“Your current clients are your #1 untapped source of referrals. No other business-development strategy delivers the high double-digit results that referrals provide.” – Mark Hunter

Every day more than 3 billion Facebook interactions and almost 500 million tweets are published. It only makes sense why companies in the last few years have increased their focus on social media marketing as opposed to offline marketing. So, why should you simply sit back and hope conversations will just happen organically about your brand when other companies are already focusing on social word of mouth marketing? If you want to be at the forefront of the marketing strategy in 2017, you need to unleash the power of SMWOM (Social Media Word of Mouth).

Let us first look at data.

  • According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family, while 68% trust online opinions from other consumers and places online opinions as the third most trusted source of product information.
  • On social media, 58% of consumers share their positive experiences with a company and ask family, colleagues, and friends for their opinions about brands, per SDL.
  • Per ‘The Consumer Conversation’ report, 81% of consumer brands say they have a working holistic view of their customers, but most consumers don’t feel understood by brands – only 37% say their favorite retailer understands them.

Creating high-quality customer conversations requires a commitment to tools and skills that encourage natural momentum and trust. In addition to earning a reputation as a well-respected brand image, providing customers a power of speech comes with certain advantages like improved SEO, more referral, and ultimately more content.

In today’s social age, as a company you should consider the 3 ‘E’ strategy to create and channelize customer conversations for a focused word of mouth marketing strategy.

  1. Engagement: Listen to what your customers are saying, engage with them and be a part of this conversation. Make sure you make them feel important; Customer Support at Nike is the perfect example of this strategy. Their twitter account @NikeSupport constantly respond to followers on Twitter to all conversations ranging from apparel to sports to out of topic discussions. They continuously respond to tweets each day. 
  2. Equip: Give your customers a reason to talk about your brand. Referrals are built on trusted relationships. These discussions can be on products, customer service, customer stories, funny facts, events, celebration, promotional campaigns, feedback, etc. Give your customers a way to establish themselves as part of your community via their social media accounts so that they can authentically interact with your community and share-worthy content. As your customers contribute to discussions around your brand, they produce fresh content, which boosts SEO, drives more engagement and generate more referrals.
  3. Empower: Provide your customers, different social media platforms to talk and share about your brand. Help them find ways to share their content with their friends and families through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog sites, etc. For e.g. in mid-2011, Tourism Australia abandoned its usual Facebook strategy and decided to hand the page over to tourists. They invited tourists to click and post photos using the hashtag #seeaustralia. It was such a successful campaign that even after three to four years since its launch, fans are still posting over 1,000 photos every day. Today, Tourism Australia’s Facebook page is the largest travel destination page in the world, with more than 5.5 million tourist/traveler fans.

Bottom line: Give your customers a reason to talk about your brand and keep your social media properties up-to-date. Partner with Digital Presence for a smooth digital-marketing transition and embrace the social world confidently.