If I were to rank the effectiveness of each marketing avenue for most businesses I’ve worked with, here’s how they stack up.

Word of mouth
Email Marketing

Organic SEO
Paid Search

Display Advertising

In many ways, items 2-5 are easy. They have well-established best practices to follow. Word of mouth advertising, or viral marketing, is a different beast. How do you stimulate this activity among your customers? Is it possible to create this type of genuine buzz, or must it come …

Viral marketing may be one of the most elusive, yet most potentially lucrative forms of online marketing. Many online marketers spin their wheels hopelessly in an effort to create a buzz around their products and services. While many attempts fail, many succeed and bring tremendous benefits. In this post, I’ll share a very successful tactic that I implemented for Christian retailer C28 using an online viral contest.
It’s not uncommon to see retailers offering incentives to …

In Street Team marketing part 1, I discussed some strategies used to create an online street team as a way of brand marketing. Below are some ideas for providing useful content for your street team. Obvisously, each of these suggestions will not apply equally to all business types as it will depend greatly on your brand identity and your customer demographic.

Free PC Wallpapers
Screensavers
Printable flyers
Avatars
AOL Buddy icons
Myspace backgrounds
Mysapce layouts
Copy and paste HTML banners

In the next post, I’ll …

YouTube video marketing is all the rage. After spying out what companies are doing these days, I’ve listed a few ideas to help you fabricate your own video marketing campaign.

Viral Video Contests: Rather than investing hours of time creating your own videos, why not have your customers do it for you? Try creating a contest centered around your products or your products being used. Reward the winner with a gift certificate, products, or other special …

In a previous post, I mentioned the concept of street team marketing. Although the concept is nothing new in the music industry, not many other businesses have not yet embraced it as a viable marketing medium.
So what can a street team do for a business? Let me use an example of how we implemented a street team at a C28, a faith based apparel retailer I currently work for. C28 has a well branded clothing …