What is Evangelism Marketing | Word of Mouth Marketing

Evangelism marketing is a modern-day form of word-of-mouth marketing in which businesses try to develop customers who strongly believe in a particular product or service by that company, and they freely try to convince other people to buy and use the particular product or service. 

These customers, popularly called as the evangelist of the company become voluntary advocates of the company and actively spread the word on behalf of the company without having any personal motive or desire.

Evangelism Marketing Explained

What can be a better way to market without even spending money? Yes, we are talking about evangelism marketing. It’s a kind of word of mouth marketing. I’ll explain to you further by giving an example. Let’s take companies selling insurance services. By providing our services, we motivated our customers, and we gave them the best services possible in the market. 

Now, after receiving a service from us, the customer is highly satisfied and motivated by our service. Since he liked our service now, he will be telling people he knows about our service or product.

That’s it. By this, our word of mouth marketing is done, and the customer to whom we provided service becomes our evangelist for marketing our service.

This is one way to do evangelism marketing. There are many ways of doing evangelism marketing. A company can make evangelists by giving you free services.

Evangelism by Content

You can also make evangelists by creating genuine and informative content. So, the audience will feel like this company or person is genuine and can be trusted. Later, you can introduce your paid product to your audience. Then you’ll market that too.

If you are selling your paid services to your audience and your services were so good, and your audience likes it, then they will tell other people about it too. And ultimately, your PR will increase more sales. Now here you became my evangelist.

Evangelism by Commission

Another way of doing evangelism marketing can be by giving commission to your customers on every sale they make. You offer the commission for the successful reference they made. Here also your customers become a type of evangelist for you. Your customers are promoting your product, which ultimately increases your sale.

A recent example of a company using Evangelism Marketing is OnePlus. OnePlus targeted all the people in the education field and gave them a proposal that they’ll choose a person from their college/school, who will become their brand representative and that person will get our free phone, and for that, he needs to do branding for OnePlus in that particular school/college. 

Now side by side people in that school/college also gets to know that Oneplus gives a free phone to their brand representative and in future, these people will also try to enroll for the campaign too, and subconsciously, the brand image will also get improved in mind of these people. This will help in the marketing of the company. 

Doing this seems to be easy but is actually not that easy to perform. In order to create evangelists for the word of mouth promotion, your product or services should be really good and must provide some value to the consumer. You must have something in your product that makes you unique and helps you stand out from your competition.

If there is a person who can not inform further, then don’t try to make him your evangelist. If you want to use evangelism marketing, then, first of all, you need to identify the audience that can give you conversion.

Types of Evangelism Marketing

• Evangelism marketing is applicable to almost any kind of product.
• Technology evangelism is the evangelism marketing of any kind of technological product or service.
• Platform evangelism is the marketing of the opportunity to create complementary goods for a multi-sided platform, which also involves non-marketing functions such as regulation of the platform’s commercial ecosystem to maximize network effects.

Benefits of Evangelism Marketing

The main benefit of using an evangelism marketing strategy is that it has a high conversion rate. As a brand, you want to find an evangelist that matches the vision of your brand.

• Ability to Persuade: The major advantage of using evangelist for marketing is their ability to spread word of mouth and reach a large number of people. Using this marketing enables us to connect with people personally and make a more natural and honest recommendation to others. It helps the evangelist persuade people easily.
• Support: Evangelist likes to share a lot of information inside groups, forums, etc. about the product or service, and this helps the company to focus on a lot of other things, and it also reduces the stress on the support department of your company. Common examples of these groups and communities are the MI community and the OnePlus red cable club.
• Data for your product: Providing a lot of data about your product is a great way to grab the attention of your potential customers. My using evangelism in your marketing strategy, your customers, or say evangelists create a lot of data for you in the form of texts, testimonials, etc. It helps to increase your content and reduce your efforts on the same.

Problems in Evangelism Marketing

• Value: Evangelism marketing is highly dependant on the value your product or service provides to the customer. An ordinary product will not motivate people to become your brand evangelist. In order to create an evangelist, you must provide great value to your customer and take care of your brand positioning.
• Satisfaction: Highly satisfied customers are the one who becomes an evangelist for your brand in the future. Your product or service should satisfy your customer more than he expects. This is one major problem in the process of performing evangelism marketing.
• Trust: While advising your product to other people, customers imperil personal reputation. It’s a challenge to create a reputation for your product. It is not a surprise that they will not recommend some unsafe products.

How to develop an Evangelism Marketing strategy?

Become a brand

The first step in doing so is to define the purpose of your company. You also need to clearly define the vision and mission of your business. You can take the help of the SWOT analysis as well. This will help you establish yourself as a brand.

Make employees your first evangelists

Your employees are the first people who believe in your product and your company. They are the ones who directly or indirectly interact with your customers. You need to first make your employees your evangelist, and empowered employees will help you a lot to expand your product naturally and will act as the first evangelist.

Focus on your brand message

Try to build your brand message keeping in mind your vision and mission. You should also concentrate on the feelings that are implied in your ideas for creating your brand message. A highly effective brand message helps your customers to connect with your brand and the feelings which you are trying to portray using your brand. So do focus on your brand message.

Be ethical in your marketing

The main point of evangelism marketing is to satisfy the expectation of your customer and try to provide them more than what they expect. But in the path of satisfying your customer, you must not promise anything which you cannot deliver to your customer. You should be ethical in your marketing and not make any false claims which you cannot fulfill.

Serve your customers well

Excellent service is an important key to make loyal clients who can become your evangelist in the future. Positive and empowered service assistants share their positive emotions with customers and make them feel a strong emotional connection with your brand.

Reach out

The last step in performing your evangelism marketing strategy is to reach out to your customers through various channels. Digital channels, like social media, can prove to be an easy and effective way to reach out to customers and communicate with them.

Conclusion

Evangelism marketing is a great strategy when we look at the conversion rates and cost-effectiveness of this system. The major point to consider while considering this marketing in your brand strategy is your ability to serve the customer either through your product or through the value and amount of satisfaction you can deliver to your customer. The more customers you satisfy, the more number of evangelist you create for your business.

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