Posts Tagged ‘word of mouth marketing’

How To Start Creating A Great Referral Network

posted by TheMarbellaSEO 12:40 AM
Wednesday, May 6, 2009

It takes a lot of time and energy to build a business from the ground up, especially if you do it on your own, this is why it helps to have a good referral network. It will not be you against the world if you think of some ways to create a network of people that you would refer business to and who, in return, will refer business to you.

Building a good referral network should start with the group of people that you already know, if you can get them to understand your product and the services that you offer and who can then refer others to you who are looking for what you have to offer. When you have a great network in place you will no longer have to rely on cold calls because you will get referrals from that network you built. Once you have educated individuals close by, like clients, colleagues and professional friends. When people are familiar with your product then they will be able to refer others to you.

As you start building a network, you may want to decide what you could offer as an incentive for people to refer friends and family to you. To start with, you could offer new people in your netword a small referral fee for new individuals sent your way. Commissioned sales associates are often highly motivated by a great check, so think of the situation when you give your customers a referral fee, they will be motivated to send more business your way. A powerful referral network will do almost all of your marketing for you.

Don’t be nervous to ask. If a customer is really happy with your service, they are going to be pleased to assist you with referrals. When there is a give away or a referral fee included with the offer, then they will be even more eagar to help. If you want to increase your business and create a powerful network then you must be proactive. Try to not waste time by waiting for people to send business your way, just ask directly for referrals, most people will happy to help out, especially when that help is reciprocated.

I have found that whenever I face a strange situation, such as asking for referrals, it helps if I write out what I want to say and then practice saying it aloud until it sits comfortably with me. When people see that you are comfortable in asking for their help then they are often more than willing to give it and this is a good way of building up a powerful referral network.

When a client compliments you on your product or service, this is the best time to ask them if they can think of any people who may need your service as well. Your network will be able to refer people to you with ease if they fully understand your product and/or service. If you keep with it, then you will soon have a massive referral network that will help you to grow your business.

Rely on the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing

posted by TheMarbellaSEO 11:05 AM
Sunday, May 3, 2009

In today’s time, there are a variety of advertising options for entrepreneurs.  If they have a lot of money, they can advertise through mass media, such as television, radio or a magazine.  On the other hand, if they don’t have that much money they can use Internet advertising.  However, in each case what will really win them over is not the advertising itself, but whether or not the offer can successfully acquire one power… the power of word of mouth.

So, how does an entrepreneur with a new company acquire the power of word of mouth, due to the fact that they will have received little puclicity?they should begin by researching companies that have had previous success with this strategy.For example, consider Avon, a company that used word of mouth so effectively, it jumped to a new level.  With them, word of mouth marketing would be the driving force that would sell their products.  And the reason why is because they would use it in such a way that their customers would actually become their main salespeople.Avon decided to sell their product through a referral-based business opportunity, instead of hiring a staff of professional marketers and salespeople.If customers liked their products, the company could actually make great income by selling to their family and friends.

Of course, MLM is just one approach to releasing the power of word of mouth.  If you would prefer not to use that type of business structure, you could promote word of mouth by giving your customers free products.  If the product is decent, customers will be glad to promote your company on their own… just because they thought what you gave them was that worthwhile.

However, there are certain ways where you can elicit word of mouth marketing guaranteed.   An example can be seen with companies offering free laptops.  Basically, if customers sign up for a service and refer others to do the same, they will receive a free laptop.   You can use the same concept for your own company, even if you sell a service.

In fact, some businesses are literally incorporating this type of incentive marketing through their payment processing system.Consider Trial Pay, one payment processor that does not accept cash, (like Paypal or Google Checkout).  Instead, the customer pays by signing up for a product or service from one of their affiliates.  You could actually be one of these affiliates to guarantee you’ll get sales, or you could offer TrialPay on your website.  If you do the latter, you will truly learn the power of word of mouth.  Why?It’s because when your site is viewed, people will think of something that gives away free products.Granted, the products do have a cost.For marketing purposes, this type unique arrangement gives them the appearance of being at no-charge, which is essential for buzz 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.

There are several ways that you can make absolutely sure you are able to do well with your business. The Word of Mouth Association or WOMMA exists to help you make sure that you can harness a unique power called word of mouth.

One of the best ways for you to be highly successful is to ensure that you are using WOMMA to your full advantage. This means taking advantage of what word of mouth can do for your business.

Word of mouth is extremely influential in marketing. Word of mouth is basically what can get you hired of fired, what can bring you customers, and what can help you achieve the highest rank for reputation.

WOMMA helps you to harness things like customer satisfaction and use it to your benefit. The satisfaction of your customers is very important – chances are good that you know that already – but what you might not know is how important it is to treat those customers with the right type of respect and admiration. You want to be sure that when your customers talk about you, they are saying good things about you. The more consumed with excitement they are, the more you are going to get word of mouth organically and exponentially.

WOMMA helps take the pressure off your marketing budget, and allows your customers to work for you.In order to benefit, you first need to have the right type of customers. They need to be happy customers, who have had an experience that is excellent from you. The experience should be something that they would love to brag about later. You must provide the ultimate experience, because this is what the marketing system is operating on.

Therefore, make it a priority to make sure that your customers have the an experience that they enjoy – so that they talk about you every chance they get. Even though this is your main job – you can use WOMMA to make sure that the job gets done correctly.

When clients expectations are exceeded, they will brag about you to others. This is the part that is going to benefit you – because as they talk about you, they'll be saying good things about you and telling others that they should try you out. Draw in more customers easily – simply by allowing your current ones to spread the word about your company. These are the simple principles that WOMMA will focus on for 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!

Word of Mouth Research - A Discussion For Marketers

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

Achieving word of mouth should be the ultimate goal of any business.This is entirely due to the fact that once your company operates using word of mouth, sales will commence without having to do any additional high-cost advertising.  However, if you conduct word of mouth research, you’ll receive an additional benefit with the same amount of buzz: the opportunity to evaluate your customers’ mindset.

So, how do you go about conducting word of mouth research?You should always understand what it entails before you begin.Word of mouth research is when you set up a marketing campaign to determine what the drives your customer's actions.Surveys are a great way to do this, especially when you give your customers a reward or some form of compensation to participate.

In my opinion, surveys without compensation or some type of "thank you" are a waste of time because they have no word of mouth value.Instead, there’s the expectation that the customer, of their own freewill is going to fill it out.  That’s not really going to happen unless they are genuinely enamored with you or your company’s objectives. 

However, things are different if you give your customer money or a free product in exchange for their participation.This is really the case if the compensation is given up front, without the participant having to worry about entering a sweepstakes, for example.  This is not to say that sweepstakes or free trials can’t work, especially if you’ve established a name for yourself.  But when you’re just starting out, you want to stay away from all that and give your customer more immediate satisfaction.

Anyway, after giving your customer decent compensation, you need to concentrate on the next step associated with good word of mouth research; making sure your survey questions promote an honest response. 

Now, by the fact that your customer is getting money or a free product for your survey, there is a risk that they could put down any old thing simply to receive their gift.To prevent that, consider giving surveys that require the participant to reveal very detailed feedback.Require them to actually complete sentence or two of why they answered as they did.Do not let them proceed with the survey until they’ve completed this portion and you get the information that you desire.

In some cases, people will not want to spend time doing your survey because they feel that they have to put in too much work.  So, to counteract that emotion, you’re going to have to try to award a bigger incentive.You could, for example, reward the participant $10, more than the $5 that the survey would normally give.If you cannot afford to do that, you might think about selling advertising space on your survey, especially if it is online.

Word of Mouth Advertising - Recession Proof Your Brand

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

There are several ways that you can use word of mouth advertising to your advantage. Word of mouth advertising is something that you can get simply by how well you treat your clients and customers, and by what they are saying about you.

Word of mouth advertising is one of the most quick, cost-effective ways to gain motivated customers. It is one of the oldest ways of marketing, which means that it has stood the test of time. Word of mouth ensures that you have what it takes to create great advertising, due to the fact that it is the mmost natural way for people to communicate about your brand and services offered. Word of mouth advertising happens when someone says something good about you, or passes on a story about you, to someone else. This is free advertising – you aren't paying anything for it, and you are reaping the benefits of it.

There are a few ways to make sure that word of mouth works in the right manner for you. Make sure that you are doing something that sets you apart from your competition, this is a key factor. If you can be unique or interesting, or if you can be creative with a new idea, you'll be the one that everyone is talking about. The more that everyone talks about you, the more that they are going to see your company brand and the more that you are going to increase your sales.

Another way that you can benefit from this type of promotion is by encouraging others to talk about you. You can offer them incentives for talking about you or your company, and the quicker you reward them, the better. Mostly, things like this, otherwise called referrals, are great ways to make sure that people are speaking highly of your company.

The best way to encourage this method of advertising is to ensure that people know about your company, and that they have a chance to speak about. Remember that you can get a negative reputation as well, and if that happens, the word of mouth advertising that is done can actually harm you. So, its always best to provide your customers and clients with the very best that they can get, and to make sure that each experience is one that is worth talking about – so that they will talk about it!!!

 

 
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