Saturday, 31 January 2009 12:50 PM
We have all heard it before, 'word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising'. A lot of businesses survival depends on it - but what do you do when word of mouth dies off? Some people say 'word of mouth is like the weather, you can't control it'. That's not true because there are proven & tested strategies that can fuel your word of mouth like a fire. If you apply these 'WOM' marketing strategies you will see a dramatic increase in sales and profit.
Here are 4 Word of Mouth marketing strategies..
Create A Buzz: One of the most powerful ways to get people to talk about you is by creating a buzz. This can be done by communicating sales, special events or just simply providing a strong customer experience. If the event you are offering is 'newsworthy' there may be an opportunity to generate some free publicity - which means free advertising.
Offer Referral Incentives: The quickest way to get a new customer to talk about you is by offering a decent incentive to do so. This is when you turn your customers into commission based sales people. These referral incentives could be in the form of credit for your business or just cold hard cash.
Recruit An Army Of Affiliates: There are people who are dealing with your target market who could be your affiliates. By building relationships with these people you could be opening the door to 100's of quality leads. Once again, offer incentives through an affiliate partnership to encourage them to refer their contacts to you. Make sure you are not stingy with your incentive because it can restrain people from referring you.
Use 'Tell a Friend' System: By proving a simple way of letting your raving fans tell others about you, you will generate a ton of referrals. There are new web based 'tell a friend' systems which will provide automated ways of letting your customers refer you to their contacts. Once your customers fill out a form it will send an email from them to their contacts automatically.
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Saturday, 17 January 2009 3:26 PM
4 important questions you need to ask yourself if you want to survive & thrive through the coming recession.
Recently MYOB conducted a survey to Australian businesses concerning
the coming recession. 57% of the participants predicted a coming
recession and 58% expected the economy to be far worse in the next 12
months. 88% of the respondent considered planning and preparing their
business to
ensure survival through economic recession to be important but only 44% have a plan to get through it. Have you prepared your business for this coming recession? When
revenue dies down, the one activity you can do in your business to control business incoming sales is marketing.
The unfortunate thing is that most businesses cut their advertising
budgets to reduce overheads - in reality, what a business should be
doing, is finding ways to
make their marketing more effective so that advertising generate more results.
Here are 4 questions you need to ask yourself in preparation for this coming recession.
Do you have a direct response marketing strategy in place? You
can't waste your precious advertising dollars on marketing that doesn't
work. Spending 1000's of dollars on getting your name and logo in the
market place simply won't generate you the return on investment you
want. You need a marketing strategy that is focused on getting your
target market to respond to your offering.
How much mind share do you have with your client base? Your
building can burn down, you can lose your staff but if you have your
database you're ok. Statistics prove that it's 6 times more expensive
to generate a new client over re-selling existing ones. You need to
make sure you have mind share with your client base so none of your
competition can take any of your clients.
Are you doing any search engine marketing? There is no point
spending money on people who may not be interested in what you offer
when there are people searching for what you sell in the first place.
Search engine market is all about channelling the "pro-active market"
into your sales funnel. You need to utilise the search engine marketing
so you deal with people who are interested in what you offer.
Is your website an effective marketing tool? Just because you
have a website it doesn't mean you are reaching your target market.
Unfortunately a lot of business websites are not lead generating tools
but are merely graphics and text on the internet. You need to make sure
that your website is set-up to convert the traffic coming into the
website, into hot qualified leads.
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