Digital Marketing Week 5:

Dear readers, this weeks blog is going to focus on the importance of social media when trying to achieve ‘Word of Mouth'(WOM) marketing and which social media platform inspires the most ‘Word of Mouth’.

So firstly lets take a look at the definition of WOM, it means the passing of information from one person to another vocally, however, this has changed overtime becoming more effective via online resources and social apps/medias. With this current trend studies show that people feel that WOM marketing is more effective then traditional marketing, and that the use of social media to interact with consumers and possible future consumers is a very important marketing technique. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/state-womm-word-mouth-trumps-traditional-marketing-slideshare

Word of Mouth has a large effect on business behaviour as seen by the follwing stats: 91% of Business to Business buyers are influenced by word-of-mouth when making their buying decisions. 83% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends about products and services – making these recommendations the highest ranked source for trustworthiness.[Nielsen]With 68% of people trusting online opinions from other consumers, which places online opinions as the third most trusted source of product information. 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts. This shows the immense importance and value of Word of Mouth marketing.

Word of Mouth is more likely to occur when exposure is on a wider scale, the more people who see the product or add, means the better chance someone speaks about it to someone else, thus making WOM marketing effective. With this in mind we take a look at some stats on usage and digital reach that our most common social media platforms have, in order to make a decision on which would be the best platform. https://www.statista.com/statistics/579334/most-popular-us-social-networking-apps-ranked-by-reach/

Now seeing these statistics most people would choose Facebook for its large amount of exposure to possible consumers, however, when selecting a social media its important to look at your target audience, because the users of each social media generally have more specific users. For example Facebook is best known for having a well rounded age group that includes our older generations, however Instagram and Snapchat are much better when targeting a younger age gap of people between the ages 8-40. So lets say your trying to market a new line of video games, your best option would be to market on Instagram or Snapchat as your target market would be the younger generations that play games the most. An example of this would be the fantasy movie Rampage staring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Kong featuring Tom Hiddleston both used Snapchat to marketing their films, by introducing filters with the date of movie release and an interesting theme relating to the movie. This is beneficial cause you are reaching your target market using a platform and method is more likely to create WOM then any typical TV ad. If we were to take an overall choice on what social media platforms general day to day companies should market it on in order to achieve the move WOM, it would have to be a combination of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Overall I would like to know what you readers feel about Word of Mouth marketing and if other peoples opinions influence your purchasing. I would also like to know what social media platforms you think would be most beneficial in WOM marketing. Thank you so much for reading this weeks blog and see you next week <3.

By Anthony Lambrianos – S3668693 – Digital Marketing