Considering the growth in digital technology, it may come as a surprise that 84% of consumers still trust word of mouth recommendation.
Many Marketeers believed that influencer marketing was the answer to this need and although some tie ups have been successful, others have spectacularly backfired. When you also note that only 3% of consumers (source Collective Bias) are actually influenced by celebrity endorsements, there are certainly better ways to spend your valuable marketing budget.
This is why at Tribal, we are true believers of employee advocacy. There's no end of stats to back up that it works; just one is that brand messages shared by employees reach 561% further than the same message shared on a company’s branded channel (source IBM).
So it's a good time to remember that whilst as marketeers we talk about B2B or B2C all the time, what we really need to focus on is human to human (H2H).
Word of mouth is still the most trusted source of information for consumers who are increasingly suspicious and avoidant of the marketing messages they’re bombarded with day after day. According to Nielsen, 84 percent of consumers reported trusting recommendations from influencers, friends, family members and peer networks above all other kinds of marketing. Tellingly, when it comes to the coveted millennial market, a recent study by the McCarthy Group shows that 84 percent of them don’t like traditional advertising, nor do they trust it.
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