What is Word-of-Mouth Marketing? (And How Can It Generate More Business for You?)
No matter the marketing measures you employ or how hard you try, there’s one thing that separates you from earning the ultimate, no-questions-asked, unbiased trust from your customers: you are not the consumer.
This one distinct difference separates you from your audience in a way that is by no means your fault and means everything to potential customers looking for an opinion of your dealership. It’s also what makes word-of-mouth marketing so effective.
The simple fact that you are the seller automatically separates you from your buyers. You stand to benefit, and despite your best brand reputation efforts, consumers are by nature skeptical. They want to know what doing business with you is going to be like, but they don’t want to hear about it solely from you. They want to hear from those who have gone before—those who have met with you, bought from you and have an opinion of what future buying experiences will be like.
Like it or not, this is where shoppers place their confidence. By leveraging word-of-mouth marketing, you can accept this fact of retail life and leverage the opinions of your customers to benefit of your business.
This article will give you an in-depth overview of word-of-mouth marketing and how you can leverage the opinions of your customers to help build your brand and bring more buyers to your business.
- What is Word-of-Mouth Marketing?
- Types of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
- Word-of-Mouth Marketing Best Practices
- Get the Conversation Started
What is Word-of-Mouth Marketing?
Word-of-mouth is the organic sharing of information and opinions about your brand. It happens on the streets, between neighbors and friends and increasingly on social media and online forums. It’s free advertising for your business, but like language itself, the words your customers use can both help and hurt your dealership.
While it’s nice to benefit from the business generated by your customers, the reality is that negative opinions tend to stand out. No dealership is perfect. Some small percentage of customers will inevitably be dissatisfied. And while news travels fast, bad news travels even faster.
If only there was a way for you to push the positive opinions to the forefront and underscore the sympathetic nature and commitment to your customers in spite of negative ones. Enter word-of-mouth marketing.
Word-of-mouth marketing is the intentional use of positive customer reviews and opinions (and your appropriate responses to negative ones) to influence other consumers’ future buying decisions.
It works in connection with your dealership’s other marketing strategies to intentionally generate communication and conversations about your dealership—its products, services, and your customer experience.
This type of marketing can be very cost-effective—it relies on the free opinions of your customers—and has the ability to be one of your most effective marketing strategies.
As much as 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertisements, according to Nielsen. What’s more, according to a separate consumer study by RRD, 55% of people discover products through word-of-mouth marketing and 40% have made a purchase based on a word-of-mouth marketing recommendation.
Types of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
You don’t have to rely on your customers to drum up interest for your dealership. You can be proactive in creating word-of-mouth marketing opportunities that are 100% authentic. While the ways you can start the customer conversation are nearly limitless, consider the following common types of word-of-mouth marketing.
Online Reviews
Generating and sharing online reviews may be the best way to help consumers see your customer’s opinions. Simply asking satisfied customers to leave a review post-purchase can go a long way toward building your brand’s reputation online.
After all, most consumers go online to research major purchases. They want to find all they can about a potential purchase, including the best places to buy. It’s a natural way to meet consumers where they are at a time when your dealership’s reputation can make all the difference in a buying decision.
Online reviews give shoppers a way to gauge their potential buying experience. Through review sites like Google, Yelp and Facebook, and even your dealership’s own website, shoppers can read reviews of recent customer experiences.
For these shoppers, your reputation and your online reviews go hand in hand. They cannot be separated, which is why taking control of your reviews matters.
Blogging
Again, shoppers love to research anything and everything they can find about a potential purchase. This includes watching videos on YouTube, reading professional reviewers’ opinions, and consuming content like blog posts.
When you post helpful, informative and interesting content to your blog and share it online, you establish your business as an authority in the industry and people naturally start talking about your dealership. A well-managed blog can help you drive more shoppers to your site and generate more interest in the products and services you offer.
Many businesses also choose to leverage their website blog as an opportunity to highlight and compile customer reviews and opinions. In this way, they are pushing word-of-mouth marketing out to their site visitors and amplifying the positive voices of their customers.
Some dealers even choose to invite customers to write a quick blurb about their experiences for a blog post. Compiling these posts into one place (your blog) can benefit your SEO, underscore and complement reviews on other sites and bring more shoppers to your website.
Social Media Marketing
Posting on social media is a great way to get people talking about you, even if they’re just echoing the messages that you communicate to them. In many ways, social media is the modern representation of word-of-mouth marketing. Many businesses choose to start conversations on social media simply because of the sheer number of users.
There are 4.8 billion social media users online, representing almost 60% of the global population and a mind-blowing 93% of all internet users. It’s a natural forum for sharing views and opinions and expressing excitement and pleasure with recent purchases and experiences. In other words, it’s a natural place to get conversations started about your dealership.
Just as you can share reviews of your dealership on your website, sharing them on social media can have a ripple effect that reaches an expansive, attentive audience in a short amount of time.
When you share a customer experience or opinion on Facebook, Instagram or X, you not only reach your immediate audience of followers, you have the potential to reach your followers’ followers, their followers and so on.
It’s word-of-mouth marketing on steroids. The right post, at the right time, worded in the right way, shared on the right social media sites has nearly unlimited word-of-mouth marketing potential.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing Best Practices
Just because your customers are talking about your dealership doesn’t mean what they’re saying (or how they’re saying it) is helpful. Consider the following best practices to make word-of-mouth marketing work for you.
Keep Your Website Informative
When consumers hear about your dealership, they’ll naturally want to learn more. Make sure that what they find is consistent with what they’ve heard by keeping your website up-to-date and informative.
By posting informative content and providing customers with detailed product and inventory information, you can become an authority and an industry leader that consumers turn to for ideas, opinions, information, and most importantly, purchases.
Build Your Social Media Presence
If you don’t have a social media marketing strategy, start one now. Build up your following by posting engaging content that users will want to view and share.
This doesn’t necessarily mean oversharing or over posting to the point that your audience wants to unfollow you. Focus on what your customers want to hear. Give them helpful, humorous and creative ways to communicate about their interests and passions.
Encourage your customers to tag and mention your dealership in their posts. Give them information about how they can follow you on social media at the time of purchase. You may even want to incentivize them with a contest or store discounts to post content about their new purchase to their social channels (while tagging you).
This customer-first approach can help you grow your social media following and bring more buyers to your business. While you’re at it, be sure to follow your customers on social and invite them to follow back. Expanding your social audience will be key to circulating your reviews online.
Start the Conversation
You never know what good can come of word-of-mouth marketing until you start the conversation yourself. Start conversations that people can get excited about. Post a photo or video of a customer’s recent purchase. Invite customers to share a video online of their recent adventures or travels. Set up a poll or start a conversation about and/or with your followers using a hashtag that’s tied to your dealership.
When you start the conversations, you have more control over the narratives. And you can introduce your dealership as an authority in your area and one that’s passionate about your products and your customers.
Respond to All Online Reviews
Online reviews are equal parts dealership and customer contribution. Interact with your followers on review sites and respond to both positive and negative reviews online.
Responding to negative reviews shows that you care about your business and your customers. You come across as sympathetic and understanding, always willing to make things right, even when a customer may have had a bad experience. It’s a great way to turn a negative into a net positive for your dealership.
Responding to positive reviews show that you’re engaged with your audience and that you naturally care about their experiences and about them personally. It’s a great chance to reinforce positive perceptions with your existing customers and influence future customers to come to your dealership (and eventually leave their own positive review).
Re-Share Reviews
Get your customers’ permission to share their reviews on your own platforms—your blog, your website, marketing materials and social channels. The most positive reviews—those that capture the essence of doing business with you—can be ultra-effective at persuading others to give your business a chance.
Get the Conversations Started
Even if you’ll never have as much sway as the everyday consumer, you can embrace this imbalance with word-of-mouth marketing to generate, curate and distribute positive conversations about your dealership.
Know the types of word-of-mouth marketing that will be most successful for your dealership, follow a few tried-and-true best practices, and you can leverage your customers’ opinions to more effectively promote your business.
Don’t know where to start, or maybe you’re concerned about the time it might take to manage this kind of undertaking effectively? Consider outsourcing to an agency that specializes in word-of-mouth marketing.
By leveraging the knowledge and resources of marketing professionals, you can start and promote positive conversations about your dealership that maximize your online visibility, streamline your reputation management and attract new shoppers.