5 Tips to Get Positive Word of Mouth for Your Business

Word of mouth is still one of the highest ROI marketing strategies for your business. Since you need customers to be speaking well of your business, it should be a high priority of yours to ensure your business is one worth talking about.

To make this easier, we’ve compiled a list of five different strategies to boost the chatter around your brand:

1. Share what you’re doing in the community.

If your team is out and about in the community doing a service project or volunteering--share it! If you offer volunteer time for your employees as a paid benefit, make sure they snap a picture while they’re out volunteering. This is something worth sharing on social media and shows your investment in your community. Or, if you make a charitable contribution or sponsor a program, make sure you share it with your customer base. You are impacting the community you live in, and others should know that you are committed to giving back.

2. Run a contest on social media.

Give your most supportive customers an incentive to share their experiences working with you. Typically, in the business community, it is known that positive reviews are harder to get, not because they aren’t there, but because when people don’t have anything negative to share--they usually don’t. But you can pull those supportive customers out of the woodwork and get them talking to their friends and family about how great your business is by running a contest. This also allows new prospects to feel invested in your business as well. It doesn’t have to be massive (I’m not asking you to spend $1,000 or anything). Simply offer a gift certificate or product from your business, or and do a drawing among everyone who leaves you a Facebook recommendation or Google review. Not only will this generate shares for the contest post, but you’ll also collect great testimonial comments you can use on your website, on social media, on proposals to future customers, etc.

3. Share positive reviews.

After you’ve run your contest on social media and see all the wonderful things people are saying about you, make those quotes into social media posts and graphics. You don’t need to do anything special -- just share them! You can grab someone's positive review online and put it on your social media page with a picture. Don’t overcomplicate it, just share it! Remember, word of mouth is one of the best ways to gain customers. When Susie sees that her friend Jane raved about your business, she’s going to trust what Jane said. If your friend recommended a restaurant, you would go, right? Right.

4. Send out helpful editorial content to media and industry publications.

Another reason customers will want to talk about you with their friends and family is if they see you as a trusted expert in your industry. So becoming a credible source for informative, helpful content is a great way to build a reputation and garner some free publicity in local and regional media as well as industry-specific publications. For example, if you’re a caterer, you could write a blog post for your website about easy holiday appetizers that go over well at parties. That blog post could then be emailed out to customers you already have, as well as reformatted as an article to distribute to media contacts and industry associations, and Chambers of Commerce. You never know when they’ll have a slow news day, or when they’ll need a go-to catering expert. If they’ve been receiving your editorial content, they’ll come to you first when they need a guest appearance or an expert quote for a new story. One easy way to come up with topics for blog posts and articles is this… If you receive questions about a particular topic over and over again - THAT is what you should write about.

5. Develop a referral program for your customers.

This may take some work upfront, but the payoff will be worth it! Make the referral worth the customer’s time. Again, we’re incentivizing our loyal customers to share with their friends. The referral program is a motivating reminder for your customers to tell others what you offer and why you’re the best choice for them. Once you’ve nailed down the details of your referral bonus, don’t forget to provide information about it on your website, share to social media platforms, and notify your current customers regularly to remind them to use it. This works for both product-based and service-based businesses. You can knock off a percentage of their next purchase or reward them with a gift card, just to name a couple of options. There are even apps that can make tracking the referral program or loyalty program even easier.

Find more helpful marketing ideas like these at www.hireamaven.com, or contact our team if you’re ready to outsource your marketing to a brand management expert.