The word FOMO (or, “Fear of Missing Out”) describes the anxiety we feel when we are excluded from a social event or a new experience. FOMO marketing uses this experience to build demand for a product. It’s a powerful strategy – in fact, recent studies on millennial buying habits revealed that 68% had made a purchase recently based purely on FOMO.
This Complete Guide to FOMO Marketing (2020) shows you:
- 5 real-world examples of FOMO marketing in action
- How to create FOMO for any kind of product
- The best FOMO apps and FOMO notifications for business websites
By incorporating this strategy into your marketing, you can increase your conversion rate and reduce basket abandonment automatically.
Some things are in such high demand that their price becomes irrelevant. Concert tickets often sell out in moments. New technology inspires consumers to camp outside stores so that they don’t miss out. In both cases, highly-skilled FOMO marketing is responsible for bizarre behaviour.
Psychologists have become more aware of FOMO due to the way social media is changing our lifestyles. However, the experience isn’t a modern phenomenon – FOMO marketing has always been used to increase demand and sell the latest trends.
How is FOMO Used in Marketing?
FOMO Marketing is about making consumers work for your products. In his Oversubscribed, Daniel Priestley describes how to increase demand for your business and ensure you never have more of something than you can sell. Being “oversubscribed” adds value to your products. It is also a powerful way to build desire among consumers. Priestley identifies “Signalling” (where you invite people to express their interest before releasing your products for sale) as a key part of any FOMO marketing campaign.
To create that, you need three essential ingredients…
- An amazing product
- An excess of demand
- An urgency trigger (eg. a timer or limited stock)
When combined, these factors create an irresistible effect. The secret behind this cocktail is that each of the ingredients has been carefully prepared in advance.
1. How Glastonbury Festival Uses FOMO In Its Marketing
A great example of this strategy is the Glastonbury music festival. If you want tickets for Glastonbury, money is not enough; you have to be prepared to work for them. Over 300,000 people apply for tickets each year, and roughly half of these manage to buy them. The application process is stressful, expensive, and it takes place before the line-up is even announced.
The result of all this fuss? Demand for tickets increases every year…
The result of all this fuss? Demand for tickets increases every year…
How Whiskey Brands Use FOMO to Add Value
High-end whiskey brands like Pappy Van Winkel are careful to keep the supply of their products limited. Whilst Jim Beam produces 7-8,000,000 cases of whiskey a year (with 12 bottles to the case), Pappy Van Winkel produces closer to 8000 (giving a Jim Beam-to-Pappy ratio of 1000:1). The result of this is that a bottle of Pappy Van Winkel can cost thousands of dollars. In 2016, NBC ran a story about the brand so exclusive that “even billionaires can’t buy it.”
Your development team are the ones responsible for making sure people want what you are offering. The rest is down to the way you communicate and how you approach the market. By following 3 simple steps, you can transform lukewarm demand into feverish desire.
One of the mistakes marketers often make is to try to promote their products. Here’s what I mean…
Telling someone how great your products are has limitations. Why would they believe you? When someone feels that you are trying to persuade them they experience Psychological Reactance, which undermines everything you say.
Instead, you can communicate more openly by building your marketing around specific events. That’s why calendars and launch schedules are so important. Events such release dates, brand launches or discount sales, allow you to display your products without being transparent.
Using a marketing calendar has one other big advantage: it creates urgency triggers…
Step 2: Create Urgency, Time Limits And Scarcity
Shop owners often separate their front-of-house displays from the reality of the stockroom. However, as retail has migrated online, the front-of-house/backroom divide has begun to disappear. One reason for this is the powerful effect of scarcity.
E-Commerce giants like Amazon and Booking.com were among the first to take advantage of the effect that scarcity has on consumer choices. By displaying limited stock notices, website designers achieve important effects:
- The value of the scarce commodity is increased
- The notices create urgency and prompt action
- Consumers make decisions emotionally
So, how can you take advantage of this effect to increase demand for your products?
- Limit the supply of your most popular products. This FOMO marketing strategy motivates customers and helps to generate “sold out” publicity.
- Communicate the scarcity of your products. This can be achieved with dynamic text replacement, linked to a stockroom database, or through website notifications.
Step 3: Unleash The Power of Social Proof
Membership of social groups is a significant factor in consumer behaviour. Not only does group influence enhance your appeal through the mechanism of Social Proof, but it also intensifies the Fear of Missing Out.
Because of these effects, it is important to make your current users visible to new customers.
By targeting the social groups that your potential customers belong to, you can supercharge the “Fear of Missing Out.” A full FOMO marketing strategy includes:
- Customer research
- Collecting testimonials
- Fostering a brand community
- Timing your urgency triggers
- Endorsements, influencers and micro-influencers
Any challenger brand or start-up faces the same problem: how do you leverage scarcity and social influence when no-one knows who you are? This is a chicken-and-egg problem that marketers know all too well.
Whilst it may seem like FOMO marketing doesn’t suit smaller businesses, there are things that make it ideal for upstart businesses.
- Every new milestone is a great chance to communicate your roadmap. Why not incorporate updates into the marketing calendar that you use?
- The exclusivity of your offerings, and the scarcity of your products, is more plausible in the growth phase than it will be at any other time.
- Social groups identify more closely with smaller brands. If you are building a user community, smallness is an asset.
