Friday, November 24, 2006

Buzz Marketing

Many of you spend all day fighting fires to retain your customers and keep your business running. You probably aren't running a marketing campaign. You need to create some buzz. A good way to do that is to have a contest where customers and prospects can submit video to be used as a commercial. College students today are creating content anyway. There will be buzz from the contest as well as from friends & family of the people who submit. This kind of buzz is viral. Here are some tips from Derek Gehl at entrepreneur.com:

Your best chance of having your material go viral is simply to get it out there -- distributing articles to free content sites, writing a blog, doing a podcast or posting useful information on sites where people get together to exchange information and opinions. When you make your content specific and useful, it’s more likely to be passed on to potential customers. Any kind of content can go viral, particularly if you include a "send to a friend" reminder.

So far, one of the most successful applications of video-to-internet marketing has been to offer quality educational content for free (with or without an opt-in), and position it as a limited-time offer. Viewers watch the video, such as the first part of a ten-part course, and then pass it on to other potential customers. [Give a live seminar and video tape it].

If you want to get in on this massive new market, you should think about a building new opt-in list--one that includes mobile phone numbers--and look at ways to adapt your promotions to interactive text messaging. Another way to reach mobile customers is by creating sites for cell phone web users. [Buy domains .tel and.mobi].

I read an article recently in USA Today that said the average consumer is hit with a whopping 3,500 to 5,000 marketing messages every day! That’s a minimum of three advertising messages every single minute. Can you blame people for eliminating what they don't want and pulling in what they do want? [Use RSS Feeds - even for store promotions.]

entrepreneur.com also lists the 10 Marketing Trends to Watch in 2007. While I don't agree with all of them, I do realize that mileage will vary depending on what you do and where you do it. In other words, depending where you are and who you target, different ways of marketing will be required. Test and measure, people. Test and measure.

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