge green-shell egg in their yard in the morning, and told the two neighbors not to tell anyone else. However, within less than an hour, people were talking about it on the street, and by the next day, everyone in the town where the scholar lived knew the news.

Secrets are like Pandora's box. You don't have to tell others to open it; people will find ways to open it on their own. Therefore, private content is the most effective and interesting means of word-of-mouth marketing. However, when creating private events, you should avoid being mysterious or giving the audience a feeling of being fooled, as this will not be worth the effort.

06Storytelling

In order to make your products popular with consumers, in addition to standardizing the quality of the content, you must also actively let consumers understand the spirit of your product and identify with the story behind your product. The person who does the best job in this is Apple founder "Steve Jobs". In the Apple industry, we not only see their products, but also through Steve Jobs we thoroughly understand the entire Apple philosophy and spirit. This is one of the reasons why Apple fans are so enthusiastic.

When we do word-of-mouth marketing, it is best to forget that we are doing an advertisement, but rather spreading a novel and interesting story. Good stories naturally have a long history, and how to tell this story well depends on the business acumen of the author and the protagonist of the story.

3. Common Misunderstandings of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

01If the core experience is not good, then invite users

If the core experience is not done well, any action to increase the number of users in large quantities is unnecessary and even harmful. At this stage, if the core experience is not done well, the retention rate will definitely be very low, and a large influx of users will only bring more negative word of mouth, which is not conducive to later efforts.

Material incentives are used to promote communication, not to create it.

When providing material stimulation, we must ensure that the product itself has a certain degree of natural spread. Material stimulation only accelerates and amplifies this behavior. Otherwise, if word of mouth is not good, the users invited may only be those who come for material rewards, and they will not be the seed users needed at this stage. Whether the core experience is good depends on whether the users have good word of mouth and the retention rate, which is an important indicator to decide whether to start efforts to attract new users.

02The core value is vague

What is the core value of your product? What kind of people and what pain points have been solved? This is a question that product managers need to think carefully about. Some products have not yet become big, but they have a little bit of every function, and none of them are particularly outstanding. Users are confused when using them, and it is even more difficult to spread the word. Not every user is a master of summarizing and distilling. If he does not know how to express the benefits of a product, it will not be easy for him to make a successful recommendation. Therefore, extracting the core value of the company's products will not only make it easier for new users to understand, but also easier for old users to spread.

To give a counterexample, there is a company called Yunlai. From my experience, their core business is marketing H5 production services, but they have created a new term in marketing - scenario application. This is really a very difficult term to understand. Even after listening to their CEO explain it for several minutes, I still didn't quite understand it. Many of their clients are bosses of traditional businesses, and they will probably be even more confused after listening. To this day, the term "scenario application" is still not widely recognized by users. The company's products are mainly driven by sales. If the core value is refined more accurately in the early stage, there will definitely be more users to spread and recommend it, without having to rely too much on a group of sales staff employed by the company to sell products every day.

If you really want to create a new concept, you should use metaphors that can help users understand and remember the product, such as some concepts in Internet terms, such as "pig on the vent", "capital winter", "small steps and fast progress", and "cloud spare tire". These are concise and clear and can be understood at a glance without much explanation.

03Users’ understanding is inconsistent with yours

Another problem that is easy to occur is that your understanding of the product and the user's understanding of the product are very different. Try asking users how they understand your product? If you were to recommend it to a friend, how would you introduce it? You may unexpectedly discover that users mistake your product for something else.

For example, a friend of mine owns a company that claims their product is a social marketing solution. However, after reading the introduction and using it, I can only think that it is just an event registration website. It does not have any functions that can really solve pain points in social marketing. This is not a problem with the positioning, but that the product functions fail to allow users to perceive the product's positioning. They will have a hard time in marketing and communication, constantly telling users about one product positioning, while users actually perceive the product as another positioning. This sense of difference will make both users and operations feel embarrassed.

What should I do then? Think clearly about the exact positioning of the product, and use product functions that solve needs so that users can clearly perceive it.

04No convenient way to share

A: "How do users share your page?"

B: "Users can take screenshots..."

A: "Uh..."

This is mainly a problem of awareness. Many applications do not have sharing methods on some major pages, and the entrances are hidden very deeply, so users can only share by taking screenshots. Not only is taking screenshots difficult, but some users are not very good at it. More importantly, new users who see the screenshots after sharing them cannot easily return to the product. Even if it is an H5 page in WeChat , users should be prompted that they can share it. Of course, we know that the share button on this H5 page cannot directly trigger WeChat sharing, but at least a mask can pop up to inform users that they can share by clicking the upper right corner.

Some people may say, isn't this just making it more troublesome for users to take one more step? Can't you just share it directly? Yes, it seems like there is an extra step. Without this prompt, many people would not realize that this page can be shared. For products that will cover second- and third-tier users, this sharing button needs to be more convenient to operate.

05 Ignoring the experience of the referral end

When designing sharing links, the experience of the referral end is often overlooked.

(1) New user awareness

For a new user, he may have never heard of this product, has no idea what it is used for, and may be completely unaware of the product's internal functions and columns; therefore, the design of this page must fully consider the experience and cognition of a new user.

(2) Minimum cost perception experience

Before users get a sense of what the product is, do as little operation as possible. For example, if a friend shares a piece of content with you and the other party clicks on it to view it, they may be prompted to register and log in first. In this case, it is easy for the user to be prompted to log out. Is there any part that can be experienced and perceived on WeChat? Try to develop support for it. With experience and trust, the next step of guidance will be more likely to succeed.

(3) WeChat link design

The most important channel for sharing with friends is WeChat, so you should fully consider the characteristics of WeChat. For example, the link title may not be fully displayed on a small-screen mobile phone, so put the important content in front of the title! It makes users want to open the link even if they haven't finished reading it. WeChat sharing links often capture the user's avatar and nickname, and embed them into the title and thumbnail of the sharing link. Compared with the previous uniform advertisements, this is also a more realistic personalized link, which is more suitable for the scenario of friend recommendation.

06Don’t give cash back to customers easily

Unless it is absolutely necessary, it is best not to return cash directly to users for the following reasons:

1. Cash outlays are a direct cost to the business and directly reduce profits.
2. Giving away coupons and products can at least drive up other indicators, such as shipment volume.
3. Cash rebates can easily attract some non-precise users who come only for the cash rebates, and may also cause fake orders.
4. Direct cash rebates between friends through introductions can easily cause resentment and bring about moral burdens.

When rewarding users for recommendations, it is best to give products that are highly relevant to the target audience rather than cash. For example, if it is a sports app, it may give away sports equipment, personal training coupons, etc. This can screen out some irrelevant users and will be more conducive to the gathering of high-quality target users .

I have personally seen a shopping O2O company promoting itself at the entrance of a supermarket, offering cash returns upon downloading and registering. As a result, a large number of middle-aged and elderly people from urban villages flocked to the company, and I felt really sorry for the investors ' money. In addition, it is also related to the temperament of the product. For example, in a learning and growth community, it is not advisable to add too many cash back referrals, as this will destroy the atmosphere. Most people stay in learning communities because the communities can create an open and growing atmosphere. If they get direct cash back by introducing friends to the community, they will feel like they are making money from their friends. In the Chinese cultural atmosphere, this will feel like it will destroy relationships and make it difficult to make successful referrals.

07 No effect cost review

In order to acquire new users and secure the next round of financing , some teams spend a lot of money on subsidies to attract users. Due to lack of experience, they just pick a number on the spur of the moment and start providing subsidies. In the end, they spend more than they earn and go out of business. So how do we calculate the reasonable range of subsidies for each new user? Here we can make an estimate using the average user value of the next round of valuation.

For example, through contact with the capital market and comparison with peers, you find that the valuation in the next round is expected to be 60 million when the number of users reaches 2 million, which means that the average user value in the next round is 30 yuan. So the subsidy is 30 yuan? Definitely not! It is not certain that the money can be raised, the valuation may be cut, and new users may not be retained. Moreover, you cannot use all the money to subsidize users, so it can only be a part of the 30 yuan. The specific proportion of this part will vary greatly among different industries and products, but at least it is a very important reference standard. If the subsidy amount is close to half of the average user value, then the risk must be very high; if the cost exceeds the average user value, the company is basically doomed.

Therefore, in order to catch up with their competitors, some companies have been frantically subsidizing without any cost accounting. The amount of subsidies even exceeds the average user value of the next round of valuation. Even if they attract users, they will soon fail.

In order to leave its competitors behind, Lashou.com spent a lot of money on marketing on TV and subways and poached employees with double salaries. The risk of its capital chain increased sharply, and it finally failed on the road to IPO and was overtaken by Meituan, a company that was good at calculating costs. According to a sharing by Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen, Meituan tried offline advertising at the beginning and found that the average customer acquisition cost was very high, so it withdrew all offline advertising and switched to online advertising that can be tracked and calculated. Although the user growth rate is slightly slower than its peers, the capital reserves are very solid. When the O2O winter comes, it can show off the 300 million cash in the account and finally defeat its opponents. It can be seen that when attracting new users, we must carefully calculate the cost of new users.

08 Ignoring the critical moment

(1) Sharing and display optimization

When users are eager to share something worth sharing, we should make some optimizations in the sharing display, especially for some content-based products. For example, the sharing design of NetEase News’ replies is very good.

(2) Trigger recommendations at the right time

The success rate of asking users to refer friends is highest when their emotions are just coming to an end. There are two key points here. One is to do it when the user is close to the highest point, because this is the stage when they are most satisfied with the product. The other is to do it right after the end to avoid interrupting the best experience. For example, when a user finishes reading an e-book, watching a movie, or completing an online course, combining this scenario with a sharing or showing-off page will be more easily accepted by users.

Of course, the choice should also be made based on user satisfaction. For example, when conducting some product satisfaction surveys, if the score is higher than 90 points, a share button will automatically pop up after filling out the form. When users exhibit behaviors that may be unsatisfactory, do not make recommendations to them. For example, if a user keeps fast-forwarding through a movie, it should be considered that the satisfaction level is not high enough, and it is unreasonable to pop up recommendations at this time.

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 filtered 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)