How Word of Mouth Marketing Works

A real life example.

Today I signed up a client to Jobthread , an easy to use jobs board service. I heard about Jobthread from the wonderful Society for Word of Mouth , (SWOM) which I in turn found out about from Michele Miller of Wonder Branding and co-author of "The Soccer Mom Myth ".

I found out about Michele from Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg at Future Now who I was fortunate enough to have worked with many years ago.

This is a very definite path, and one I can personally recognise.

Can This Be Measured?

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Content is Not King – it is Supreme

How Web 3.0, the Semantic Web Will Affect Everything

The web of the future is going to make content supreme. What’s more, it’s going to make it incredibly valuable in ways that may finally see content creators get real reward and value for their efforts.

Almost since the start of the modern web, industry experts have been continually saying that Content is King: And they’ve been right, but now they’re right in ways that they couldn’t have possibly imagined.

The coming semantic web, known variously as the data web, microformats, FOAF, RDF, Linked Data, Web 3.0 and a whole host of new acronyms is pointing to big changes in cybersphere.

Yahoo recently announced it was embracing semantic web standards , and has already released some interesting tools that point to the future. Many are seeing this as a good thing and direct challenge to Google.

The End of Google?

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How To Get More Customers Online

Some interesting reports have recently been released detailing what techniques and strategies many direct marketers are using to acquire and keep customers.

Direct marketers are usually the sharpest cookies in the marketing arena because they are obsessed with producing financial results, and will usually do whatever it takes to turn a dollar. (No bad taste jokes please.)

Therefore, they are usually worth listening to as they can always back up their marketing strategies with hard results.

The Number One Tactic

According to Target Marketing’s Media Usage Report, the number one tactic for getting more customers and giving the strongest return on investment (ROI) was direct mail.

That’s the printed, personal letter in an envelope with stamp kind of mail. Read the rest of this entry »

To Market Online You Must Market Offline

Traditional offline marketing is one of the most effective ways of driving qualified customers to your online business.

However, it is often totally overlooked by many in the ecommece and online marketing arena. Scratch any online marketer and you’ll find an almost obsessive focus on search engine optimization, search engine marketing and online advertising.

There will probably be some talk about email marketing, and, if they are really on the ball, a discussion about conversion rate improvement, but traditional offline marketing methods will probably barely rate a mention.

As a business owner, this means you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to drive customers to your site and generate revenue.

Traditional marketing’s effectiveness at generating online customers was recently highlighted in research by The e-Tailing Group.

It found that consumers are most motivated to go online after:

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Online Advertising Doesn’t Work - Yet More Evidence

I recently came across a DoubleClick report entitled: Video Ad Benchmarks: Average Campaign Performance Metrics, which enthused about how video ads were 5 times more effective than graphic ads.

“Big deal,” I thought. Traditional graphic ads, banner ads etc have a click thru rate barely above zero, so 5 times zero is still nothing.

My assessment was confirmed later in the report where it stated: “…the click-rate for plain GIF or JPG image ads based on DoubleClick data is approximately 0.1%”

So let’s be clear about this. For every 1,000 people who see the ad, only 1 will actually click on it. If you couple that with the appallingly low conversion rates of 2% for most sites, then you need 50,000 people to see the ad just to make one sale.

You Will Lose Money

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