What influences customers and prospects? Is it what a company says about their product or service through advertising, marketing and direct sales?
Or, is it what other people are saying about the company’s product or service?Surely the later. Then why do we spend so much time and money on traditional marketing, advertising and selling, and so very little on word of mouth marketing?From Your Mouth to Their Ears
Most marketing focuses on building a case for a better product or service. This is good and necessary but it ignores the fact that for many, purchasing is part of a social decision. People rely on invisible networks of friends, relatives and co-workers for recommendations. This is buzz. I have spoken before about establishing a unique identity, branding and differentiation. Buzz is the natural extension of a branding and identity campaign. And it is beginning to take a much more influential role in the purchasing decision.Why Buzz Works
Today customer are suffering from information overload. They see and hear so many advertising and marketing messages that it becomes difficult to filter out what is valuable and credible through all the clutter and noise. As a result customers are turning to their friends and associates for purchasing advice more that ever. Marketing experts believe that the new customer, Generation Y – those born between 1979 and 1994 – shop by word of mouth. In the coming years, buzz marketing may that much more important.
Buzz works so well because talking is in our genes. As human beings, we need to talk. We talk to connect with people. Sharing information is essential to our make-up. We talk about the latest movie we saw, the car we test drove, the book we read and so on.How to Create BuzzHere’s some simple ways to create buzz about your product or service:1. Good buzz begins with a positive customer experience.
There is no substitute for exceptional performance. The key here is to underpromise and over deliver. Try to change your thinking from: “I need to get this sale,” to “How can I get this prospect to talk about my product or service?”2. Give a little away.
Ask yourself, “How can I get people to experience my product or service without them making a big commitment? How can I giveaway a small piece of my product or service so that people will start talking about it?” When Hotmail launched its Web-based free email service, it experienced the fastest adoption rate of any product ever introduced. Subscriptions went from 0 to 12 million in just 18 months. And each person who signed up helped to recruit other members because a message was sent with each email.3. Work at building trust
Let’s face it at the core most customers and prospects are just plain skeptical. They don’t trust us. To begin with, they don’t know us. They don’t know our values, our history, or our background. The more we tell them how great we are and how wonderful our product and service is, the less they trust us. Instead of pushing our product or service, let the product spread itself through the invisible customer networks through good buzz.4. Know your customer.
If you want to create buzz, you have to know your customer and how you are reaching them. Ask yourself the following: From who do your customers learn about your products? What do people say when they recommend your products? In what invisible networks are your products discussed? What kind of information spreads through the networks fastest?