The power of Word of Mouth Marketing

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Does W.O.M Marketing instigate informed consumer choices? Today’s consumers are not as prone to exploitation as they were in the past. The prime reason for this being the exposure to all different products and services – thanks to the evolution of the internet. Along with search engines, social networking sites, such as bzzagent, facebook, my space and twitter have aided in making the once ignorant consumer , well-informed about the variety of services and products available in the market; providing them the opportunity to make a wise choice suiting their needs. While on one hand social media is facilitating the consumer, on the other they are serving as a plausible marketing tool, primarily with regards to word of mouth marketing.

Word of mouth marketing functions through an individual’s personal recommendation regarding specific services and products. The biggest advantage it has for the event marketers is the maintenance of the trust level amongst the consumers, while your purpose is being fulfilled to the utmost. “Harry Potter” is perhaps the best example of how effective word-of-mouth marketing is. So, why not utilize this top guerrilla marketing technique along with others to give a boost to your business?

As I mentioned before, social media tools are serving as an event marketer’s right wing. Add informed consumers publicizing and reinforcing your product amidst their social circle, and you have the best marketing strategy lined up! By becoming a part of the online social utilities, you can have a one-on-one interaction with your customer; learn what they want and formulate the best possible option you can give them. Have the trend setters of a community recommend your product and soon you will have an army of enthusiasts marketing for you. By introducing an element of “surprise and exclusivity” you can further attract more customers to what you are offering them.

In a nutshell, having informed consumers recommend your product is a great way to boost up your ranking amongst the consumers. Why, we all would prefer purchasing a product which is being recommended to us by one of us, rather than all those flashy advertisements showing only one side of the story.

Video Marketing Case-Study

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Since we’ve been discussing the importance of using videos as an integral part of your marketing strategies, I thought I’d share a case-study with you. A number of companies have been engaging audiences in activity based marketing to build viral campaigns. We all saw the red Gmail envelope exchange hands all across the globe, didn’t we?

The Heinz ketchup campaign specifically stands out. Here is a summary of what they did:

- They first checked to see where there market was. Youtube had a significant presence of their demographics, so they built a competition for Youtube users.

- They designed the competition perfectly: there was an incentive for the winner ($57,000 cash prize). The competition was to design an ad campaign for Heinz. A win-win for all.

- They got popular bloggers to spread the word.

- They played with the right mental triggers and feelings: association, loyalty, fun, good moments.

- They got smashing responses in thousands of participations. Anticipation and hype kept growing until they finalized the winner (has a link to the winning video as well).

- They finished off with great Ads and an incredible amount of media attention and hype.

- They let those feelings of association translate into brand attributes that those participants feel about Heinz. They got themselves a horde lifetime customers!

Facebook 3 - Promoting your business

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Gone are the days of traditional marketing. The strength of your Facebook presence is going to define how effectively you can promote your business, products, events or services to your market. Remember, Facebook is just the tool - you are the marketer who has to get it right.

Since we have already talked about Facebook profiles, groups and pages in our previous post, lets just quickly go through the fourth important element in promoting your business - the Social Ads. These are additional paid branding options within Facebook, to allow you to reach a wider network and reinforce your branding.

These ads can be shown based on your specific demographic and keyword requirements. It is an incredibly cost effective channel for marketing to niche segments based on pay per click (or view) modalities. Spots are given based on bids so make sure your bids aren’t too low, or you may risk losing to competitors. Because of its excessively focused placement, it is bound to get great traffic to your sites. You can make these ads interesting by adding a picture and tagline that will appeal to your market

Get yourself some ad spots before the big market players jump in with their endlessly deep pockets.

Why social media?

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Social media is something which you just cannot ignore. Whatever industry you are working in, it is amazing how much influence social media can have on your business, you just need to know how to use it to your advantage.

Social media marketing basically defines how you can use online channels to market your products, get traffic, convert people into customers, get your conversation started, etc. So when you’re planning your marketing mix, it is important to understand the dynamics of different social media tools to find the right ones for your business. You can’t just put them all up and expect magic to happen. What works for a online clothing store may not work for a web services company and so on.

That is why we keep reminding you not to follow someone else’s best practices by the book, figure out what will work for your business or get a consultant to do that for you. If you are an event manager, figure out what tools to use for maximum impact: e.g. you may want to create an online page for an event and choose not to for another. Will a short-lived fame from getting highlighted on Techcrunch or Digg help you or will creating an authoritative blog about your industry? Are different internet marketing techniques like SEO and PPC going to work for your launch or event or are they just hyperboles? You need to know how to make these important decisions effectively, and for that you need to understand the impact of social media on launches, events and any other services.

The truth is that the world has changed. People, audiences, consumers, business are all looking for more value from everything that is offered to them. You see it all around you in the offline world, where even food joints are giving out upsize meals. Translate that to the online world and everything multiplies exponentially. Its easier, its more powerful, it has more of an outreach and most of it is available for free.

Well, the question that comes to mind is that if there are so many free ways of marketing online, why isn’t everyone doing a great job at it. One of the reason could be that the face of the online world is constantly evolving and you need to be at the foremost in order to know what’s going on. I guess that’s where posts like these come into place - we’ve worked, consulted, tried, tested, experienced, experimented and think that we have gained considerable knowledge that we can now share.

We will be sharing a whole series of step by step guidelines on how to market your events through multiple channels and how to use different online platforms to your advantage. The guidelines will be posted on a daily basis on this blog. Do check it out whenever you can.

Interact with customers - your best branding strategy

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The escalating online trends in social media, the increase in fancy new gadgets - all of these factors have paved ways for you to communicate with your market on more direct levels. This direct interaction brings you to downright human level and potentially breaks all gaps between you and your customers. You can talk to them. You can listen to them. You can communicate with them. You can build loyalty. You can build relationships of trust. You can do so much, just by leveraging different tools to form a bridge between you and your customers.

As IAB CEO Randall says, “This achievement is a testament to the continued vitality of interactive. Explosive innovation in the industry is providing marketers with new and unique ways to reach consumers. It’s a very exciting time.”

While event marketing may seem to be about meticulous planning, it also involves quite a bit of right-brain activity. Balance in creativity and structure is important in this domain and thats why we are starting a whole blog series just to talk about this. You can follow these step by step Event Launch Guidelines and share any thoughts or experiences that you think can add to its content.

Using “article marketing” to build credibility

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While article marketing may work for building credibility over time, it shouldn’t be used for one-time event promotions. In the current internet world, there is an onslaught of online content and it becomes difficult to parse through and find valid information. If you are an event manager or promoter by profession, you would want to first build credibility before expecting people to hire you or attend your events. This is a natural process also followed offline, where consultants give away free advice for gaining authority.

I would personally discourage people to write articles just to improve their search rankings or to guide traffic to their websites. While good articles lead readers to your business (through contact information or website links), it is imperative to make sure that your intentions are clear. The bonus is that if you can get insightful articles out for free distribution (through different websites) it is likely to get you credibility and clients. So I’m not advising you to dismiss it completely, but to write wisely.

We talked earlier on how to build relationships with your community, writing informative articles to people who are already interested in hearing you is one such way to invest in that relationship.
Find the right places to write to, expand the reader exposure via RSS and then put your writing skills at work. If you want, you can hire people to do the writing bit for you on freelance platforms, such as oDesk or Elance.

Using social media to market Concerts

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I had heard about how using social media marketing tactics can massively increase the foot traffic to the concerts that we plan. We decided to give it a try for one of our concerts which turned into a raging success. We had people fly in from other cities and the event ended up with an active list of supporters who now want to turn it into a cult of concerts. I was able to compare the two approaches comprehensively and would like to share them with you.

Earlier, we spent only about 11-15% of the total budget on marketing our concerts, whereas the major chunk used to go to the artists and site preparations. Shows with multiple underground artists would end up with 40-50% budget allocated to getting the artists booked, accommodated and compensated. This left a measly 50% for everything else including ticketing, liaisons, production management, licensing and compliance to name a few. What we realized with social media is that we can greatly increase the outreach and promotions without increasing our budget at all. Online mediums like Facebook and other social groups allowed us to really get our targeted audience interested in the show – and soon enough we had them marketing the concert to their friends for free.

It was great seeing the excitement and suspense building up all by itself, while we focused on conceptualizing and planning the event details. Another great thing that we managed to do was get immediate feedback on the preferences and choices on the music itself, and schedule the artist bands accordingly. This was great not only for attracting the right crowd, but also for making the audience feel like they were part of planning the concert. That itself was invaluable to us. We ran out of tickets to sell!

An important thing to remember is that we didn’t just go online and started to promote the concert. We had a pre-launch period in which we first built a network of targeted audience, through which we communicated, connected and built a level of trust. This was a very important step in understanding the audience and forming a relationship and rapport with them.

There are a number of great social networking sites that you can use for planning your concerts. Do keep in mind that they have to be planned meticulously and with tact to get the best results. I am going to keep sharing my thoughts and experiences in managing and marketing all sorts of events successfully. Keep tuned in and feel free to ask for specific advice.

Great events - the community power

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We’ve often talked about how we can make our events more successful, big or small, using online marketing methods. Although social marketing is great for driving traffic to your events, building pre-event hype; it still needs to be handled with tact. So, when you jump on this bandwagon, it is important to come with the right mindset and expectations.

Often when planning events, I’d think of myself as an attendee and plan everything from that perspective. Having a mindset which is consistent with the audience is very important in social marketing. Having the wrong expectations can result in damages to your reputation as an organizer or event manager.

Social marketing requires strategic planning. Just like a chess game can be mastered, this too can be used in a way that can make your events a huge success every time. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have to do things differently; you’ll just have to approach them differently, that’s all.

Always remember that the people you are marketing to are your “community”. They are a community of people supporting your services, attending your events and communicating directly with you. If you want more people to contact you for services, or manage their events, or attend the events you are managing and so on, then it is important to build initial trust and credibility first.

Secondly, you need to be an active part of the community itself. Participate with the audience, ask them questions, discuss ideas, share thoughts, request feedback. This communication helps people in opening themselves up to you and become more inclined to use your services or attend your parties later on. Also, it is the best way to get a feel for audience expectations and early feedbacks of your events. Credibility comes from sharing insight, discussing thoughts and adding value to conversations. When people start to respect your opinion as a good one, they will become more inclined to becoming your customers.