Marketing - IAA Wedding Association

Social Listening Makes Your Digital Marketing Better *

by International Associations | Sep 29, 2021 | Marketing

Can Social Listening Improve Your Marketing?

It’s not easy to build an effective Digital Marketing Strategy. All the content bombarding your audience every day makes it difficult to garner the attention you need. The question is, what can you do to stand out?

It all begins with your research. To stand out, you have to know your audience, and who they follow. You have to understand what content they like and what they are saying and what is being said about them in online conversations.

Understand Your Audience

That’s what makes social listening so important. Social listening helps you better understand your audience and what your digital marketing needs to do. Social listening also works to improve your social selling, brand reputation monitoring and customer service.

In this post, I’m going to show you how you can use social listening to improve your marketing.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is using both paid and free technology to monitor keywords across the web generally and social media in particular. Depending on the tool you’re using it helps you to gather relevant mentions and conversations from your audience.

This definition doesn’t fully explain the real value of social listening. While social listening is a terrific method for you to catch mentions of your brand so that you can respond accordingly, you can actually use social listening in many other ways.

Social Media Complex Searches

Professional level social media listening tools offer a lot more than a simple keyword search. In fact, you can create very complex searches with multiple keywords and use features like Boolean search to help you gather the relevant social intelligence that you need.

Before you can start leveraging social listening, you need a tool to help. Here is a look at a few great choices. Then, I’ll show you exactly how you can leverage these kinds of tools to help improve your marketing with better information about your audience and your competitors

Social Listening Can Improve Your Marketing

Monitor Your Brand Using Social Listening

One of the first things you need to do with social listening, monitor for any mentions of your brand name. That’s because social media tools usually only notify you about mentions where the user actually tagged you.

However, what happens when someone mentions you without tagging you? How do you find out about it so you can act? Quite simply, you need to set up a search for your brand name.

This will help you with customer service issues, and brand reputation management. It will also help you discover any social selling or engagement opportunities. Once you’ve created a search for your brand name, you can also set up alerts. Doing this every time you get new mentions of your brand, you’ll get alerted so that you can react accordingly.

Create Better Content Using Social Listening

According to a recent study by Ascend2, content marketing is the most effective tactic for 58% of marketing professionals. Brands need to use their generated content on their website/blog, social media, via email, and on all kinds of other channels and platforms.

Social Listening Helps You Compete

It’s a constant battle to get attention for your brand, because you also need to compete with countless other brands, bloggers, YouTubers, and all kinds of content creators for your audience’s attention. Because there is so much competition, you need to be able to create personalized content that is super relevant to your target audience. You also need to learn:

What types of headlines work? What gets clicks? What gets shares on social media?
What types of content formats does your audience prefer? For example, do they prefer short/long blog posts, how-to guides, listicles or videos?
What topics interest your audience?
What topics does your audience talk about the most? What are the most common keywords they use?

Social listening is the perfect tool for identifying these kinds of trends and information about your audience. By using social listening and experimenting with different topics, headlines, and content formats, you can ensure that you’re creating content specifically for your target audience. Set up searches for relevant industry topics and track the most shared content to uncover trends and patterns.

Use Social Listening for Social Selling.

Another way to use social listening to your advantage is to discover social selling opportunities, including

People searching for products/services like yours or recommendations
People talking about your competitors, such as disgruntled customers, people searching for alternatives, or those inquiring about features
People who have an issue that your product or service can solve.

Some tools can do this for you automatically – like Awario Leads, but with most you need to search for them yourself.

Look up relevant keywords from your niche. What keywords would people use to search for products or services like yours? Use a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest or Moz Keyword Explorer to see what keywords/phrases they’re most likely to use.

Monitor Your Competitor’s

Monitor your competitors’ brand names. Monitoring your competitors not only helps you understand what works and doesn’t work for them but allows you to discover opportunities for lead generation. Such as people discussing your competitors’ products/services and asking about their pros and cons. Or others looking for similar product recommendations, complaining about the competitors’ products, etc.

Monitor your brand name. I’ve discussed the importance of monitoring your brand name online. However, another advantage is that you might connect with some potential customers. Possibly people who are looking at your products or services as an alternative and talking about it online. Jump into these conversations to help convert these users into customers.

Be Proactive About Lead Generation

If you want to be more proactive about your lead generation, make sure to set up social listening searches. Set relevant alerts so you can jump in and engage at the right moment, and generate more leads.

Learn From Your Competitors

By monitoring your competitors’ online activity, you can learn a lot about their marketing strategy. Where exactly are they active? What platforms do they use? And most of all, where are they most successful.

What is their content strategy like? What types of content do they create and how frequently? What are their most popular pieces of content? What is their audience engagement like? Does their audience engage with them?

What campaigns did they run? Which ones were most successful/least successful and why? What can you learn from their wins/losses? What are people saying about your competitors? What are your competitors’ weaknesses?

This information can help you improve your own marketing strategies, as you learn more about your own industry and target audience.

Identify Brand Ambassadors and Social Influencers

Who truly influences your audience? Who in your industry gets the most shares and the most engagement overall? By definition, social listening helps you uncover trends, so it makes perfect sense that it would also help you discover the top influencers that your audience follows.

Most social listening tools have built-in influencer marketing tools and tell you exactly who the top sharers are for the keywords you’re monitoring. For example, Brandwatch lets you search for relevant users and gives them an influencer score.

In addition, Awario lists all the top influencers for your topic/campaign. In other words, these tools usually do the work for you once you’ve set up your search.

Learn About Your Audience Using Social Listening

If you want successful marketing campaigns, you need to know who you’re targeting. Without that knowledge, how will you know where to reach them? Or the type of content they would be interested in? Social listening can help you learn a lot about your audience.

Where do they spend their time online and which platforms do they use? In order to reach more people and deliver a better user experience, you need to have a presence wherever your audience is active.

What do they talk about online? Which topics interest them? What are they reading and sharing? Follow their conversations to learn more about their interests and needs.

How do they feel about certain topics? Social listening tools tell you what their overall sentiment is.

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Social Listening Can Teach You a Lot

Social listening can teach us a lot, and that knowledge, when applied to your marketing strategies will improve them. Learn more about your audience to know who you’re targeting.

Monitor your competitors to understand their strategy. Monitor your brand nameto ensure you never miss online mentions.

Discover Hidden Opportunities

Use social listening to discover hidden opportunities and improve your lead generation. Learn what content works so you can improve your own content marketing strategy.

Discover the top social influencers your audience follows and engages with. Learn from these interactions and apply what you’ve learned. Can you think of other ways for you for you to leverage social listening?

Email Makes Your Content the Digital Marketing King! *

by International Associations | Aug 4, 2021 | Marketing

Email Helps Make Your Content King!

Email Energizes Your Content Marketing Strategy

A dedicated digital marketer will send out an email marketing campaign or work on a content piece for future Email Marketing while they wait for their coffee to brew in the morning.

When you combine email and content marketing strategies, it guarantees having a productive morning because it’s the perfect combination. Content marketing and email are like chips and salsa. You can’t just have one without the other. Why do you think that’s true?

Your Email Driven Content Marketing

It sounds like a huge challenge, let’s look at what research shows us that other Digital Marketers rely on to succeed. An Ascend2 research study examines how combining email and content marketing is the bedrock to build your Digital Marketing Strategy on.

The survey was done to determine what an effective email-driven content marketing strategy looks like. The survey was fielded the week of August 27, 2018, and a total of 224 marketing professionals participated.

Email Leads Your Digital Effectiveness

Email is clearly considered an effective channel for marketing content to prospective customers by 82% of marketing professionals. The next most effective channels are social media and a company’s website or blog for 54% and 51% of marketing professionals, respectively.

Email’s importance is consistent in various research studies on content, email, data, and technology.

Establish Your Content Priorities

Define Your Content and Email Priorities

Improving the quality of leads is a top email-driven content marketing strategy priority for a 54% majority of marketing professionals. Increasing conversion rates and the number of leads or subscribers generated are also top priorities for 49%.

When considering your content & email priorities, you should examine your content.

To improve the quality of your leads and increase conversions, you need high-quality content.
Content needs to be laser-focused on your audience. Determine who you want to reach. Just like you segment your email list, segment and personalize your content.
What content types should you create? Here is what the research study revealed that works best for marketing professionals.

What is Your Most Effective Digital Content for Email

Videos or motion graphics are considered the most effective types of digital content used for marketing purposes by 44% of marketing professionals.

Almost as effective are webinars or events, and research or eBooks for 43% and 41% of marketing professionals respectively.

Optimize Your Digital Content for Email

High-quality content creation is difficult, so when you create awesome content, be sure to optimize your results by generating a variety of content types. For example, a research study could produce the following content types:

Report: Create a report that is easy to scan and answers the readers important questions.
Video: Many people would rather watch a video than read a report. So give them what they want with a video format of your research.
Webinar: Your research is ideal to set the stage for the topic of your webinar. Your research helps to identify a problem or opportunity and your speakers can provide expert advice on that topic.
Blog posts: A quick review of a research chart will inspire a blog post. If you have eight research charts, that is eight blog posts.
Infographic: A picture is worth a thousand words. Use your research to tell a story visually.

You do the math:

1 research study = 1 report + 1 video + 1 webinar + 8 blog posts + 1 infographic

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Emails and Content Marketing Achieve Priorities

More than half (54%) of marketing professionals consider an email-driven content marketing strategy to be successful at achieving priorities.

Email and Content Marketing Are a Winning Combination

So keep combining email and content marketing, it is a great combination!

5 Easy Steps to Building Better Content Experiences *

by International Associations | Apr 1, 2021 | Marketing

Content Drives Your Marketing

Content is the driving force behind all of your most effective marketing strategies. Content drives your lead generation, inbound marketing, and sales enablement. As marketers personalize how their prospects and target accounts experience their content, creating these content experiences become your next big hurdle.

It doesn’t have to be a burden. By planning and up front preparation you will make the creation and scalability of personalized experiences for your marketing strategies and campaigns painless. You might even have fun doing it.

What is a Content Experience?

A content experience is the environment in which your content lives, how it’s structured, and how it compels your prospects and customers to engage with your company.

The Content Experience Framework developed by Uberflip provides a measurable approach to creating personalized content for any stage of the buyer journey. The framework outlines five easy steps to help build your content.

Uberflip Content Experience Framework Screen Shot

The Framework helps you focus, align your team, and deliver meaningful experiences so you can rock your inbound, ABM, demand generation, and sales enablement programs!

Whether you have a content experience platform to help you do it, or you manage it with separate tools, spreadsheets, and serious hacking skills, the concepts remain the same.

Centralize Your Content

Before you can build out content experiences, you need to take stock of all the content you have. There’s a scary statistic floating around the internet that says between 60 and 70 percent of content in B2B companies sits unused. Why?

The truth is that marketers simply can’t keep track of it all. They have content all over the web; on their blog, their social channels, hosted on other platforms, but also on zip drives, in folders, and saved locally.

Centralizing your content allows you to bring all of your content into one central location and deliver it across multiple channels. It also helps you establish version control and ensure everyone is using only marketing-approved content.

Organize and Audit Your Content

Once you have all of your content in one place, the next step is to organize it. What are your topics? Who are your personas? Will you organize content by stage of the funnel? And what kind of content do you have.

Auditing your content is a must-do at this stage. You have to find out what you have, and then tag or label your content by topic, persona, account, or funnel stage so you can easily find it, decide how you will use it, and how it will be shared in a personalized manner. Auditing your content will also show you any gaps you need to fill.

Once labeled, your content can be categorized for easy discoverability on the front-end using the top navigation and on the back-end through either a spreadsheet or using technology. This will allow you to quickly and easily build personalized experiences at any time.

Finally, before you move to step three, be sure to define what content should be recommended. This can be done using the categories and tags you just created.

A content experience platform can help you do this, or you can simply add another column in your audit spreadsheet. For the more advanced, decision trees, and artificial intelligence can be leveraged to determine what to recommend to whom and when.

Personalize Your Experiences

Now, most people would jump right into distributing their content. However, personalizing your experiences is an important next step. Creating a personalized content experience will impact how your customers move through the buyer journey. More importantly, it will define how they view your brand.

You laid the groundwork for this in the first two steps. Now the real fun begins! You can create collections of content and design your experiences around them. That way your target audience can engage with content in different formats in one purposed experience.

Some examples include a destination for your email engagement campaigns, or a knowledge base for your customers.

To make it truly personalized, you’ll need to include tailored messaging, custom images and branding, and contextual Call To Actions. These all work together to make your experience richer and more engaging for your prospects, customers, and target accounts.

Distribute Your Content

Now that you’ve created your content experiences, it’s time to put them into action. You probably will be marketing them across your different distribution channels. How do you do this?

The experience you created will have a unique URL and your distribution tactics such as email, organic, social, paid advertising, direct mail, etc. will lead them back to that experience.

Your experiences should be mapped to cover each stage of the buyer journey and distributed across the channels that best complement them.

If the buyer is at the awareness stage and you’re taking an account-based marketing approach you might try a mix of paid ads and direct mail. Or if inbound marketing is your focus then organic marketing and social media might be your best way in.

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Generate Results

Well, it’s time for the grand finale. Step five is where we harvest what we’ve put into building our experiences. Because after all, this isn’t just about having a great brand, it’s about driving business results.

Putting the right finishing touches on your personalized experiences will allow you to generate the results you want. Things like:

By leveraging marketing analytics and , you can capture leads, score your leads based on engagement, and get actionable insights. You’ll also find you have the ability to maximize the results you see because engagement is contained within this one experience.

As you begin to focus on your content’s environment, structure, and how your audience engages with it. You’ll see your content reach its full potential and perform the way it was intended. Then it will prove the ROI of your content marketing. That’s the power of focusing on the content experience.

Now that you know the best way to build personalized content experiences, find out what kind of results you can expect. How have your content marketing experiences helped you?

How Your Digital Marketing Strategy Build’s Your Brand *

by International Associations | Mar 25, 2021 | Marketing

Use Landing Pages to Manage Your Reputation

Building your reputation, which is synonymous with your brand is how successful businesses establish themselves. It’s how you build the brand that your customers trust and engage with. You need to monitor your social media for mentions, checking reviews, and cultivating shares. They’re the real gold of social media marketing.

Landing Pages Are Inexpensive and Effective

Landing pages are an inexpensive and effective way to manage your Reputation and build your Brand. Landing pages allow you to control how your business is seen by the public.

You may feel that you have done your best to build your Reputation and your Brand. Have you been happy with your results? Have you considered building landing pages to expand on what you have accomplished?

Landing Pages = Reputation Management

Landing pages promote reputation management because Google will rank each of them for your brand name and keywords. Landing Pages also work to increase your traffic and lead generation. If used correctly, landing pages effectively help visitors connect to your brand. Landing Pages are also a great way to build your all important Email list.

Can anything else be as effective in connecting you to more customers? Can Social Media pages? Blog comments? Video Responses? Landing pages present the image and information you want customers to see and they quickly and inexpensively connect you to the customers you desire. Connecting to qualified customers is what your business needs to succeed.

Use Landing Pages to Engage Visitors

Holding customer engagement campaigns is just one of the many ways that you can use to build your brand. Others include using influencer marketing and using paid review posts on popular blogs.

You expend these efforts to develop the company brand and through that the company reputation.

Your Reputation Management Landing Page

Reputation Management is the key to your landing pages serving a dual purpose. You want your landing pages ranking high in Google for your brand keywords and phrases. Secondly your landing pages guide customers to your most important content and selling point.

Google Ranking is Your #1 Priority

How you rank on Google is your #1 priority. Having your landing pages ranking in the top 10 for your targeted search queries is your goal. Multiple landing pages provide more opportunities to focus your keywords on brand specific search queries.

It’s all about focusing on the search queries that help your new customers discover your business. Content rich landing pages allow you to engage and educate visitorsand turn them into customers.

Build Your Brand With Landing Pages

Following are five examples of the types of landing pages you need to create. These landing pages focus on your brand’s keywords, helping to build your email list, sales leads, credibility and reputation. Landing Pages provide more keyword focused opportunities for your customers to connect with your business.

Your Start Here Landing Page

Your Start Here landing page is an introduction and doesn’t have to be long, although some long landing pages have been found to be more effective in converting visits into clicks.

Your Start Here landing page tells customers what you do, what your mission is, and what your business offers to your customers.

Don’t assume that your visitor knows what you do.

Your Start Here landing page allows you to control the narrative and your brand image. Your Start Here landing page gives your brand a face and establishes the tone you carry through your promotional materials and content.

Your Start Here Landing Page can also be your “About” page, however I prefer to have both. One page is directly attached to the website while the other is a “hello” introduction that is less about informing and more about engaging and informing.

Your Coming Soon Landing Page

Several years ago SEO Smarty was launching a new content marketing service. Their original plan was to use the website to generate leads via email subscriptions. They quickly discovered that engaging visitors using content might not be effective for direct B2C engagement. Their User Experience fell short, making it impossible to get the desired results using old methods.

Three months before site launch, SEO Smarty created a landing page using Launchrock, that created the desired engagement from visitors. After the landing page was created, promoted, optimized, discussed in guest posts, and linked to on social media, the results improved the ranking for the page in particular, instead of the website.

Their landing page had a video introducing the coming service. The landing page also displayed the launch date, and an email subscription form with an invitation to the initial opening. It generated so many leads that it made SEO Smarty a big believer in using landing pages for lead generation.

Templates and Tools are Available

Many cool templates and ideas for your own coming soon landing page are available. You can even find some cool Coming Soon templates here, giving you the opportunity to test several till you find the perfect template for you.

The Seasonal Landing Page

HubSpot created a Seasonal Landing Page for the holidays called HolidayHub. They paired it with a hashtag campaign of the same name and promoted it widely. Their Seasonal landing page was the same as their regular website but in a smaller form, with limited features and a holiday theme. Their mini-site for the holidays was a landing page, with a bit more.

Seasonal Landing Pages Engage Visitors

Their Seasonal Landing Page engages visitors with it’s holiday theme. The top of the Seasonal landing page has a countdown to the next holiday or special event. The middle of the page includes guides and tools to help and inform those visiting. The bottom of the page has a sign-up form for a free assessment through their service.

Effective and Popular

Their Seasonal landing page was not only effective, it also popularized minisite landing pages. Mini site pages are the most suggested landing page styles by experts, because they provide the flavor of the website without overwhelming.

Better Message Control

Seasonal landing pages allow better control of what visitors see and should be theme based to engage and inform visitors through the season. A new domain for your Seasonal landing page is inexpensive, and a dedicated domain helps the landing page rank for your brand name or other terms.

A great Seasonal landing page used by CouponSherpa.com is Free Shipping Day, operated as a separate website which ranks for a variety of free shipping related queries.

When the season for that theme passes? Simply make another one!

Your Social Digest Landing Page

Social media draws attention, however it is disconnected from landing pages and content marketing strategies. It acts like a secondary platform, combining Social Media and your business website can be hit or miss.

Connect Your Business and Social Media

That is why it’s a great idea of using a Social Digest landing page to display all of your Social Media. The Social Digest landing page is my new favorite method of connecting your business and your Social Media.

A great resource, Miappi takes all of your social media and curates the best content that is gaining the most attention from your followers. Miappi brings it all together on your landing page in a digest format that visitors can check out and get updated with regularly.

One Page for all Your Social Media

What I love about this, it allows your followers to go one Social Digest Landing Page to view your posts from all of your Social Media platforms. I don’t post the same thing to all my accounts since that is an ineffective strategy. I’ve created a strategy using each platform for its own unique engagement.

A Social Digest Landing Page takes advantage of that, allowing visitors to access and view all of your Social Media posts at one source.

Your Offer Ended Landing Page

Special offers expire, and products become outdated. However expired offers continue to haunt long after they have expired. Expired offers still have a strong association with your brand that the Offer Ended landing page takes advantage of.

Customers will ask about your expired offers long after the offer has expired. Don’t delete those expired offer landing pages, those pages still can rank for your brand name! Instead, remake them into something that will help to attract visitors and turn them into customers.

Re-purpose With New Offers

The Offer Ended landing page will direct people to posts, pages, products, updates, or anything else relevant at that time. Imagine that you have a new promotion that gives 20 percent off a year’s subscription to your service.

You can place a banner up on the landing page that announces and links to your cart with a promo code auto-filled. Another option is a new end of year guide with all of the tips you provided over the past twelve months, placed prominently front and center.

Offer Ended Landing Pages Engage Visitors

An Offer Ended landing page helps your visitors find what they didn’t even know they needed.

Many great examples of “expired offer” pages can be found with conference landing pages. If you don’t have the next event ready yet re-direct your traffic, utilize old landing pages to develop interest, as well as build your mailing list.

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Landing Pages Engage Your Visitors

There are many types of Landing Pages and they can all be designed to reach out and engage the specific visitors that you want. They provide a unique and inexpensive way to spread your message.

Your Blog Posts Can Emulate Landing Pages

If it seems overwhelming to use landing pages, take a serious look at blogging to get your message out. You can emulate what you would do with landing pages by tailoring your blog posts to different audiences. Give it a try, you might be surprised by the results.

6 New Rules to Ensure Your Landing Page Success *

by International Associations | Mar 9, 2021 | Marketing

Limited Budgets Hamper Small Businesses

It’s just a given that small businesses have limited resources for their marketing budgets. Because of this their limited funds as well as their time and other resources, must be used judiciously.

Two of the most common marketing used by small business are email marketing campaigns and paid ads. These methods are used since they tend to yield the best returns.

But if you’ve invested in these approaches and haven’t seen the response you hoped for, you might be missing something important. Engaging and effective landing pages.

Continue reading to learn how one company increased their campaign conversion rates once they restyled their landing pages, and how you can use their tactics to do the same for your business.

Is a Bad Landing Page Better Than No Landing Page?

Few companies are as strapped for time as small businesses, there is so much to do that seemingly minor moving parts can slip through the cracks. This question begs to be asked. Is having no landing page for your marketing campaign better than having a poorly constructed one? Or is it best to still use a landing page, even if you don’t have a lot of time to devote to building it?

Landing pages are crucial to your marketing campaigns success, so it’s obviously better to have one. Thankfully there are new methods for creating high-quality landing pages that won’t take a lot of your time while still allowing you to treat them as a high priority.

Embracing a New Landing Page Approach

Master Oil Painting needed a better way to capture more leads and increase conversions. They had tried landing pages in the past, but their average conversion rate was stuck at 4.4 percent. Setting up landing pages was a tedious process for MOP, with limited ROI for the effort expended.

The Master Oil Painting people knew oil painting, but needed a solution that could help them create more professional-looking landing pages in minutes. They wanted features that would enhance their customer experience and provide better results.

Master Oil Painting searched for a different way to gather more leads, better capture their leads data, and provide higher conversion rates. They understood that their approach to landing pages just wasn’t working for them.

Improved Numbers Provided Proof

Master Oil Painting decided to adopt Infusionsoft’s new Landing Pages feature. The company quickly and effectively learned the important components of a landing page.

They implemented what they had learned within the seamless system and saw their conversion rates jump from 4.4 to 11.5 percent.

On top of that, their email click rates nearly doubled with a corresponding increase in their monthly sales figures.

Master Oil Painting discovered what works within landing pages, and what fails.

The Basics Needed for Your Landing Page Success

No matter what system you use to create your landing pages, there are six key aspects to keep in mind to get the most conversions.

Ease and Time

You can’t spend large amounts of time agonizing over the details in your landing pages. Find templates that include placeholders for the information your customers expect to find. You should also be able to move things using drag-and-drop. This will save you time, and give your pages the polished and professional appearance you want.

Aesthetics and Experience

Your landing pages need to be eye-catching. Ensure that your landing pages are responsive and give a smooth experience on a wide variety of devices. Use royalty free images and test your landing pages to be sure they load quickly. Your prospects will give you 2 -3 seconds for a page to load before clicking away.

Compelling Call-to-Action

Your landing page needs to have a call-to-action button that draws your visitor in. For example, invite your visitor to request a free consultation or download a useful ebook. They’ll need to receive something valuable in exchange for handing over their information, so you want to make this part of the deal as enticing as possible.

Form Fields and Data Collection

Landing pages sole purpose is capturing customer data and providing a follow up method. Any web forms need to be brief and gather the minimum information as quickly and easily as possible. l addresses, phone numbers, or other information that you want to use. Relationship building can come later.

Integration and Support

Your landing page builder needs to synchronize with your CRM or marketing software. This makes follow-up and data consolidation a whole lot easier.

Customization

Finally, consider how custom domains and messaging can help increase your respnse rate. The right domains can help boost your SEO rankings. Personalized messaging can be the difference between converting prospects or not. Your landing page needs both.

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Design Effective Landing Pages That Convert

If you’re already spending your limited time and money on email marketing campaigns or paid media, you need to make sure you’re spending equal attention on designing an effective landing pages. You can get a boost in conversions by focusing on the points above. Here’s to creating engaging landing pages and excited prospects who convert into customers.

Your Marketing has to be Memorable Remarkable and Relatable *

by International Associations | Jan 13, 2021 | Marketing

Word of Mouth Marketing Defined

According to the Business Dictionary, Word of Mouth Marketing is:

“An oral or written recommendation made by a satisfied customer to the prospective customers of a good or service. Considered to be the most effective form of promotion, it is also called word of mouth advertising which is incorrect because, by definition, advertising is a paid and non-personal communication. “

The Better Business Alliance Defines Word of Mouth

Here at the Better Business Alliance, we define Word of Mouth Marketing a little differently:

“Turning your customers into your most effective sales and marketing asset by doing something they don’t expect, thus giving them a story to tell.”

As a practical matter, that’s not quite nuanced enough either. Because even when you succeed in getting your customers to talk about your business, there are still two different types of word of mouth. They are reactive word of mouth, and proactive word of mouth.

Word of Mouth Creates a Conversation

To achieve either type of Word of Mouth, you need to first understand that competency doesn’t create conversation. When you do exactly what your customers expect and anticipate you will do, they do not mention that to anyone because there is no STORY there.

You need to do something remarkable, unexpected, and memorable to kick off the Word of Mouth conversation that you are hoping to create.

Word of Mouth is About the Extraordinary

I have never said to anyone, “Hey, let me tell you about this perfectly adequate experience I had recently.” That would be a terrible story. Not interesting to tell, and not interesting to hear. Word of mouth requires story crafting.

Word of Mouth is not something that can be brainstormed in a meeting. WOM will rise out of the customer experience which you create in your business. Word of Mouth is part of your customer experience, it’s something your business does which will make your customers excited and they will tell their friends about it.

What’s Your Story Catalyst?

Once you have a story catalyst, we call them Speech Triggers, you will prompt one or both of the two types of word of mouth.

To demonstrate the difference between reactive word of mouth and proactive word of mouth, let’s use one of our favorite examples, the chocolate chip cookie at DoubleTree Hotels. Every day, for nearly 30 years, DoubleTree has given each guest a warm, chocolate chip cookie at check-in.

Those cookies are GREAT. And people tell stories about those cookies constantly. Research found that 34% of DoubleTree’s guest have told a story about the cookie. That means that given that they give out 75,000 cookies each day, the story is told approximately 22,500 times every 24 hours. That’s a LOT of word of mouth.

And that’s why you don’t see much advertising from DoubleTree. The cookie is the ad, and the guests are the media.

Reactive Word of Mouth Definition

Reactive Word of Mouth is when your customer mentions your product or service when prompted, in the midst of an offline conversation, an online exchange, or similar situation.

For example, if I was with some friends at dinner and someone asked, “We’re going on a trip to Houston, any idea where we should stay?” I might chime in with “Yes! The DoubleTree at the Galleria is terrific, and the chocolate chip cookies at the front desk are the best.”

I am reacting to the situation and am making a recommendation in that context. “Referrals” is what reactive word of mouth is called in some instances.

Proactive Word of Mouth Definition

Proactive Word of Mouth is when your customer introduces or inserts your product or service into a topically unrelated offline conversation, online exchange, or similar situation.

For example, if I was at the same dinner, with the same people and someone asked, “Anyone do anything interesting lately?” I might answer “Yes! I was in Houston last week. I stayed at the DoubleTree, and you would not believe the amazing chocolate chip cookies they hand out at the front desk.”

In this scenario, I am not waiting for the topic to come around to hotels before mentioning DoubleTree and their famous cookies. Instead, I am inserting the cookies into a broader conversation and turning the topic toward DoubleTree.

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Which Word of Mouth is Best?

Both types of word of mouth are important. Because, word of mouth is the most persuasive and most common way that people are influenced to make buying decisions.

However, proactive word of mouth is the more desirable type because it requires your customer to be enthralled with your product or service. They feel compelled to find a way to bring it up in conversation, even if it’s not on topic.

Word of Mouth is all About Telling a Story

Telling a story when asked is one thing. Telling a story without being asked is something else entirely. It requires more conviction and more passion.

To make sure the word of mouth about you is proactive as much as possible, you need to make certain that your Speech Trigger is truly unique, remarkable, and memorable. You have to do something different, that your customers do not expect, and then find irresistible.

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