The Holy Grail of marketing – How does electronic Word-of-Mouth influence online purchase?

The Holy Grail of marketing, one of the oldest and most well tested promotion and sales techniques, has been word-of-mouth for centuries now. In the age when all information is freely circling the internet and where offline interaction has been reduced to a minimum, whereas online communication is more present than ever, the crucial question is how to get good recommendations online, motivate people to talk about your brand or service and help you increase your sales, visibility or promotion of a new product or service.

How can people be stimulated to talk about you on social networks whenever and however much you need them to?

eWoM to the rescue

World experts say that the answer lies in eWoM (electronic Word-of-Mouth) online and social network marketing. During our interview with the founder of the biggest regional eWoM service, Dragana Djermanovic, we learned that it was not easy to carry out a successful online WoM campaign.

Most marketing experts know that word-of-mouth is the most efficient tool in our line of business. The important questions are where to find perfect representatives of a brand, how to approach them, how to hire them and estimate their results and how much to pay them for their work. These are the challenges that agencies and marketing and PR experts have been facing for years now.

Beer and diapers don't mix

Online marketing experts look for perfect brand ambassadors whose efficiency can be quantified and with whom it is easy to communicate, without excessive emails and misunderstandings. They find it important to be able to accurately define the fee to be paid to a blogger or an influencer promoting the brand, announcing innovations, new campaigns and other activities important for the brand.

We all have around twenty influencers in our contact lists. It's always the same twenty people, who themselves have other colleagues in their contact lists! This leads to the one and the same group of people promoting detergents, beer, diapers, cars, festivals and new banking services! That's not eWoM! It's boring, inauthentic and inefficient!

Having faced this problem, Djermanovic founded BeeShaper, which has become the biggest directory of influencers, micro-influencers and bloggers in the region.

– Trying to solve this problem, we realized that we had a solution for both our colleagues and our biggest clients. They have been winning awards with us for two years already and creating a massive buzz for their brands through BeeShaper. The BeeShaper directory makes thousands of web users ready to promote brands they believe in through their personal accounts in all networks available to everybody. It is now incredibly easy to to hire them, measure their results and pay them for the results they've achieved! Online marketing has finally got a human voice – Djermanovic explains.

Sixfold returns on each dollar invested

All sectors strive to increase efficiency and optimize the processes, and marketing hasn't been immune to this world trend either. Influence marketing platforms improve cooperation between companies and influencers considerably. As many as 70% influencers believe that the best way to establish cooperation with brands is through influence marketing platforms.

The ease of hiring influencers is one of BeeShaper's biggest qualities according to 9 out of 10 brands using the service. Research says that each dollar invested by a brand in influence marketing earns it USD 6.5 on average.

Will this piece of information motivate companies to include this type of promotion in their strategies?