There is no other medium which can substitute the relevance of word of mouth. It will always be the first hand tool for a company to attract consumers, more positively. Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, talks more about it by sharing his own personal views with it. Read on..
By- Taru Bhatia
If you go out for a shopping and discover that your favorite brand has put 50% sale on all of its merchandise, wouldn’t you like to share it with all? Of course, you will. Well that’s what we call an easy way to marketing that is known as word-of-mouth. The medium has its own unique significance, the core one is that it’s ‘contagious’. We see many advertisements and been through many events of companies but we tend to hesitate to discuss about it. It is so because we haven’t had the personal experience of the service they are offering. For the reason word-of-mouth is contagious is that people pass on their experiences to others and then it becomes viral around many. This is why the medium has gained admiration among major companies in respective to promote their services, as it is economical and speedy.
Zomato, an online company which offers directory of restaurants across Delhi/ NCR, with that also helps out the customers by publishing the menus of those restaurants, which constantly gets revised. The company is the brainchild of Deepinder Goyal, who talks about the foundation of Zomato, as well as how the company has founded its way in to the medium of word-of-mouth to reach to the masses.
“While we were working at Bain & Company (management consulting), Pankaj and I noticed that a lot of our colleagues would use the stack of menus collected over time in the office cafeteria to order food. This set of menus was neither updated nor exhaustive, so we asked ourselves: “What if these menus were available online?” That was how Zomato (then Foodiebay) was born. We then went on to build this database and soon had gone live with menus for 1,200 restaurants in Delhi NCR (India) in July 2008.”
Word-of-mouth is not recently discovered medium, people has been using this type of approach since long time back. It is only a few years back that social networking sites have become another big thing for convenient accessibility. “We believe word of mouth marketing is one of the most traditional forms of marketing and probably the best form of brand endorsement. It is definitely the most credible form of advertising because people who stand to gain personally by promoting your product or service put their reputations on the line every time they make a recommendation.”
When a small company lays its foundation, promotions and other activities through advertisements usually shake their budgets. So in that way networking through online and endorsing services through people’s own medium makes the reach cheap and effective. “When you’re trying to build awareness about a new brand with very (very!) little money, word-of-mouth and social channels play a big role. We used all the channels we could, right from our friend list on Orkut (yes, we had a Zomato community on Orkut!) to Facebook and then Twitter. The major advantage of this was that the generation adopting our product was very active on social media. Personal endorsements from people to their friends gave us a big boost in the initial days.”
As Deepinder shared his experience further, he stressed that the time in which we are living is online driven and so it is certainly a useful medium to talk to the customers with a personal touch. “While the reach and impact of paid marketing is evident, word-of-mouth plays a massively important role. Especially in an age where the Internet is a powerful tool integral to a company’s marketing efforts. Interaction between a product’s users and consumers amplify the original marketing message. Individuals become your brand evangelists, and in turn, build a larger circle of evangelists every time they are talking about your brand – be it on a social networking platform, or in person. Sharing feedback, news, updates and content becomes that much easier, because a user is more likely to be welcoming of a brand through a known, trusted channel – a friend, for example – than by being bombarded by a brand’s marketing.”
For any company, it important to make their consumers feel like a king, and it possible if the company grant heartily attention on them, “Companies should focus on turning their users into their brand ambassadors, because no amount of paid advertising can replace the faith instilled by genuine feedback of a good user experience.”
Ensure good word-of-mouth promotion for your company
Social media has been the most effective channel for us in terms of user engagement. It serves as our primary medium for interacting with our users, particularly on a one-on-one basis. We consistently try to stick to a few basic principles:
1. Communication is a two-way road: We love speaking to our users, and encourage them to give us feedback (negative or positive), suggest ways to improve our product, ask for recommendations on where to eat, or ask anything about our product. We approach them as we would a friend, and try our best to keep the turnaround time to a minimum. This helps strike a chord with them as a brand that listens, and genuinely cares. To make sure we stay on top of this, we have a dedicated in-house social media team.
2. Content is king: We hate spam as much as anyone else, which is why our posts are planned and timed so as to not clog anyone’s feed. Our in-house social media and graphics teams work together to create the content that goes up on our social media platforms, which keeps it fresh and original. This usually gets people talking and spreading the word.
3. Do what you do best: It’s easy for a brand to stray from its core focus and become disconnected from its users. We stick to our domain (which, in itself, is quite extensive) in that our content is related to food & nightlife, product launches/tweaks, and updates on Zomato. This makes it relevant to our users, immediately helping to build a brand identity.
As a company, we’re lucky to be in an environment that is conducive and receptive to non-traditional forms of marketing. Social and word-of-mouth are important to us because of their efficacy, and most importantly – they help make a powerful association with our customers.