Creating eWOM Through Scaled Social Advertising

Collaborative advertising™ presents a unique opportunity for marketers to generate exponential eWOM (electronic word of mouth) through indirect advertising. Unlike traditional marketing, which can be hard to measure, collaborative social advertising allows for end-to-end control and visibility into downstream conversations. However, social as a communicative platform does present challenges and risks to brands looking to expose themselves further, all of which can be accounted for with the right tools.

There’s a wrong way to create electric word of mouth through scaled messaging on social media and there’s the right way. The former entails shot-gunning non-local display advertisements, whereas the right way concerns deploying hyper-targeted, consumer-centric social campaigns with differentiated messaging, ensuring campaigns complement national branding efforts while generating reach with local consumers.

Driving Factors of eWOM Engagement 

A recent empirical analysis (2020) found altruism, attitudes towards eWOM, information credibility, information quality, innovativeness, sense of belonging, self-enhancement, and social support to be significant determinants of eWOM engagement (Ali et al., 2020). When consumers perceive any message to be credible, they are more willing to take part in such communication, yet consumers tend to be increasingly less responsive to passive forms of messaging. The scholars argue that the higher the perceived quality of information will increase consumers’ likelihood to engage. Collaborative advertising blends brand credibility with the consumer trust of local establishments/retailers. According to the results of the report, consumers are already active in eWOM, either through a strong sense of belonging to a specific community/brand or an open mind to innovation, further validating an indirect approach to social advertising where channel partners are activated as brand champions. 

Real World Examples

Real Estate

When a real estate franchise company ran television advertisements, they could see Nielsen Ratings and social mentions; however, these television advertisements do not offer enough insights to analyze. The company knew it could deliver more. By partnering with their local agents, the company opened the door to understanding how consumers respond to their actual inventory. Through a collaborative advertising program, company brokerages can track local agent activity to learn more actionable insights about their social program in aggregate — all while executing better performing, highly-personalized campaigns at scale. This enhanced the real estate company’s social strategy to support its brand-level efforts. 

“Tiger Pistol enables us to collaborate with and support our agents like never before. The platform allows our brand to reach into communities through our agents, who understand the distinct dialect of their local neighborhoods.” – CMO, American Real Estate Franchise

Consumer Products

A Global Fortune 500 beverage company had been using national television commercials and on-site print collateral to drive performance for their beer brands, but the company did not have a method to reach potential customers at the right time and place with a clear brand message to drive foot traffic to its worldwide network of bars, restaurants, and retailers. Collaborative advertising offered a method to publish on-brand content straight from local establishment social media accounts with interests and offers targeted to be relevant to consumers, strong calls to action, and quality, on-brand creative. 

“We needed a technology like Tiger Pistol to deploy not only local ads but ads that were based from the local establishments’ own Facebook accounts to truly drive consumer action. Achieving that goal but also doing it at a truly global scale would not be possible if we were just working with Facebook alone.” – Global Director of Customer Experience, Global Fortune 500 Beverage Company

Learn how you can enhance your brand’s social strategy by adopting a collaborative advertising solution that supports national branding efforts and drives reach in aggregate through local affiliates. Contact us today.