Word-of-mouth marketing is an elusive and strange thing. It’s a valuable asset, and something that many businesses crave, but it often comes about naturally, through little direct effort from you. Of course, you can indirectly try to shift the needle by simply maintaining a high standard of quality and providing a positive experience to your customers, but bad PR and negative associations can threaten to spiral out of your control and impact this.
So, being careful and measured, and looking to improve the right areas where you can, might get you on the road towards having your audiences spread the good word of your brand beyond your reach, developing a close-knit and positive association.
The User Experience
Of course, when your users and customers are the ones who are supposedly spreading the word-of-mouth marketing, you’re going to want to ensure that they’re going to have positive things to say about you. That might mean that you consistently strive to deliver quality customer service, or it might mean that the various ways of interacting with you are all going to leave a good lasting impression. This might mean that your website or app is accessible, intuitive, and well-designed. It might also mean that you develop a keen understanding of what makes these experiences solid, striving to achieve that, such as implementing a rest api, to deliver a smoother interaction between varying services within your app.
High Quality
The idea of ‘simply delivering high quality’ is only simple in theory. If it were so easy, then everyone would be doing it, but focusing a great deal of attention on the quality of what your business provides might not feel as immediately lucrative as putting resources into marketing, and drawing as many people towards you as possible. However, without that quality behind what you’re offering, there is no guarantee that your customers are going to want to come back for more.
This is another area where you can cultivate a positive interaction with your customers, by offering the chance for them to give you feedback, engaging them more deeply into your dynamic and using what you learn to improve your services further. This can even be done easily online through reviews, which are in themselves an opportunity for good word to spread surrounding your name.
Promotional Offers
However, this is all well and good when it comes to the customers that you already have, but what about when it comes to expanding your audience? Well, hopefully, if you have already got a dedicated base that is willing to say good things about you, word will reach them, but what if you wanted to accelerate the process? In that case, you might think it best to initiate a promotional offer, marketed through your social media channels and, therefore, easily shared by your customers, giving those who are unfamiliar a good reason to try what you’re offering them and providing you with the groundwork to deliver the first impression that leaves you with a larger long-term audience.
