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Why Word Of Mouth Marketing Is The Most Important Social Media

Word of Moth Marketing or WOMM for short, is exactly what it sounds like, an oral or written recommendation by a customer to another potential customer.
It is regarded as the most effective form of marketing.
For example, the Nielsen global advertising survey, said that in 2013, 84% of the people participating trust in recommendations they hear from people they know (today the number is closer to 92%).

According to Mark Zuckerberg; People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.


How to get good word of mouth advertising?
Word of mouth marketing is most successful with brands that are working really hard to do right by their customers. This means a great offering partnered with exceptional customer service. The product needs to be strong, but it is just as important that the staff’s interacting with customers and clients is the best it could be.
Another way to create a good word of mouth is to be unique, have a one of a kind product or creative marketing ideas. Such as the Old Spice commercial on YouTube (below).

This commercial has over 52 Million views of YouTube and is so popular because it is funny and weird which people enjoy. This commercial became even more successful thanks to the power of word of mouth. One person saw it somewhere, and started to refer it to a friend or relative, and so on and so forth (Marrs, 2014).

The most time-consuming way to get good exposure of word of mouth is to become a industry thought leader, which means that a person is engaging in dialogue with existing industry leaders and power players while staying up to date on the latest industry news (Whitler, 2014).

One of the most important things to consider when creating good WOMM is to create a good name. Which means that people appreciate a business that is honest and treat their customers right. Using false advertising or trying to trick their customers will experience in bad WOMM and will ultimately lead to a decrease in sales (Bughin, et.al, 2010).

Lastly, a company needs to create an active social community and engage with their customers online.
The most efficient WOMM power brands, convince costumers that by buying their product, they are making a personal statement and joining special ranks.
The most devoted fans may even refer to favorite brands as “family” since certain products or services become part of a customer’s identity (Whitler, 2014).

Negative Aspects of WOMM?
With everything business do on a daily basis handling negative effects that some campaign or product have is probably one of the most common.
The disadvantages need to be taken into consideration before a company decides to rely on WOMM as their primary method of bringing in business.

WOMM can spread slowly, it takes time for employers and employees to spread the word about the product and it can take even longer to reach out to customers who can then keep spreading the word around. To help this a company can post things on their company blogs or social media platforms to reach out faster (Groeger, et.al, 2013).

Tracking issues is another factor that needs to be considered. It is almost impossible to thoroughly track the amount of business generated by WOMM. Asking customers to fill in a survey is one way to find out, but it does not usually cover as many people as needed for the company to make future marketing plans.

The most obvious negative effect of WOMM is negative feedback. If a customer have a bad experience with your business, it is very likely that they will tell other people of the bad experience and they will in turn tell more people and so on and so forth. It is a increasingly bad experience wave that will lead to a lot of potential customers not buying from a business. The only way to deal with this type of issue, is to prevent it before it happens. Every customer needs to be treated equally and never be treated badly by staff or other (Buttle, et.al, 2014).

Conclusion
In conclusion, WOMM is very effective but can be time-consuming, it is always a good marketing tool, even for online based businesses and it can help a business to get a lot of positive feedback and increase sales.
However, it can go the other way and create bad publicity, it is hard to keep track of and it can be a very slow process.
WOMM needs to be taken seriously by any business in today’s society. It either helps increase sales, but it can also rupture a business with one bad experience.

References
How Powerful Is Word-Of-Mouth, Exactly? – The Definitive Guide To Referral Marketing”.ReferralCandy. N.p., 2016. Web. 9 May 2016.

Bughin, J, J Doogan, and O.J Vetvik. “A New Way To Measure Word-Of-Mouth Marketing”. McKinsey & Company. N.p., 2010. Web. 9 May 2016.

Buttle, F and L Groeger. “Word-Of-Mouth Marketing: Towards An Improved Understanding Of Multi-Generational Campaign Reach”. European Journal of Marketing 48.7 (2014): p1186-1208. Print.

Groeger, Lars and Francis Buttle. “Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Influence On Offline And Online Communications: Evidence From Case Study Research”. Journal of Marketing Communications20.1-2 (2013): 21-41. Web.

Marrs, J. “5 Ways To Wield More Word Of Mouth Marketing Power”. Wordstream. N.p., 2014. Web. 8 May 2016.

“The Disadvantages Of Word Of Mouth Advertising”. Smallbusiness.chron.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 10 May 2016.

“What People Watch, Listen To And Buy | Nielsen”. Nielsen.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 9 May 2016.

Whitler, K.A. “Why Word Of Mouth Marketing Is The Most Important Social Media”. Forbes 2014: 1-2. Web. 8 May 2016.

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How to use SEO techniques to Increase Website Visibility

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It starts with optimizing your website with keywords and phrases. You may already have a good idea which words people use to find your business but it’s important to keep an open mind and do your research. The results may surprise you. The Google Keyword tool can help you find the most popular words and phrases.
In short, SEO helps you find what you need on the web (Killoran, 2013).

Using SEO to Increase Visibility?
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SEO is a technical process, and as such, it impacts major technology choices. A CMS for example, can facilitate or, possibly, undermine your SEO strategy. Some platforms do not allow you to have titles and meta descriptions that vary from one web page to the next, create hundreds of pages of duplicate content, or make a 302, temporary, redirect the default redirect.
An important factor to understand is the nature of the market in which you are competing. This tells you how competitive the environment is in general, and augmented with additional research, which you can use to tell how competitive the SEO environment is.
Another method you can use to get a very quick read on competitiveness is using a keyword tool such as the Google Traffic Estimator to see what your cost per click would be.
A key factor is how many clicks from the home page it takes to reach a page. A page that is only one click from the home page is clearly important. A page that is five clicks away is not nearly as influential. In fact, the search engine spider may never even find such a page. In SEO it is important to keep the site architecture as flat as possible, to minimize clicks from the home page to important content. However, too many links on a page are not good for search engines either. The bottom line is that you need to plan out a site structure that is as flat as you can reasonably make it without compromising the user experience.
Establish a strong foundation, and you will help set yourself up for SEO success (Marketing Donut, 2015).
Keyword Research
Every search phrase that’s typed into an engine is recorded in one way or another, and keyword research tools allow you to retrieve this information. However, those tools cannot show you how valuable or important it might be to rank for and receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, you need to research further, make some hypotheses, test, and iterate, the classic web marketing formula.
Popular search terms usually comprise less than 30% of the overall searches performed on the Web. The remaining 70% lie in what’s commonly called the long tail of search (Enge, et.al. 2012).
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It is a good idea to target keywords that indicate imminent action, because searchers are more likely to perform the corresponding action on your site when they search for those terms than they are when they come to your site from different search terms. Your click-through/conversion rates are likely to be higher if you target keywords that indicate the intent behind the search. You can also test this by setting up a PPC campaign and buying clicks on a given keyword and seeing how it converts for you.
Pay attention to your site’s content and compare it to what other sites in the top results are offering. You can also use an analytic program to check which of your pages have the highest abandonment rates. See what you can change on those pages to improve the user experience and increase users’ level of enjoyment when using your site.
Keyword research is a complex and time-consuming task, but the rewards are high. Once you learn where the keyword search volume is, you can begin to think about how that affects the information architecture and the navigation structure of your site (Imperial College London, 2016).
Conclusion
SEO and Keyword Research are vital parts to increase the visibility of your website, they are time consuming but have high rewards for when it is done. It is something that can help any business that need to increase traffic on their sites, from small businesses to large, SEO is very important and should be undertaken by all.
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Sources
Enge, E, Spencer, S, Stricchiola, J and Fishkin, R (2012). The Art of SEO. 2nd ed. United States of America: O´Reilly Media inc. p25-160.
Killoran, J. (2013). How to Use Search Engine Optimization Techniques to Increase Website Visibility. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. 56 (1), p1-4.
Imperial College London. (2016). Increasing the visibility of your website. Available: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/staff/tools-and-reference/web-guide/training-and-events/materials/seo/. Last accessed 29th January 2016.
The Marketing Donut. (2015). Online Marketing. Available: http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/online-marketing/seo. Last accessed 29th January 2016.