Non-Traditional Marketing: Leveraging Word of Mouth and Social Media

Non-Traditional Marketing: Leveraging Word of Mouth and Social Media

TRADITIONAL MARKETING FAILURESBillions are spent each year on marketing campaigns that end up leaving the clients who finance it dissatisfied or, worse yet, broke. A ton of time and resources are spent on pointless brand awareness (this is not saying that all brand awareness is pointless) that doesn't connect to buying habits of the public, humor for humor's sake, and even targeting too large an audience and diluting the efforts. I'm sure you've heard the stories of Super Bowl startups, spending millions on television spots for a good laugh and initial buzz only to later end up in Chapter 11 because revenues didn't last. Good marketing today is non-traditional marketing, with steps to measure marketing agencies and partners, leverage and create word of mouth marketing opportunities, and tapping traditional tactics as well as the new social media marketing of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.NON-TRADITIONAL MARKETING DRIVES SALESTop Non-Traditional Marketer Adair Witmer of The "W" Partners recommends that any marketing activity a small business undertakes must be able to be measured with respect to sales. Sales is the entire reason for marketing in the end, and even for non-sales professionals like engineers who lead firms, Sales is an acceptable 4-Letter word to not only say but measure marketing efforts against. Start with the Sales Funnel, where all activities engaged in at the top eventually separate the wheat from the chaff and end up trickling sales out the bottom. The better your tracking of activity in, that little trickle can turn into a flood with higher opportunity conversion. The best marketing pros interview clients going in and examine actions into the funnel, such as brand awareness activities. How do people connect your brand with buying habits for your product? Take print advertising, for example. How do you make sure that viewers end up purchasing or at least begin taking steps further into the sales funnel that start to narrow them down as buyers? For traditional media this is usually done with offer codes to track who is responding to a given ad or product placement. For channel sales partners, are they analyzing their individual conversion rates from suspect to prospect to demo-attendee to buyer and providing your firm with reports every month? If not, how on earth would you know with any sort of predictability what is going to happen in any given period? Stepping up these metrics is Non-Traditional Traditional Marketing. Luckily with current technology and the ubiquitous world of the internet playing a larger and larger role in small business marketing, it has become much easier to track effectiveness of funnel activities and measure marketing. Click-thru rates on banner ads and building landing pages that pace browsing prospects through each step of the sales process will demonstrate in your analytics how much falloff there is from initial interest until, in a full e-commerce sale, adding something to the shopping cart. There is still an art in setting it up and it is easier said than done. I make use of article marketing for website promotion and get quite a bit of my content reproduced around the web, with commesurate linkbacks, yet I struggle on to connect that fact with direct actions of buyers. In many cases, I may be providing the world with good free information and tips on small business, but perhaps only a select few will take that next step and want to hire me for the deep dive. WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING STRATEGIESTraditional Word of Mouth Marketing strategies still workrunning special events, providing coupons or bonuses for existing customers to refer you, etc. Social Media Marketing has taken your father's word of mouth campaigns and put them on steroids. The non-traditional new marketing via social media like Facebook and Twitter can be tracked and, when the seeds are planted correctly, cross the proverbial tipping point into viral success at a record pace not seen even five years ago. Here's the challenge: how much can you control events using social media marketing? AT 500 million plus Facebook subscribers, sometimes you have to just start the ball rolling, wait and watch where the marketplace takes your brand or product. With so much competing white noise in the space, that answer could range from nothing to turning your company into an Internet rock star. Marketing specialists like Adair Witmer use the difficult and time consuming tool of extensive market research to serve up her customers a plate of more up-front control. By speaking directly to target consumers of a client's products, she finds out what pushes their motivational buttons enough to blog about a brand, tweet and re-tweet to their friends, give it the Facebook thumbs up, or promote it to niche LinkedIn groups. This up-front dialogue before throwing the bank vault at a social media marketing campaign provides small business owners with an affordable fighting chance at capturing existing passion for products that otherwise might be lost. They can then provide current customers with what is the most meaningful ways to get them vocal about products, companies and brands for their word of mouth marketing campaigns.VIRTUAL VERTICAL MARKET SPECIALISTSOne benefit of the new world of work, where vertical market specialists can use the tools of virtual technology to be hired guns, literally communicating around the world from anywhere, is that small business can now gain much easier and affordable access to world class talent. If your engineering or IT consulting company is struggling in the Sales area, you can bring in experts in the Sales Discovery process to provide virtual training. Not sure how to establish a working company blog page? There are subject matter experts roaming the globe who can help, put fun into it, and even ghost write for the company president. The availability of these niche resources allows small companies to compete with the Fortune 500 and be bigger than ever to capitalize on the necessary dialogue to market and, ultimately, sell in the new world of non-traditional customer engagement.

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