Combining fresh technology and a classic marketing strategy, Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing is receiving unprecedented uptake among a wide range of markets. Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing encapsulates a wider audience outside of mainstream social media channels, such as personal blogs and online discussion forums. Our friends at RewardStream help us to better understand Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing and how using referral marketing programs leverages on the effectiveness of this marketing method.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Tried and True
What does a flea market in San Francisco, a souk in Cairo and a bazaar in Mumbai all have in common?—Probably not much in the way of food or wares, and certainly nothing when it comes to common language or currency.
But what these three markets do share is a wondrous display of oral marketing. Vendors create a symphony of sound as they hock their products using an energy and eloquence that would turn most marketers green with envy.
Whether it’s being used for marketing, sales or something else entirely, there’s nothing new about the power of word-of-mouth marketing. For millennia, oral communication has been the primary method of discussing and describing all matters of significance (and insignificance) in communities across the globe.
But while the power of word-of-mouth marketing remains unchanged, the means in which we take advantage of it has. The internet, above all, has radically transformed how we utilize word-of-mouth messaging as a means of marketing. Enter the age of Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing.
Digital Word of Mouth Marketing
The Internet and Everything Else
At the consumer-level, the first place potential buyers – be they individuals or entities – often turn to prior to purchasing any kind of good or service is their immediate community.
Consumers will default to the opinions of their friends, family, colleagues and social peers with far greater frequency than they’ll listen to even the most polished or compelling marketing pitch.
And to be fair, why wouldn’t they?
With the amount of content (digital or otherwise) besieging consumers on a daily basis, how can they be expected to distinguish the good from the bad or the false from the true? It’s no wonder people like to default to word-of-mouth; it jumps out like a light on a moonless night.
However, the evolution of the Internet coupled with the meteoric rise of social media use in the last decade has catapulted traditionally private word-of-mouth exchanges into the public domain.
Now instead of picking up the phone to call a colleague or going to get coffee with a trusted friend, consumers (especially Gen Y) are hitting up blogs, firing out Tweets, creating threads on Reddit or accessing consumer-advocacy websites to get purchase-related questions answered.
Whether the product to be acquired is big ticket or small, consumers are turning to the internet (particularly social networks) as a source for trusted opinions, reviews and advice more frequently than ever before.
Jumping on the Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing Bandwagon
The proliferation of digital discourse is radically changing the way in which agencies and in-house marketing departments do business. For marketers, this is the first time we have been able to readily plug-in to the real, uncultivated, word-of-mouth conversations of the consumer.
Concerns, questions, opinions, likes, dislikes—these have all been pushed into the public space, leaving marketers with a goldmine of information ripe for exploration and – sinister as it may sound – exploitation.
The successful mining of this data is allowing aggressive digital marketers to quickly predict where their target audiences are headed. They can tap into open communities like Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook to see what a wide array of people are talking about, while collecting invaluable facts and figures along the way.
Ten years ago, this kind of consumer information would not only be far more costly and cumbersome to obtain, it would almost assuredly be gathered using tired market research techniques. These techniques – try as they might – don’t offer the same truthful transparency of naturally occurring word-of-mouth.
Today, marketers can obtain real-time insights by using social media to tap the word-of-mouth musings of nearly any demographic they might be trying to reach across the globe.
People Trust People
Big change is coming. The overgrown old-growth of the digital marketing space is slowly burning to the ground, and with its departure new opportunities are springing forth thanks to numerous emerging technologies.
Moving forward, digital word-of-mouth marketing presence will be where the value is in marketing online.
In determining value, digital marketers have always had a somewhat unhealthy obsession with certain statistics when it comes to defining success. And while clicks and impressions are still relevant today, they will become progressively less important in the years ahead when it comes to measuring the health of campaigns.
As the tools and methods for measurement become even more refined, digital marketing strategists (and their clients) will become far more focused on evaluating word-of-mouth presence. Sooner or later, buzz – upvotes, likes, pins, shares, retweets and days trending – will become the focal statistical indication of strategic success.
Acknowledging this impending transition, coupled with a willingness to get ahead of the curve, will come as a major boon to digital marketers with the foresight to see the writing on the wall of the great bazaar that is the Internet. By using a referral marketing program to simply and effectively enter the digital word-of-mouth marketing space, marketers will see a growing trust in their customer base.
Want to learn more about Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing and online Referral Marketing Programs? Get in contact with our friends at RewardStream.
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