Use Word of Mouth Advertising
One of dozens of strategies listed and linked to here:
How to Make More Money
From Your Business
By Steve Gillman
We have all heard the expression "word of mouth advertising."
Get people talking about your product, service or company and
you have the cheapest--and perhaps most effective--marketing
available. So how do you get this to happen? Let's look at some
of the possible ways.
Ideally if you offer a great product or service it will be
natural for your customers to tell others about it. But there
are also ways to prompt this word-of-mouth advertising. The most
recent tactic involve what is now called "social marketing,"
and "buzz marketing." If you can make an entertaining
video to put on YouTube.com and other such websites, people will
link to it, tell friends about it, and show it to them. Just
be sure that the name of you company or website is mentioned
during it or at the end of the video.
If you don't have a clue how to do this you can hire out the
work. You could pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for
a video though, and you really don't know if it will "go
viral" and be watched by the multitudes. On the other hand,
a few cheap experiments won't cost much. I recently have seen
several people at Fiverr.com offering to do video testimonials
for any product for $5. These are not likely to be creative enough
for use on YouTube, but you could send them out in emails to
customers who might share them with friends.
Buzz marketing involves creating "buzz" or publicity
of a sort. There are even companies that hire people to talk
about your products to friends, and to do so in public places
to create more awareness. They will wear t-shirts with your logo,
post their thoughts about your company or products on their personal
blogs and Facebooks pages and more.
Of course, the simplest and cheapest ways to get word of mouth
advertising is to ask your satisfied customers to tell others
about what you offer. You can sometimes bribe them. My accountant
has coupons for us to give to others (we are very satisfied with
his service), and we get a discount if the coupon is redeemed.
Events or unusual promotions create a lot of talk as well.
A local pizzeria has a magician wandering from table to table
every Friday evening. I have told several people about this,
and some of them may have gone there to have pizza.
How you promote word of mouth advertising will depend on what
kind of business you have. But people respond more positively
to what a friend says than they do to an ad in a magazine or
paper, so it's worth looking for ways to encourage such social
publicity.
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