14 Terrific Word of Mouth Marketing Ideas

One of the best ways to get organic results for your organization is through good word of mouth marketing. When your customers also double as your ambassadors, you’ll be having plenty of extra leads because people will trust what these ambassadors have to say about you. This happens in both good and bad ways, so how can you make sure that what your customers are saying is good? And can you actively pursue getting compliments for your business?

With a little effort, you can create new ambassadors every day. Here are a few proven ideas to help get you started!

Best Word of Mouth Marketing Strategies

1. Have You Encouraged Someone?
People tend to do what they’re told to do when it comes to spreading word about your business. If you haven’t asked anyone to say something, then they probably won’t say anything at all… unless they’ve had a bad experience.

2. Offer Incentives
Your customers might like you, but they won’t do anything for free unless they REALLY like you. Offer incentives like a discount on a future product, small free products, or other rewards that will encourage them to become an ambassador.

3. Focus on Results
You can’t guarantee positive feedback 100% of the time, but you can just about guarantee negative feedback 100% of the time. Make every experience a customer has be a world class experience and you’ll increase your chances of receiving good word of mouth marketing.

4. Don’t Expand Your Margins
What makes people angry more than anything is the concept that you’ve taken more of their money than you deserve. It might look good to have huge margins or be able to add fees or reduce warranties to increase profitability, but that will also cause a lot of negative feedback to head your way. When goods have a fair, competitive price, that’s when you’ll see good word of mouth marketing in return.

5. You Need Respect
People won’t give you any extra time if they don’t respect you – even if you’ve made them happy with your goods. When someone makes a recommendation and becomes your ambassador, they’re putting their own good name on the line! People must have confidence that you’ll come through 100% of the time and that will translate into respect.

6. Give People Words
Your customers aren’t going to regurgitate all of your professional content, so let them talk about something that sets you apart from your competition. Maybe it’s your return policy. It could be the fact that you actually do what you’ll say you do. Your customers will connect with your value, so give them that and you’ll give them words to say.

7. Be On Topic
You have to keep generating interest in what you do in order for your ambassadors to really enjoy recommending you to people. You’ve also got to stay on topic in order for this to work. If you’re telling people to come to your store for an awesome experience, but then change your business plan so that everyone must shop online, then you’re not fulfilling the value that you’ve promised through your ambassadors.

8. This Works For Businesses Too
Referrals from another business are just as lucrative as referrals from individual customers. Businesses that become your ambassadors will give you different topics and tools to help you expand and grow – and potentially get your name into different markets. The rules are the same: without respect, without being asked, you won’t get any referrals. If you want a business to become your ambassador, then you’ve got to make it easy for them to do.

9. Fix Problems
Fixing problems indicates that you’re willing to work toward repairing a situation so that it won’t happen again. All of your information spreads, but people who have a problem with you that gets fixed because of your proactive efforts will tell more people than any other group. They’ll even tell more people than those who had the best time ever with your business.

10. Participate In Your Program
Join the conversations that you’d like people to have so that those conversations actually happen. Many times this is ignored because of fear that something bad could happen, but the only bad thing that does happen is if a business is stuck on the sidelines.

11. Utilize Social Media
Social media is the electronic version of this marketing form and you won’t maximize your success without it. Even families speak with each other regularly using social media platforms! Without a presence here, you’ll just be conceding this entire section to your competitors who are already active on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even Pinterest.

12. Employees Are Ambassadors Too
The most overlooked place for word of mouth advertising is with the existing employee base. If your people are unhappy or their morale is low, that negativity isn’t just going to spread through the company. It will spread through all of your efforts in this area too! You don’t have to give them all raises or cater to their every need, but your people do need to feel like you care about them. Do that and you’ll take a step toward creating an ambassador.

13. Keep It Simple
Today’s word of mouth marketing is often about the user experience, so keep things as simple and easy for your customers as possible. Offer a variety of different payment methods. Have an ecommerce platform. Utilize digital currency formats.

14. Be the Expert
If you’re not the expert in your industry niche then no one is going to trust you at all. No one is even going to care because people automatically gravitate to those with the most expertise. That’s because expertise is associated with quality! Increasing your customer’s perception of your own expertise can come from a helpful blog, innovative products, or just world class service. As long as you’re the best, you’ll get the good word of mouth marketing that you want.