Posts Tagged ‘referral marketing’

Free Viral Marketing – Get Some Today

posted by TheMarbellaSEO 1:38 AM
Saturday, May 2, 2009

If you do a web search for free viral marketing, you will see the system at work. Offering something at no additional charge is part of the methodology. No companies can actually offer free advertising. They may offer free information. It could be just enough to make you interested and want to get more information.

Reports, trials, test-runs and lead generation are things that they offer. Of course, if you want more, you will have to pay. That is how this type of advertising campaign works. It is what you decide to do with your company, too.

Whatever you are selling or whatever service you provide, you need to identify something that you can give away. Perhaps you are an expert carpenter. You can offer do it yourself advice and either publish on your website, an online magazine or create a newsletter for people that are interested in carpentry. Then find a way to let people in on your information offering.

The only way to do free viral marketing is to do it on your own. You would need to create or buy a list of e-mail addresses. Join clubs online like twitter and get posting on the social networks. Post on forums. You can buytarget e-mail addresses and some other companies offer a sample at no charge. Giving something away often generates customers interest.

Success of any campaign depends on reaching a big group of people and offering a free item. But, your success depends on the quality of the item or service that you have to offer. A product can only reaches virus proportions if people really dig it or they think that they must get it, in order to be “in”. The excitement aspect wears off. Valuable items stick around.

Actually, I’m giving you free viral marketing advice right now. Do some businesses charge for this kind of information? There are actually classes that you have to pay for and what they teach is what I have just told you. They always go into great detail to make you feel that the seminar was worth your hard earned cash. But, there is not much to learn.

Do companies charge out to do the all marketing for you? Yes. These kinds of advertising campaigns are especially time-consuming, so you might not want to attempt them. Your website might not even possibly be ready for the amount of business that a viral campaign might generate. If you read some more about free viral marketing, you’ll see what I mean.

Before you hire a viral marketing agency, take a moment to look objectively at your website. With a good technique, a marketer may be able to drive tens of thousands of visitors to your website. But, it won’t do any good if your site does not sell your products or services.

If you are confident in your site and the products that you sell, there are hundreds of companies to choose from. You can even take a course and learn how to implement it yourself. Take time to do your research and look around. Read about the company’s techniques and see if it is something that you could apply. Try to establish how many people are in the network. Read all the testimonials that are available online.

There is a business that operates totally under the radar. The techniques that they use may be ok, but sites like YouTube would not approve of them. Moreover, their services can not be customized. They highly recommend the exact same strategy for all of their clients.

If they are to effectively grow your business, a viral marketing agency should tailor their solutions to suit your products or services. To be worthwhile, they should offer ways to keep in contact with your existing clients and help convert your clients’ friends into your customers.

One of the effective techniques is a regular newsletter, sent to your client’s e-mail address. If you do not have any customers, you may need to buy a list of e-mail addresses. Some of these lists were created by other successful businesses. They ask their existing customers if they would like to receive information and monthly communication from their affiliates. If the customer says “yes”, they become part of the company database.

You might find an agency that specializes in viral marketing and could also provides this sort of list, as well as offering other services you may want to engage. To be highly effective, you should create your list that is targeted to include people in your niche market. If you are selling a toy, parents would be your target market. It would be a waste of time to send dozens of e-mails to senior citizens.

Some of the easier methods that you can employ include “social networking”. Become a member of an online forum or group, whose members have interests that are similar with your target. If you have yet to identify your niche, you may need a little more help than a viral marketing agency can offer. Everyone has a specific niche or target market. Sometimes, it’s just hard to see it, from the inside, looking out. Someone outside of your business might offer solutions to help you find your target market and grow your business.

What is online viral marketing? It is called a successful advertising campaign. The phrase was a creation of a business school graduate, made popular by the media and a media critic Douglas Rushkoff. This refers to your ability to reach millions of people by starting out with only a few.

If you tell me something that I think is interesting, I will tell my friends about it. They will tell their friends as well if they like it. They are associated to people that I am not familiar with. So, the potential of growth is virtually limitless. Many years ago, and even today, it was called work of mouth advertising.

The main difference between word of mouth advertising and online viral marketing has to do with the sheer potential number of people that someone can or does speak to daily. Using me as an example. In my “real” life, I talk to my close family members every day. I may talk to my extended family members and my friends once a week.

Some of them I haven’t talked to in years, “live”. But, via e-mail and social networking sites, I communicate with all of them, every single day. If I find something that I believe in…something that moves me, I will share it with at least 30 people.

Surveys indicate that the average person shares this type of thing with 12 people max. So, I may be a little outside of the loop. The point is that the 30 people that I know will share with others. With very little effort, the information moves through this mass of people. Will the wave eventually crash?

If you have an effective online viral marketing strategy, you may be able to generate numerous waves; when one crashes, another forms. There are countless different strategies, but all of the effective ones isolate one key element. There is something “free” of value for people to share.

In some cases, it is simply a well-done commercial. Sony created one a while back. It was posted on YouTube and people got it out there to people they knew. To date, it has had hundreds of thousands of views. How many people made a purchase? Who would possibly know?

Here is the point. In order to reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the past, you would have had to pay for television advertising. Of course, you would have to buy space on the highly watched shows and the costs are astronomical. With online viral marketing, you can reach that many people for next to nothing.

It is a fact that not all people tell the truth in a review, so it’s unlikely that everything you read is going to be the whole picture. To counter that, especially when in connection with something as ethereal as word of mouth information, listed here are a number of statistic’s and sources that you (if you so desire) can check for accuracy at your leisure.

1. Family and friend recommendations trump all others when influencing decisions when giving out word of mouth advice (AdAge).

2. Visitors to a site that post commentary will typically visit a site 9 times, and are 2 times as likely to purchase from that site than similar websites (McKinsey and Co.Jupiter Media Metrix).

3. Consumers have a higher level of trust with friends more than experts or celebrity endorsements (65%, 27% and 8%, respectively; Yankelovich).

4. A Nielsen worldwide study of some 26,000 users in over 40 markets reported that consumer recommendations were the most credible form of word of mouth information advertising within the 70% plus of respondents.

5. Way over 116 million user generated comments were made.S. alone in 2008, with an additional 82 million content creators. With the extended reach and influence of Web 2.0 and social networking, these figures are sure to climb (source: eMarketer.com).

6. Social network users are three times more likely to purchase a product on the strength of recommendation from a peer rather than any form of advertising. (Jupiter Research).

7. 86% of people asked said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over an experts, with 83% saying they would trust user generated comments over a critic’s (Marketing Sherpa).

8. 66% of social networkers are more inclined to purchase due to a recommendation, compared to 52% that aren’t social networkers (Royal Mail home shipping tracker).

9. 81% of shoppers during the holidays read user generated reviews before they bought (Nielsen Online).

10. Consumers totaling 86% read reviews on businesses before buying, with over 90% saying that they trust those reviews (Kudzu.com).

11. 49% of consumers reviewed claimed that they have made purchases based on the strength of reviews. Of this total 53% decided on the strength of user reviews;48% due to comparison charts;41% relied on editorial reviews and comments;58% was from shared shopping lists.

12. Nearly two thirds, or 62% of home-based consumers read online user generated product reviews before deciding to buy (source: Deloitte and Touche) as well, 62% or these consumers did state that they would also read through sites with user reviews in order to make any entertainment purchases (source: Marketing Sherpa).

13. 7 out of 10 people who read consumer generated reviews are more likely to share those opinions, which amplifies the impact they have (Deloitte and Touche).

14. 74% of those surveyed claim they base purchasing only on user generated reviews of their customer service level rating for a product or company (Society of New Communication Research).

As you can see, word of mouth information coming from trusted sources such as friends, consumers, etc. is without a doubt the most powerful form of advertising ever.

In many respects marketing by word of mouth can be said to be the “hidden statistic” for all programs, as it’s well near impossible to actually gauge the effectiveness of marketing done this way. However, it also should be noted that most every product in the digital age has used this method to enhance puclic and corporate awareness of the product.

A recent study exemplified that two thirds of online marketing is expected to be done this way next year, which when coupled with the advent in leaps of Web 2.0.0 social networking and social marketing sites point towards promoting your product by word of mouth may be both more cost effective, and have an increasingly better ROI than more “traditional” online advertising media.

Think about the business model of the current social networking sites. There has yet to be a successful site of this type that charges for any sort of membership, relying instead as they do on ad generated income to fuel their corporate engines. While there is not in a real sense a metric that can be used to measure the effectiveness of marketing by word of mouth, it should be noted that there is one method of knowing if your campaign is succeeding – sales.

A company should know from their output volume exactly the change between before a campaign, during a campaign and after a campaign. This gives businesses a highly measurable statistic to show effectiveness of this methodology. It is true that not all businesses need or desire this form of sales technique, but is also through that not one business turns away prospects garnered from the by word of mouth method either.

Whatever you sell, a great study completed by Hill and Knowlton in February this year showed that decision makers are largely influenced by personal experience’s (58%), with recommendations and industry reports coming in at 51%. Coming in third was direct marketing at 21% with internet advertising at 17%. These figures may only reflect the purchasing habits of key decision makers, but a young lady in Oregon deciding to buy one car insurance or another IS the key decision maker for that purchase, and her buddy Becky telling her to go with this company over that company will have a greater influence than any gravel-voiced actor pushing the product in a TV advert.

In essence, this statistic can be shown to reflect into any industry, any segment or niche, if every purchaser is considered the key decision maker. This makes the resurgence of the world’s oldest sales tool a given – so get talking or tweeting, but tell everyone!

Referral Marketing Beats Out The Competition

posted by TheMarbellaSEO 6:01 AM
Thursday, April 30, 2009

If you’re low on money, you might want to consider using referral marketing to promote your business.  How does referral marketing work?In fact, you use the general public to help advertise your company.They would accomplish this through a separate referral site that they would share with friends and family.If someone buys through this site and/or signs up for the referral program, the original referrer would receive an gift certificate or other incentive.This incentive can be virtually anything, whether it’s cash, discounts, or give away merchandise. 

Now, there are two ways you can achieve referral marketing.  The first involves utilizing it as a secondary form of advertising, especially for time-sensitive promotions.You try to create as much buzz as you can before your promotion ends.  The second method involves incorporating referral programs into your business model.If you do this, technically your business becomes an MLM company, which stands for Multi-Level Marketing. 

I have an idea of what you might be thinking.Isn’t an MLM a pyramid model scheme?No, but MLMs can go in a downward spiral if they are not done carefully.  Specifically, this means that they rely solely on referrals for their business.  No legitimate sales of products or services are incorporated into their business model.

12 Daily Pro is an example of such an entity.This was an autosurf website that was able to create profits in the millions of dollars during its heyday.However, over 95% of these profits came from referrals who invested their own money into the program; very little came from typical business transactions.Consequently, older members were getting paid from the new members’ money.   But as the scheme continued, many new members weren’t getting paid because there weren’t enough leads to keep the pyramid going.

nd this is the sad fate of pyramid scheme, even those that last many years….just like the Madoff scandal.The Madoff scandal was a ponzi scheme, which is a way more complex than your everyday pyramid scheme.  Either way, the concept is the same.

So, to prevent these problems, always make sure that you’re paying referrals from the profits of your business.  If you find this is difficult to do, consider compensating them on an affiliate basis, where they would receive a commission only if their referrals actually buy something.

In conclusion, if you can’t afford an elaborate advertising campaign, consider utilizing referral marketing.Implementation is a snap, and once it’s established, you’ll have tons of people promoting for you with no cost to your business.

Referral programs are a very good way to popularize your brand and increase your sales. A referral program works best in the following manner – you reward the customers who send you new business. Ultimately, this encourages them to send you more clients. It is as effortless as that. What makes these programs highly successful? Let me explain.

Most humans enjoy being rewarded for their actions. When there is an incentive, it motivates people to take action immediately. So, naturally, when customers get rewarded for sending new business to you, they feel elated. This increases your response rate tremendously.

The advantages of a customer referral program include:

1.It costs practically nothing. Your friends and clients bring you new business – all you need to do is reward them with an incentive to do it again.

2.It will attract high value customers. Any customers who are referred by your existing clients are most likely to do a lot of business with you, as they already know that you are trustworthy and dependable.

3.This will assist in building brand awareness. If large numbers of people talk very highly about your business, it has a very positive effect and your brand’s popularity explodes exponentially.

4.It creates a platform to launch your new products and services. This is without a doubt the largest advantage of a referral program.

5.It creates a foundation to maintain the wonderful relationship you have with your existing clients and to build a base with new clients.

To get great results, you should inform your existing clients about your referral programs. You can do this by making a phone call, text message or by sending an email to all your clients. You should continually build a mailing list and send a reminder to your inactive clients. In this manner, you keep reminding them that you appreciate what they do and would love to reward them.

As a smart business owner, you should understand an important thing about a good customer referral program. The incentive given need not be extravagant. Mostly, service credits would be sufficient. A box of chocolates will show your appreciation for your customers, or even a donation to a local charity in the name of your customer will go a long way.

Your intention is what matters. You should not worry about spending a lot of money on your incentive program. Set up a referral marketing program today and get the results you want.

 
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