How to Increase Word of Mouth for Your Company
Word of mouth!? In the competitive digital environment, a lot of companies are turning towards all sorts of fancy tech-based methodology in order to try and get a leg-up on the competition. However, one of the most effective tactics is word of mouth business and it is something that a lot of people tend to overlook.
Word of mouth is an extremely powerful tool that accounts for 13 percent of all consumer sales. So if someone can help their business to get good word of mouth going, then they could see significant improvements in their company performance. In order to help achieve better word of mouth, here are a few tips that you should be following.
Put Your Contact Information Somewhere It Can Easily Be Found
Something that is sure to drive away customers is the inability to find contact information for a business. There are a large number of reasons why someone might want to contact a business and if they are difficult to reach, then it is going to have a huge negative impact on a customer’s experience. This will make them far less likely to recommend the business to anyone else, which will severely limit its word of mouth.
One of the best ways to help solve this potential problem is to put the contact information for your business on every single page on your website. Whether in the header, the footer, or a sidebar, it is crucial to make this information very accessible.
If they have to hunt down this information, then they will likely just give up after a few minutes and move on to another business that makes it much easier for customers to reach them. That means the next time that this person’s friends or family ask if they know of a good business that they should use, they will recommend that other business that was easily accessible rather than your company who made finding their contact info feel like trying to solve a Japanese puzzle box.
Post Testimonials on Your Website
Online reviews are an excellent way to help improve your business performance and inevitably lead to better word of mouth as well. This is because 93 percent of consumers base a large portion of their first impressions on previous reviews. Therefore, a lack of testimonials on your website might indicate to someone that your business is slightly inexperienced or a bit of a risk.
When it comes to online testimonials, it is a lot like credit. Having some that are mediocre is better than having none at all. This is because even if there are just a couple of decent reviews, it will at least give prospective customers something to base your company’s performance on. So if there are customers who you know for a fact are happy with the previous work that you did for them, then you should be making sure to ask them to write a short testimonial for your website.
Or you can make this process a lot easier by simply creating a form and publishing it on your website where customers can go to write a review that gets automatically uploaded to a specific testimonials page on your site. This will help to create a constantly growing list of online reviews for people to read and help form a good impression of your company, which they can then share with people they know and then increase your word of mouth.
Be Active on Social Media
One of the best ways to get a good word of mouth is to have a presence where people are most likely to see you. In this digital age, one of the best places for this is social media platforms. This is due to the fact that 72 percent of American adults possess at least one social media profile that they actively use. So if a business can make themselves widely known on social media, then they have a much better chance of getting people to see their content and then share it or talk about it with others.
But this does not mean that you can just purchase some Facebook ads and think that will be enough. While this will certainly get your brand in front of people, it will not necessarily be doing it in a way that gets these customers to want to share it with their online followers.
That is why you need to make sure that you are putting in the time and effort to be able to set up and operate a social media account where you regularly share interesting content that would attract viewers and cause them to engage with it, whether it is in the form of likes, views, or shares.
Provide In-Person or Online Seminars
If your business offers some sort of service as opposed to just selling physical products, then something that could be of value to you is hosting some sort of in-person or online seminars for your current or potential clients. By providing a public service like this, it is a great way to make people aware of your company while also forming a very good impression of your business since you are helping them learn something.
But you need to make sure that you are performing these seminars in the right way or it is not going to have the same effect on your word of mouth. For example, while it might seem like a good idea to charge a fee for these seminars, doing so will severely limit the number of people who sign up for it. Therefore, the influence on your word of mouth will be significantly diminished.
You should also be making sure that these courses are not too long. Nobody wants to have to spend three or four hours of their weekend learning how to do something when they could be relaxing. That’s why you should be picking a topic that you know a lot about and is specific enough to teach in under an hour.
By following these tips, you should see a significant increase in your word of mouth. For other tips on how to improve your business development, contact us today.