Getting a customer to recommend your brand online is like gold dust to any marketer- but how can this be achieved? Matthew Robinson, Marketing Communications Manager at Acxiom, looks at the D-WoM strategy (Digital Word of Mouth), exploring what this concept is, why it is so important and also highlight ways that marketers can start implementing it by using big data analytics.
“Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 % of all purchasing decisions”
– McKinsey
What?
Do you have a D-WoM strategy? If not, why not? Digital Word of Mouth (D-WoM) is the acronym marketer’s must know and the strategy they must adopt. Word of mouth is trigged when a customer experiences something beyond what was expected and shares their positives experiences with their peers. It is one of the most influential and powerful forms of advertising. This is because people “who don’t stand to gain personally by promoting something put their reputations on the line every time they make a recommendation”.
There is often confusion between a word of mouth strategy and a viral strategy. Viral marketing is defined as “a strategy by which a marketer creates a campaign focused around the goal of causing viewers of that promotion to spontaneously spread it by sending it to friends”. These are typically campaigns created with the intention of ‘going viral’ whereas the core of a D-WoM strategy is to utilise digital marketing to create brand evangelists who will spread positive reviews and recommendations on an ongoing basis and create an environment to facilitate this at every touchpoint.
Why?
The reason is trust. People trust people. Consumers are far more likely to trust the opinions and reviews of their peers rather than what a company says. Recommendation from a trusted source is an extremely powerful source of marketing. The plethora of online reviews that are available for consumers to post feedback and comments means there’s no hiding place for brands. Brands must equip themselves with the right tools and approach with data insight informing the most beneficial tactics and channels in which to operate.
How?
Three steps to implementing your D-WoM strategy:
1. Smarter targeting
2. Be more personal
3. Be more interesting
Smarter Targeting
An on and offline approach is needed. Can you match the habits of your online customers to your offline data? Connecting the numerous data points emerging from online transactions or social interactions with offline data and linking it back to anonymised user profiles has long been the Holy Grail in the advertising world. Now with the advent of sophisticated tools and techniques to achieve this, the industry is finally able to make inroads into being able to target consumers seamlessly across multiple channels and devices in a highly scalable way.
Many marketers still tend to take the short view, optimising on metrics such as clicks and ignoring more powerful ones such as transactional history and customer lifetime value. Is your database segmented according to their habits? Are you serving specific content to specific targeted customers to enhance their experience and deliver more personalised communications? Is this communication served through their preferred channel at the right time? Have you adopted social media analytics to measure mentions and the online conversation? Do you use this data to feedback, respond in real time and shape your strategy? If these questions bring you more questions, you must scrutinise your data management strategy.
You need to identify those customers that are more likely to become brand advocates. Identify those segments of your customers who are valuable and those who aren’t. Brands should target influencers and loyalists, those with a higher propensity to share and spread your messages and promotions. Your CRM database must be scrutinised, every customer is obviously important as each one can be turned into an advocate, but some of your customers have a higher propensity than others to be valuable to you and they need to be ‘put under the spotlight’.
Don’t forget, your targeting strategy shouldn’t just be focused on your existing customers. What about targeting lookalikes of your existing customers who are with rival companies who may be dissatisfied with their products or services? Again, the right offer, with the right message, at the right time may just cause them to switch brands and become your brand’s evangelists.
Be more personal
A critical target for any D-WoM strategy is creating customer evangelism: but how to achieve this? Consumers become more brand loyal to more personalised communications. So what do they like? What content and messaging helps exceed expectations, delight them and turn them into brand advocates? Brands must intrinsically get to know them and sophisticated data insight is crucial to achieving this understanding. Turn information into insights, and action into advantage. Social interactions and location-based data can significantly enhance the customer experience by offering a service that is not only tailored to the individual, but also contextually relevant. Brands must process this insight in a meaningful, intelligent way to serve up personalised content which will increase the propensity to create brand advocates and thus increase brand amplification through WOM.
Build a two way dialogue. Create conversations with your customers and prospects, don’t just talk at them, talk with them. Social media is a perfect platform to achieve this. Utilise data insight to monitor behaviour and assess what it is they what. Look at what they do rather than what they say they do.
Reward customers who refer friends and recommend products and services. This varies from customer to customer. What do they value most? Financial reward or ‘community status’? The longer the consumer is engaged the deeper the connection between the brand and the consumer. Some consumers value ‘community’ status rather than reward.
Make customers feel special. The challenge facing brands is how to make them feel unique and delight them with more personalised offerings, engaging content and to funnel them into becoming brand advocates. Making personalised connections is the single most important element for reaching customers and enhancing the relationship with them. Your focus needs to be on getting customers to leave more reviews. How best to do this? The timings of the messaging as well as the technology necessary to facilitate sharing at critical touchpoints are essential to achieving this aim.
Be more interesting
Position yourself as a thought leader. To do this would need to answer the critical question. What do my consumers want? What do they find interesting? Once you’ve established this you need to be relevant and engaging. You want consumers to talk about you? You need to seduce them with enough interesting content. Create a point of difference. Stand out from the clutter. How many of us automatically delete an email from a company that’s trying to sell us something? How many of us remember one of, if any, of the adverts we watched last night on the TV? How about recalling an advert in this morning’s newspaper or an outdoor advert on your morning commute? Exactly. Put the customer first and at the heart of your activities.
What is your content marketing strategy? Are you delivering tailored messages to pre-defined segments of your audience? If not, why not? Consumers value opinions expressed directly to them which will all feed into be the end goal of creating brand advocates who will help your D-WoM strategy by sharing this content and engaging with your brand. Are you creating ‘portable concepts’ that are easy to share? There are numerous bodies of evidence to suggest that the use of video and photos will greatly increase your consumer’s propensity to share thus positively contributing to you D-WoM plan.
Summary
Adopting a D-WoM strategy covers many touchpoints but critically, placing the customer at the heart of the strategy whilst concurrently using smarter data analytics is fundamental. Using technology to facilitate sharing, personalising messages to customers and responding in real-time when your brand is mentioned online are all elements which will feed into developing an effective Digital Word of Mouth strategy, of which, the implementation into your business of one is critical. To learn more about some of the technologies that can help you achieve these goals, visit here for further information.
By Matthew J Robinson
Marketing Communications Manager
Acxiom Corporation
http://www.acxiom.co.uk/