Do you want to learn about FOMO marketing and how to create FOMO marketing strategies to increase your sales and revenue?
FOMO stands for fear of missing out.
Even before the rise of eCommerce and social media, FOMO advertising had existed. Marketers always have managed to tap into this consumer’s anxiety and found success through FOMO ads.
But how can you take advantage of FOMO marketing in the online and eCommerce space? This blog will help you discover that as we discuss nine proven FOMO marketing strategies.
Before we dive into that, we should first understand the concept of FOMO and FOMO marketing psychology.
Or you can skip that and use the following links to jump directly to the FOMO marketing strategies:
- Leverage Live Sales Notifications
- Build Urgency With Limited-Time Offers
- Display Visitor Counts Across Your Site
- Showcase Reviews & Testimonials
- Write Case Studies
- Take Screenshots on Social Media
- Work With Influencers in Your Niche
- Feature Past Clients
- Highlight Your Most Impressive Metrics
What Is FOMO?
Verywellmind defines FOMO, or the fear of missing out, as the feeling or perception that others are having more fun, living better lives, or experiencing better things than you are.
FOMO is a pervasive form of social anxiety in which people worry that they might miss out on something fun and exciting.
It’s that feeling you get when other people experience benefits that you want, too.
Imagine the last time your friend:
- Made an expensive purchase for a product you’ve had your eye on
- Tried a new restaurant in town
- Traveled to an exotic destination
- Went to a concert with your favorite band
Hearing about these experiences probably made you happy for your friend, sure. But it also probably left you feeling like you were unfairly missing out.
This is FOMO in action. And while you’ve likely felt FOMO in the past, you’re not alone.
What is FOMO Marketing?
FOMO marketing or fear of missing out marketing refers to marketing messaging that evokes a desire in your target consumers’ minds to take action before it’s too late.
It triggers impulse purchases, with the fear of missing out on the opportunity later.
The FOMO marketing psychology affects all consumers. With a neat FOMO marketing strategy, you can leverage the power of FOMO to increase conversions, sales, and revenue.
Here’s what FOMO marketing looks like:
This FOMO marketing campaign was created with TrustPulse.
Want to see it in action for yourself? Sign up for your 100% risk-free TrustPulse account today!
Now, let’s dive into the FOMO marketing strategies you can use on your site.
Benefits of FOMO Marketing
FOMO marketing offers several benefits for businesses:
- It increases brand awareness and visibility by creating buzz and excitement around your product or service.
- It can lead to higher conversion rates by encouraging people to take action immediately.
- It can lead to increased customer loyalty as customers feel a sense of exclusivity and belonging to your brand.
- It can improve customer engagement by providing a sense of urgency and excitement.
9 FOMO Marketing Strategies You Can Use Today
1. Leverage Live Sales Notifications
Social proofing your site is the best way to leverage FOMO marketing, and live sales notifications are the perfect FOMO example.
The key to remember is that online consumers are heavily affected by the decisions they see others making.
When you display on your site that real people actively buy your products, you’re more likely to convert new visitors. That’s because making these live sales notifications shows potential customers that your products are:
- Popular
- Trustworthy
- Beneficial (at least in some way)
These factors work together to get your site’s visitors to take action.
Live sales notifications are easy to make, too. Here’s one we built with TrustPulse in less than five minutes:
These notifications can be targeted to specific pages and demographics. With just a bit of personalization, you’ll be looking at higher conversion rates in no time.
It’s why TrustPulse clients have reported sales increases by up to 15%!
Resource: 8 Best FOMO Marketing Examples to Boost Your Conversions
Resource: How to Create a Recent Sales Notification Popup
Want to learn more? Get started with TrustPulse today!
2. Build Urgency With Limited-Time Offers
One of the best ways to use FOMO marketing isn’t necessarily showing that other people are buying your products.
Instead, you can leverage FOMO just by showing that your offer isn’t going to last forever. By that, we mean creating a limited-time offer for your target audience.
This has a firm start date and, more importantly, a firm end time.
One of the best tools at your disposal is creating optin campaigns (popups, floating bars, fullscreen welcome mats, and so on) with countdown timers.
You’ve likely seen campaigns like this before. They look something like this:
The image above shows a countdown timer on the pricing page to motivate users to take action.
Countdown timers are effective, even without seeing other people purchasing the product. The idea is that if there’s a limited-time offer, it’s limited for a reason.
And that reason must be how popular your products or services are.
Whether or not that’s entirely true doesn’t matter. What matters is that your site’s visitors will feel more motivated to take action when they see the clock ticking than they will with evergreen campaigns.
Ok, but how do you create optin campaigns with countdown timers?
For that, you’d want to use a tool like OptinMonster:
OptinMonster is hands down your best bet for creating a limited-time offer deal for your target audience.
That’s because OptinMonster allows you to build optin campaigns quickly, including:
- Popups
- Floating bars
- Fullscreen welcome mats
- Inline campaigns
- Gamified wheels
- And much more
And since it has a visual drag-and-drop builder, you can add elements (like a countdown timer, for example) in just a few clicks.
Then you can target those campaigns to the right people, in the right places, at just the right times in their customer journey.
Want to learn how? Check out this helpful resource: How to Add a Countdown Timer Popup to Skyrocket Sales.
Or you can get started and dive right in by signing up for your 100% risk-free OptinMonster account today!
3. Display Visitor Counts Across Your Site
So far, we’ve looked at a few ways to use fear of missing out marketing to get more sales from your site.
But what if you’re just starting? How can you use FOMO marketing in the early stages of your business before you’ve made any sales?
You might use a visitor count notification to boost engagement with popular posts and pages.
Live visitor counts don’t track how many sales your store has made. Instead, it tracks how many people have visited a specific page of your website.
Imagine you were running an online contest to build brand awareness and have yet to make any active sales. When you advertise your contest on social media, you find more people are seeing your landing page but not actively signing up.
By adding a live visitor count to your contest’s landing page, you’ll leverage FOMO to the fullest.
That’s because people will see your page’s popularity and assume other people must be joining.
Maybe you’ve even seen these notifications in the past. They look something like this:
As we already mentioned, you can quickly and easily create these notifications with social proof software like TrustPulse.
Need help deciding which software to choose? Check out our comparison of the top three social proof tools: FOMO vs. UseProof vs. TrustPulse: Which Is BEST for Social Proof.
4. Showcase Reviews & Testimonials
Did you know that your strongest copywriting doesn’t come from your words?
Every website needs to come up with a catchy and powerful copy to make sales. But you can skip a lot of the heavy lifting by using something even more powerful:
Your customer’s words.
Your website should be loaded with positive reviews and testimonials from your client. This shows your site’s new visitors that people love and trust your brand.
Plus, it reinforces your credibility for returning visitors.
You see, big companies like Amazon do this for their products all the time:
The reason they do this is simple: it works.
How does it work? Again, this FOMO marketing campaign is effective because it gives people a deeper sense of what a solution to their problem might look like.
Rather than just “taking your word for it,” new leads can see other people who struggled with their exact problem.
They’ll also see that your products or services were the best solutions for that unique problem.
From there, it’d just be a short time before your potential lead becomes a loyal (and paying) customer.
Want to take things to the next level?
With TrustPulse, you can create social proof notifications that display popular reviews from 3rd-party websites.
That means you can create notifications whenever someone leaves you a positive review on sites like Google My Business or Yelp.
Or you can find your favorite 5-star review and create a static message. New visitors click the notification and get redirected to that 5-star review.
Here’s a FOMO marketing example:
Reviews and testimonials go above and beyond any copy you can write for your online business.
5. Write Case Studies
In the last tip, we discussed how reviews and testimonials are excellent for fear of missing out marketing.
But let’s take things one step further: writing customer case studies.
A case study is a deep dive into a customer’s problem and how your solution made their lives easier.
Not only are these longer than your average customer review, but you also play a role in creating this piece of content.
That makes it a powerful mix of a customer review and a long-form sales page. You can embed some copywriting best practices into your case study to make it extra persuasive.
And since you’re writing about a real customer, other users will get a dose of FOMO when they see the resolution.
Remember to choose your case study wisely, though. The case study you choose should:
- Demonstrate your product’s concrete results
- Show that you can replicate those results for others
- Nurture the existing relationship you have with the client from the actual case study
You might find some of your customers have great results but are a pain to work with.
Or you might find that your favorite customer is a brilliant writer, but the results need to be more stellar to persuade skeptical readers into action.
You need to find the right balance and strike it aggressively.
For more help, check out this resource: How to Write an Epic Case Study That Wins More Business.
6. Take Screenshots on Social Media
Getting reviews, testimonials, and case studies are all great FOMO marketing strategies.
But let’s be honest: they’re super time-intensive.
Another approach is seeing what people say about your brand on social media. Since that information is public, you can grab screenshots and add them to your website.
Finding those conversations is easy, too.
You can invest in tools that monitor social media conversations or search for your brand on your favorite social platform:
This is extra persuasive because people perceive these messages to be unbiased.
Whereas companies need to ask for reviews and testimonials from clients, these occur more naturally on social media.
The result? People give this type of social proof more credibility.
And if so many people are talking about your company online (and unprompted), it will inspire others to get involved in that conversation, too.
7. Work With Influencers in Your Niche
Influencer marketing is nothing new. The concept is simple:
Find someone with a large audience that aligns with your target audience. Then get those people to share your brand.
You can find influencers on nearly every platform, like:
- YouTube
- TikTok
And about a million others.
But remember that companies can be influencers, too. Many businesses have large email lists that go to waste.
You can work out deals to have those businesses share your brand with their list. Just be sure to do so in a way that’s ethical, non-spammy, and profitable for both parties.
8. Feature Past Clients
You’ve probably seen this FOMO marketing strategy on the homepage of many websites.
It’s something that many of the world’s top brands do and, for some reason, new marketers gloss over.
But you can get many more conversions when you feature high-profile logos from clients you’ve worked with.
Here’s what this looks like when done well:
When new visitors see the names of companies they already know, trust, and love, they’ll associate your brand with it.
As a result, they’ll want to use the same tools as these other high-profile companies and will be more likely to try your solution.
9. Highlight Your Most Impressive Metrics
As your business grows, you’ll want to track and document that growth in cold-hard figures.
McDonald’s did this by counting the number of burgers they’ve cooked over the years. Grocery stores used to reward their one-millionth customer for raising awareness.
And you can start counting how many people you’ve helped over the years. Then, just like you did with every other piece of FOMO marketing campaign, you can add this to your website:
Remember, when you use these statistics to create FOMO, always use the actual number and don’t round up.
Stating that “1,213,437” websites use your product is much more powerful than saying “over 1,000,000” websites have done so.
The former is more trustworthy, and the latter is sometimes too generic to be believable.
Gather some stats and crunch some numbers. Then use that data to build FOMO in your site’s new visitors.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in FOMO Marketing
While FOMO marketing can be highly effective, it’s important to use it ethically and avoid common mistakes.
For instance, overusing FOMO marketing can lead to burnout and customer fatigue. Similarly, using misleading information or fake social proof to create a sense of urgency can damage your brand reputation and lead to loss of trust.
Finally, targeting the wrong audience can lead to a lack of interest and engagement and waste time and effort.
TrustPulse: The Best FOMO Marketing Tool
TrustPulse is hands down the best FOMO marketing tool on the market. It lets you quickly and easily create social proof notifications to boost conversions on your site.
With TrustPulse, you can leverage social proof to increase your:
- Newsletter signups
- Webinar registrations
- Survey participants
- Pageviews (to strengthen your SEO efforts)
- Sales
- And more
And the best part is there’s almost zero learning curve.
That means you can create professional social proof notifications in minutes, even if you don’t have coding or “tech skills.”
Plus, you can target these FOMO campaigns across your site, ensuring they’re seen by the right people, in the right places, and at the right time in their customer journey.
This makes TrustPulse the best FOMO marketing tool around.
Want to see it in action for yourself? Sign up for your 100% risk-free TrustPulse account today!