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

1. Word of mouth
2. Email Marketing
   
3. Organic SEO
4. Paid Search
   
5. 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 organically?

This question reminds me of the in-house debate among SEO’s over the most effective link building strategy. Do you build, buy, or beg for links or do you create powerful, unique, and engaging content that transforms your site into a natural link magnet?

If word of mouth was as simple as throwing up a YouTube video or creating a Tell-a-Friend page, everyone would drop traditional paid advertising methods such as search, email, or display ads. Obviously, a truly successful viral marketing campaign depends requires more.

Simpleology gives a brilliant break-down of the 2 main types of word of mouth marketing.

Incentivized Word of Mouth

This type of WOM marketing attempts to stimulate viral marketing through incentives, usually monetization. An example would be a refer a friend program that allows customers to earn store credit by getting friends to buy.

Inspired Word of Mouth

Inspired WOM marketing, in contrast, occurs naturally and without incentives. This can be as simple as one soccer mom telling another about the great experience she had at a hair salon, or an influential blogger who reviews a product he or she had a great a experience with.

Customers who engage in inspired WOM marketing typically aren’t just customers, they’re raving fans. Their passion may be based on the product, service, or the entire experience. In all likelihood, the customers that are engaged in this type of WOM are your top 1,000 fans.

So how does a company create genuinely inspired WOM?

Back to the Basics

In reality, I believe the most successful viral marketing comes as a result of only 2 things:

1. Creating products that are actually worth talking about and or…
2. Providing legendary customer service that consistently exceeds expectations

The simplicity of this formula is great news for many e-tailers, who will never be able to create a successful viral marketing campaign. For example, how does a website selling printer cartridges stir up viral buzz? Simple, they just do what they know best. They run their business with excellence and by providing an outstanding mix or products and service.

Why do so many viral marketing campaigns fail? Because they’re trying to create something from nothing. They’re attempt to create buzz results in hyped up, blatant, and sometimes tacky advertising tactics.

In contrast, consider Starbucks, who recently closed their doors for 3 hours in order to refocus on customer experience by learning to make better coffee.

Like Starbucks, many online retailers need to get back to the basics, take a “coffee break”, and refocus on what they do best. When this happens, inspired word of mouth will follow.

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 get customers on their email list. We wanted to take this one step further. Rather than capturing the email and then showing a “thank you for entering” page, we created an incentive for customers to pass along the information about the drawing they just entered. Basically, the program works like this:

1. Existing customer enters drawing for product/gift certificate on website
2. Customer is asked to “Tell-A-Friend” about the contest/drawing
3. For each friend who enters contest, the original customer receives 2 more entries
4. Friend of original customer passes the contest on to their friends, who tell their friends, and so on…

As you can see, the contest has the potential to spread virally very quickly. Of course, the contest or drawing has to have enough of an incentive to create this buzz. With C28, we use products or giveaway items that are targeted to the customer demographic.

The results of the viral contest were very impressive. Not only were new people being introduced to the brand, but we were able to track orders coming from people who were referred by the contest.

Leave a comment if you’ve every used anything like this before, and how it worked for you.

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.

1. Free PC Wallpapers
2. Screensavers
3. Printable flyers
4. Avatars
5. AOL Buddy icons
6. Myspace backgrounds
7. Mysapce layouts
8. Copy and paste HTML banners

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to integrate a customer referral program into this free content. For now, checkout 2 great examples of online street team.

• Threadless street team
• C28 Street team

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.

1. 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 certicate, products, or other special recognition. Here’s an example of a YouTube video contest I did for a customer recently.
2. Video Testimonials: It’s very common to ask your customers for testimonials. Why not ask for a video testimonial? Of course, you may need to provide an incentive for this since it is a big time investment for your customer.
3. How To Videos: “How To”, or “Do it Yourself” videos are a great way to provide useful content while at the same time promoting your website. YouTube has a category entirely to this type of video, and it is extremely popular. Be sure to link to your website from your YouTube video profile. Also, it’s very effective to offer a teaser as part of the video such as “more How-To video available at www.yoururl.com/videos.” A strong call to action will ensure your videos get responded to in the way you intended. Here’s an example from a company called planiTweb that created an SEO oriented how-to video.

Leave a comment if you have any other YouTube video marketing ideas or if you’ve used any of the both. Happy marketing….

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 line that represents not just fashion but also a lifestyle and image. Because of the power of the brand, much of their marketing is word of mouth.

Over a period of several months, we created an online street team only area of the C28 website featuring tons of free content such as wallpapers, screensavers, myspace content, and flyers. We also provided online promotion tools such a personalized email templates, copy and paste html banners, avatars, etc. We also went a step further and combine this free content with the ability to let street team customers earn store credits by referring friends.

The response was overwhelming. Customers immedietely embraced the content and the idea. Some came for the free stuff, some came to earn credit, some came for both. While we expected the street team to appeal only to a younger audience, a quick survey proved we had customers ranging from the teens to middle aged fans, all willing to promote the brand.

Obviously, a Street team such as this is not practical for every business. However, I strongly believe nearly any business in industry can benefit from this concept in some way. Stay tuned, as I’ll share some more ideas on street team marketing…