Archive for the ‘word-of-mouth marketing’ Category

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Fake Word-of-Mouth Marketing Could Cost You

Friday, February 10th, 2012

Word-of-mouth marketing, the kind of marketing where your customers spread the word for you, is an exceptionally effective marketing strategy in our world of connections and sharing. Customers trust word-of-mouth because it comes from their disinterested friends, family or online community.

When a business first opens or releases a new product, they might be tempted to “get the ball rolling” by asking employees or relatives to post favorable reviews, but this dishonesty might cost them. Online word-of-mouth marketing only works because customers trust the recommendations, reviews and ratings. It’s dangerous to risk losing that trust.

For instance, potential customers might spot the fakes and publicly denounce the reviews. Even worse, the FTC might come knocking on your door. From an FTC news release:

“A public relations agency hired by video game developers will settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it engaged in deceptive advertising by having employees pose as ordinary consumers posting game reviews at the online iTunes store, and not disclosing that the reviews came from paid employees working on behalf of the developers.”

Clearly, this PR agency will have a difficult time reclaiming its reputation. As with every aspect of life, honesty is the best policy. Inspire real customers with great experiences, and you won’t need to run the risk of fake word-of-mouth.

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Posted in Government, Social Networking, word-of-mouth marketing | No Comments »

Yelp for Small Business Marketing

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Your small business is already on Yelp. People are voicing their opinions about your business, and others are listening to their advice.

Yelp reported that 61 million people visited the site in the 3rd quarter of 2011.

Many small business owners don’t realize Yelp’s influence, let alone contribute to the conversation on the site. Including Yelp in your small business marketing plan can be a great way to build word-of-mouth-marketing. You’ll develop relationships with influential customers and encourage new customers to give you a try.

What is Yelp?

I would describe Yelp as an avid online community of passionate reviewers, eager to uphold their reputation and grow their influence. Casual users visit the site to find recommendations about nearby businesses, whether that be near where they live or where they are traveling.

Yelp got its start with restaurants, but it’s not just for restaurants anymore. You’ll find reviews on dentists, retail shopping, hair salons or even hardware stores. In many cities, the company has invested in local Community Managers, who develop and nurture relationships with local businesses and power reviewers.

Yelp Advertising

Of course Yelp would tell you the best way to improve your marketing with their site would be to buy advertising. Advertisements appear in search results and on competitors’ business pages. Below is an example showing Hannoush Jewelers’ business page with an advertisement for Rogers Jewelers:

There are a few other perks to advertising, such as the ability to display a video. Advertising on Yelp ranges from $300-$1000 per month.

Yelp Deals

Yelp also offers a way to provide customers with discounts from your business page, called Yelp Deals. Customers buy the “deal” from the site, and Yelp keeps 30% of the sale. Here’s an example of a deal, shown in a search result:

It’s hard to say how effective Yelp Deals are, but they might be worth an experiment, especially since there are no up-front costs.

More Marketing with Yelp Tips

There are several things small businesses can do to improve their Yelp marketing efforts without buying advertising or posting deals. I recommend taking these steps before making any ad buys.

First, ensure your business information is complete and up-to-date. On your business’s page, “unlock” your listing to add hours of operation, menus, pictures or an OpenTable reservations widget. Here’s a screenshot:

Once you unlock your business’s page, you’ll also be able to see handy data about the visitors to your page.

Another benefit to unlocking your page is that you’ll be able to communicate with your reviewers. Responding to your reviewers can build your relationships with them… if you do it carefully.

To respond to a negative review, consider the customer’s input constructive criticism, and try to remedy the issues the customer experienced. If you can “make it right” with the reviewer, chances are she will revise her review more positively. Even if the review is unreasonable, your business will not benefit if you reply angrily or defensively.

Responding to a positive review is much easier. Consider sending a private thank-you to the reviewer with a personalized note that shows you truly read and understood the review.

To really engage with Yelp, find out if your city has a Community Manager. This person organizes events for Yelp reviewers, and you might be able to improve your standing with local reviewers by hosting a free event just for them.

For more information about marketing with Yelp, send me an email: amanda@zooinajungle.com, or you can check out some of my reviews on my Yelp profile.

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Posted in Advertising, Customers, Small Business, Social Networking, word-of-mouth marketing | No Comments »

Use Your Product to Sell Your Product

Friday, January 6th, 2012

If you’ve got a great product or service, what’s the best way to market and sell it?

By letting customers try it out!

Lighthouse Carwash does this whenever they open a new car wash. For the first few days, all the washes are free. It helps them build a customer base by showing just how great the service is.

Busken Bakery in Cincinnati does the same with their business catering service. Their flyer promoting the service is pretty nice:

But it isn’t nearly as enticing as the free dozen donuts that accompanies it:

Who wouldn’t trust this bakery to cater their next business breakfast after tasting these delicious donuts? (My apologies to anyone dieting this January.)

Not only does giving samples allow customers to experience your product, it’s a much more cost-effective marketing effort than almost any other tactic. For instance, compare the cost of a free car wash or dozen donuts to the price of a radio commercial.

When you’ve got a great product you can sample, your customers get a delightful experience, and your business stays in the marketing budget. See why it’s the best?

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Posted in Advertising, Customer Experience, Marketing, Selling, word-of-mouth marketing | No Comments »

Marketing Podcast: Twitter Tips

Friday, December 9th, 2011

This month, I was privileged to talk Twitter marketing with Dave Weatherholt on his radio show, “Getting Down to Business.” In the adventure that is radio broadcasting, Dave’s other guest was unable to make it, so we extended our Twitter talk to the whole show.

Listen and enjoy!

Link: Marketing Podcast: Twitter Tips

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Posted in Marketing Podcasts, Social Networking, word-of-mouth marketing | No Comments »

Should I be on Twitter?

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

If you answer “Yes” to the following two questions, you should probably include a Twitter presence in your marketing plan:

  • Are you interesting?
  • Are your customers on Twitter?

That is my basic litmus test to answer if a business or person should be on Twitter. More specifically, personalities, speakers, authors, thought leaders, news organizations, technology companies and similar groups should make room in the marketing budget for Twitter.

Who shouldn’t be on Twitter?

To effectively market with Twitter requires quite a time commitment– you have to develop a community of followers by engaging in conversation and keeping them interested. If your customers don’t use Twitter, don’t bother including it in your marketing activities. It’s OK to just say “No!” to any marketing activity that won’t help you reach your business goals.

What should I say?

Marketing on Twitter is less about what you say and more about how you participate. People use Twitter for news, stories, conversations, and to learn what others are thinking right this moment about important (and not-so-important) issues in their lives. No one uses Twitter to receive deals or special offers from businesses. Be friendly and join conversations. Consider Twitter the cocktail party of marketing more than a megaphone.

What about that Twitter vocab?

Here’s some Twitter vocabulary to get you started.

  • Tweep – a Twitter user
  • Tweet – What tweeps post
  • # – This little guy is called a hashtag, and it allows tweeps to add categories to their tweets. For instance, #marketing would be a tweet about marketing. Usually, event organizers specify a hashtag to use when attendees are tweeting from the event, so people the world over can follow the happenings.
  • RT – Retweet. Give credit where credit is due. If you repost someone’s tweet, credit them with RT @username.

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Posted in Relationships, Social Networking, Technical Tips, word-of-mouth marketing | 1 Comment »

Marketing is easy when you’re awesome

Friday, October 14th, 2011

A couple weeks ago, I published a post imploring businesses to be good. Being good is important for your business, though it might not make your marketing any easier. But what if your business is not just good, it’s awesome? Being awesome opens the door to great marketing opportunities that makes your marketing strategy easy.

Here are three ways marketing is easy when you’re awesome:

1. PR and social media are easy

For many businesses, developing a compelling PR and social media strategy is hard– what do we say? who will care? who will spread the message? But for businesses that are awesome, PR is easy.

Grady Veterinary Hospital in Cincinnati, OH accepts animals in need from the SPCA. Right now, they are caring for a kitten that had been set on fire and loosed on a city street. Each day, they provide updates on the little guy’s progress. Because they do awesome things, their public relations and social media strategy is easy: Tell stories about the wonderful animals we help.

2. Word of mouth marketing is easy

It’s pretty obvious that if your business is awesome, your customers will want to talk about you. That’s the essence of word of mouth marketing. Give your customers something to talk about– a charitable initiative, an innovative application of your product or service that goes above and beyond what they could have imagined.

The BonBonerie is an extremely successful confectioner here in Cincinnati. Customer demand is so strong that they have an entire cafe dedicated to wedding cake tastings. Their business has been built mostly on word-of-mouth marketing because their business is amazing. The beautiful cakes, delicious flavors and careful service give customers plenty to rave about. Crafting this business wasn’t easy, but the word of mouth marketing is creating itself.

3. Employee satisfaction is easy

Happy employees make happy customers. When an employee believes in what she does, she wants to help each customer as much as she can. And, no surprise, employees find it easiest to believe in awesome employers.

When I worked at Apple, my fellow employees were 100% dedicated to the company’s way of doing business. Apple has a great employee training program and customer service methodology, and the employees already believe wholeheartedly in the products they sell. Because employees believe the company is awesome, they are able to provide customers with awesome experiences.

Marketing is easy when you’re awesome. “But my business isn’t awesome,” you might reply. So what are you going to do about it?

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Posted in Employees, Marketing, Marketing Theory, Public Relations, Small Business, word-of-mouth marketing | 1 Comment »

Be Good, Businesses

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

The plumber ruined my plaster ceiling.

A year later, the roofer broke my deck.

Does this look right to you?

Does this look "right" to you?

They both told me, “I want to make this right.” Then, they did everything in their power to avoid paying. (With limited success. I’m pretty tenacious.)

In the age of word-of-mouth marketing, with Angie’s List, Yelp and girlfriends getting together for coffee, how could any business person be so short-sighted to think shirking a responsibility today would result in profit tomorrow?

Honesty and virtue are key ingredients to long-term success. It sounds old-fashioned, because there’s nothing new about being a good business with good people.

Dishonesty can lead to short-term gains–remember Enron?–but ultimately ends in business disaster. For the plumber, I wrote a reasonable yet scathing review of his business and chose one of his dozen competitors to be my go-to plumber. As for the roofer, I related my story to friends and neighbors, so they can make informed decisions in the future. I’m just one home-owner, but my influence extends beyond my own purchasing needs.

And the same is true of your customers. Each day, your customers are evaluating your dependability and trustworthiness. They are sharing their opinions with friends and family. Their opinions carry more weight than the most perfectly-designed marketing campaign.

So, be good. Do the right thing.

Your business will profit from it, and so will your conscience.

P.S. Bonus: The effects of unethical business decisions extend further than word-of-mouth. If you have customers who won’t pay anything until the last jot and tittle of the contract are fulfilled, they’ve likely been treated badly in the past. They feel the need to protect themselves. And who can blame them? We’ve all heard the lie at sometime or other, “I want to make this right.”

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Posted in Customer Experience, Customers, Philosophy, Relationships, word-of-mouth marketing | 2 Comments »

Facebook Marketing Tips

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

Facebook marketing is becoming increasingly important for certain kinds of businesses. These include locally owned businesses, brands with exceptional personality and organizations that inspire great loyalty in their customers.  Sixty-one percent of Internet users visit social networking sites, like Facebook. Chances are, a percentage of your customers visit Facebook every single day (or multiple times a day!).

The basic building blocks of marketing on Facebook are to develop a page for your business, regularly update that page and advertise to get customers to ‘like’ your page. Once a customer ‘likes’ your page, your updates will display on their wall; their friends will be able to see that they ‘like’ you, and they will have a chance to interact with your business on Facebook.

If you do a great job marketing on Facebook, customers will engage with you, recommend you to their friends and stay interested in all of your updates. Your page will be a great marketing tool that your customers will enjoy. If you do a bad job with Facebook marketing, customers will ‘hide’ your posts, and your efforts will be useless. If you do a really bad job, customers will ‘unlike’ your page and tell their friends about their bad experiences.

To help you do a great job with Facebook marketing, I’ve put together some Facebook marketing tips. To illustrate my tips, I’m using posts from the Cincinnati Zoo’s Facebook page. With 60,000 ‘likes’ and 2,500 check-ins, this marketing effort is extraordinarily successful. A quick glance at the page shows why their Facebook marketing works– the Cincinnati Zoo has implemented marketing strategies that attract interest and interaction from its customer base.

1. Post interesting content on Facebook.

Content is king. Content keeps your customers interested and keeps your business top-of-mind. Like this video post from the Cincinnati Zoo:

Not every business can post a video of a baby bearcat, but you must develop content that will be interesting to your customers. Try to post many different types of media like pictures, videos and blog posts. Strike a balance between entertaining, informational and promotional content.

2. Motivate your customers to interact on your Facebook page.

One way Facebook marketing is different from email marketing is that the customers can talk back to you. Inspiring interaction is a great way to get customers more involved with your business. The Cincinnati Zoo has a contest every Friday, soliciting photo captions, like the one below:

This particular contest received 346 comments, 149 likes and many voters on the individual comments. That kind of participation is well worth the prize given away. Other ways to encourage participation would be to have a poll, ask for picture and video submissions or simply asking an intriguing question.

3. Respond to your customers’ questions.

Before a joint event with the Zoo and the Cincinnati Reds, I posted a question on the Zoo’s Facebook posting. Someone answered my question in under an hour. By responding to questions quickly, you teach your customers that your Facebook page is a resource they should keep returning to.

4. Be subtle with your sales.

Facebook users are on the site to get updates on their friends, share about themselves, be entertained and learn interesting facts. They aren’t on Facebook to see advertisements on their walls. Here’s a subtle way the Cincinnati Zoo promoted their summer camp:

The Facebook poster shared a child’s experience and asked others to share their children’s experiences. It started a nice dialogue, but the real goal was to educate customers about the existence of a summer camp. It’s fine to occasionally post informational updates about a new product or your annual sale, but do it in a way that will interest your customers. Just posting a picture and a price isn’t enough.

These are just four tips to help your Facebook marketing, and following them is crucial to building a successful presence. There’s lots more to learn to become a Facebook marketing expert, though. If you have specific questions about your business’s unique situation or offerings, feel free to email me: amanda@zooinajungle.com

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Posted in Advertising, Customer Experience, Marketing Theory, Social Networking, word-of-mouth marketing | 1 Comment »

Marketing Throughout the Lifecycle

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

Do you have different marketing strategies for interacting with customers at each phase of the customer lifecycle? Most businesses don’t, but they should. The cost of acquiring a new customer can be quite high– think of traditional metrics like CPM, CPC or less traditional ones like the time spent making unfruitful sales calls and writing proposals. However, the cost of keeping a customer is usually much less. (Additionally, the cost for getting referrals from your customers is often nothing.)

There are many different customer lifecycle models, but I like Steve Yastrow’s. In fact, he wrote a great article about the topic, “Most Companies Stop Marketing.” Here’s his model:

As illustrated, most businesses focus their marketing on helping customers learn about them, then slack off when it comes to purchasing and the ongoing customer relationship. Think of it like the cable TV, wireless phone provider or car insurance model: reel customers in with a great deal, then see how much hassle you can get them to put up with before a competitor entices them with a better deal. Most businesses aren’t quite as blatant as this, but the result is the same– customers get upset or bored with them and move to a competitor.

Your business will have an incredible competitive advantage if you develop and implement marketing strategies for keeping your customers. When competitors lose their customers, those customers will come to you. And these customers will stay with you, breaking the cycle of fickleness.

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Posted in Customer Experience, Marketing Theory, Relationships, word-of-mouth marketing | No Comments »

Marketing Podcast: Word of Mouth Marketing

Friday, May 20th, 2011

In this marketing podcast, I talk about word of mouth marketing- the marketing strategy for getting referrals. Word of Mouth Marketing is the most powerful way to get new customers. Why do I think that and what can you do to improve your referrals? Listen to find out!

Listen or download below:

Word of Mouth Marketing

Download the Word of Mouth Marketing MP3 file here. (6.1 MB)

This segment first aired during “Getting Down to Business” on Alaska’s Fox News Talk 1020.

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Posted in Marketing Podcasts, word-of-mouth marketing | No Comments »

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