Word of Mouth Marketing and why you should care
Word of Mouth Marketing or WOMM for short is essentially getting your happy customers to promote your business and do your marketing work for you. It’s also the new age conversation between corporation and customer.
WOMM has been identified as the most valuable form of marketing — the one that consumers trust above all others and the one that is most likely to drive sales for your company. It’s powerful, easy, indirect and usually free.
According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising. And a study done in 2013 by Dimensional Research found that 90% of consumers admit that their buying decisions are influenced by online reviews.
If you want to win the marketing race in 2015 and beyond, you need to unleash the power of word of mouth and start engaging your customers.
What are you doing to trigger word of mouth?
In the digital era, the ever-expanding social media channels make word of mouth marketing incredibly easy, allowing images, articles, videos, comments and other great pieces of content to fly across the globe every second.
Digital evolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis: where product & service reviews are posted online and opinions disseminated through social networks.
While these changes can make certain marketing tactics easier, it also creates new expectations from consumers. Today potential customers are much more likely to seek out reviews from your past customers prior to purchasing your services.
Precisely why you will need a WOMM strategy such as online reviews, the best endorsement a company can have.
5 Reasons why you need a strong WOMM strategy like Online Reviews
1. They help you build trust and confidence with your customers
You provide an excellent service and most of your reviews are going to show this. This builds confidence and trust in customers who hasn’t used you before and the more three to five star ratings you have, the more likely they are to believe all those people can’t be wrong. The more reviews you have published, the more credible you will be.
2. They help you improve conversion rates
When potential customers read your positive reviews, they become familiar with the quality of your service and are more likely and ready to commit to you.
3. They give you great unique content to share on Social Media
With 92% of people trusting recommendations from people they know, an online review system that lets your customers share their reviews easily on their personal social media platforms will enable your customers to spread the good word among their peers, increasing your potential customer base.
4. The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) benefit
Search engine favour websites with unique content that are updated regularly and customer reviews fall right into this category. They are a great way to attract and ‘renew’ your content.
Reviews are an increasingly important part of the decision making process for customers. This also means that more and more customers will be searching for keywords such as “mover reviews” when they are looking for a moving or relocation service.
5. A perfect place to ‘house’ those negative reviews
Yes, THE perfect place! These days you can’t hide nor run from negative reviews anymore. One negative review on its own can be damaging, however, one negative review amongst many other positive ones won’t have much impact at all. Mixing your few negative reviews together with a majority of positive ones is the best way to neutralize any effects from less than stellar feedback and demonstrate authenticity.
Contrary to popular belief, it is a myth that people are more prone to posting negative reviews. Based on MoveAide.com’s reviews collected over the past year, only 5% of them were negative.
Consumers are buying differently but are you selling to them differently? How do you engage them and put your company right where they’re looking?
Using online reviews as Word of Mouth marketing
So now that you know the importance of online reviews for your business and how you can use them to win more customers, how do you get started with online reviews?
1. You will need to incorporate online reviews in your process flows, embrace the change and learn how to leverage them to increase business. Appoint key team members to kick start this project and ensure that they understand the importance of these online reviews.
2. Review your online platform options; third party versus own website, how convincing will the reviews on your own website be? Can you respond to the reviews published on these independent sites and are they verifiable? Are you in control or can your customers post and publish anything they so desire?
3. Get your online platform up and running really quickly so you can start collecting reviews from your existing customers well ahead of the competition. The more reviews you collect, the more credible your reviews will look, and the more it helps put you on Google search.
4. For starters, it’s great to be able to respond to all your reviews, both good and bad and share, share, share wherever you can.
How do you get started?
Start building up your arsenal of reviews immediately; invite your customers to review your services on MoveAide.com. Designed especially for the moving and relocations industry, MoveAide will help you collect, showcase and manage your customer reviews.
In this online era where word of mouth marketing has evolved quite a bit from one on one conversations, you will need to guide your customers along, making it easy for them to review your services and share their reviews on social media.
With MoveAide.com, you’ll also have full control over the review process. You have the option of responding to every review posted. Upon receipt of a less than stellar review, you will also be alerted immediately so you can jump on the service recovery process and respond to the published comments, engaging your customers and demonstrating that you value their business.
With Search Engine Optimization, MoveAide.com will put you right where your potential customers are looking. When potential customers start searching for keywords like “mover reviews”, your review page on MoveAide.com along with the number of stars you’ve collected will show up at the top of the Google search results once you’ve collected enough reviews.
To get started, all you need is a computer with an Internet connection. MoveAide is cloud based and it’s really easy for your customers to post their reviews on your services. With powerful real time analytics to help you measure service quality, quick snapshots of your team’s performance is now available at your fingertips, 24/7, 365 days a year. It really can’t get any easier than this.
We think it’s time you harness the power of online reviews and let your customers do the talking for you. Do you?
Interested to find out how you can gain a huge competitive edge with Word-of-Mouth marketing? Reach out to us at info@moveaide.com
Rightly said @Wendy! Word of mouth marketing is the best form of doing marketing. And that comes with no advertising cost, your quality of the product or service only speaks. So if someone feels good about your offerings, then they will definitely tell that thing to others whoever come in their contact. And for a moving company, it really matters a lot. As all of the earned prized possessions worth millions are being moved by them, people will not trust any mover so easily unless they heard from other people about your service.