5 Ways To Increase Word Of Mouth Marketing
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” When it comes to running your business, however, one of the only ways to influence what people are saying about you is how you work, show up and deliver a seamless experience for your client or customer. In this article, we’re sharing how you can work to make sure clients or customers (and even fans) share rave reviews that rake in more revenue.
Reviews, recommendations and referrals can be HUGE for growing, building, and maintaining your business. Sometimes one client or customer that loves what you do or how you did it could refer many more your way.
This is called Word Of Mouth Marketing (WOMM). Word of mouth marketing is when a client or consumer shares about their experience with friends, family, their community or even on their social media profiles and blogs.
WOMM works because people tend to trust the others in their group, community, tribe or family. They are more likely to take the word of someone they know rather than searching themselves, seeing an ad, or even being reached out to by the business owner themselves.
Here’s how this works for us: Girlbosses on the internet tell other amazing female entrepreneurs in their industry about their experience with us, and we end up getting a lot of referrals from previous clients.
After working with our clients, we asked them why they ended up deciding to book us for their website design in a survey after the project. In their response, they said: "They came highly recommended by more than a few trusted colleagues and now I know why!"
We truly believe WOMM is not dead. If anything, with social media making it so easy to share your experiences, it’s really growing! Because of that, we wanted to give you 5 tips that can help you increase your WOMM by making sure your business is streamlined, easy to share about, and that you’re serving others with your best work!
5 Ways To Get Your Customers & Clients To Share About Your Business:
1. Simplify Your Products Or Services.
This is one of our biggest tips for business generally! We recommend getting specific with what you offer and who you serve. For your offerings, we’d recommend getting really good at one or two services or offerings, and then only promote those things rather than sharing a whole list of things you do.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll end up being nothing to no one”? Basically, that means that if you’re offering everything under the moon, you run the risk of your messaging, product, service and even customer interactions getting muddled, messy and unclear.
For us, we’ve specialized in website design. You’ll find we don’t promote copywriting, photography, or even other types of design like stationery or business cards. For a photographer, that might be narrowing down to a specific type of photography. Or for a social media manager, that may be getting really good at one platform.
We’d also recommend targeting your products or services to a smaller audience and narrowing your niche. This helps you become the go-to brand in your industry. For us, that’s female entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners. If you need help figuring out how to focus small, check out our workshop called Narrow Your Niche: A Guide For Those Ready To Target Their Tribe.
2. Summarize What You Offer In One Sentence.
It’s way easier for someone to share about your business when it’s easy to say and understand. If what you do or what you offer is muddled, confusing, or involves too many things, people are less likely to share about it.
We recommend doing this by crafting a one-sentence statement that we call a Brand Bio. It’s a concise sentence that explains exactly what you do and what makes you different than your competitors. Then, you use this statement on your website, your social media profiles, at the bottom of your emails, and verbally when people ask, “What do you do?” Having this formulated statement on-hand makes it easy to share!
If you’re having trouble figuring out how to explain what you do, you can get our FREE Brand Bio Formula here!
3. Create An Amazing Customer Experience.
We could fill this point with lots of cliches! Work hard and be nice to people. Underpromise and overdeliver. Be on time. Communicate quickly and clearly. The bottom line is to make sure you are really serving your clients or customers well. You’ll get bonus points if you actually love what you do because it really shows!
PRO TIP: Ask for feedback from your customers or clients to find out ways to improve your products, process, and customer service. Don’t be offended by the feedback, and instead, listen to what their needs and desires are. Then, use that to continue to refine your customer experience until you have it nailed.
4. Add An Element Of Surprise.
Add something to your process, product or customer experience that they might not be expecting. This could be a free gift, an unexpected thank you note, or even just a word of encouragement after you’ve worked with them! Find a way to have a special touchpoint with them that would make you stand out.
5. Stay In Touch.
Stay in touch on social media, email and even in-person and by mail so that you stay top-of-mind for your clients or customers. This way, no matter how much time has passed since they booked you or bought from you, you’re still at the tip of their tongue when someone asks for a recommendation.
You can do this by sending DMs, commenting on their posts, sending Christmas cards, and even by recommending your clients products or services to others so you send some business their way. We even know of a photographer that sends Christmas cookies in early December to her clients because they might know of someone getting engaged over Christmas or New Years, and she wants to be the first name they think of when that newly engaged bride asks around for recommendations! How smart!
The Wrap Up
The main takeaway to get more people to talk about your brand or business is to be more memorable! These 5 tips can get you started to get more WOMM that brings in more revenue for your business. When you’re ready to move onto some other types of marketing, check out our other tips below for your next steps.
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