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Lets be honest, marketing isn’t rocket science! Unfortunately, a number of marketeers would have you believe it is. How do they do this? They use jargon that makes things more complicated.

One of the things that got 10Yetis started was anger at the way in which the marketing industry dressed simple things up to justify costs. I like to think 10Yetis doesn’t do that, we tell it how it is and try to keep the jargon to a minimum. Recently though, I have to hold my hands up and say I fell off the wagon and got sucked into “jargonism”.

It was Viral Marketing that did it… there I go again. What is Viral Marketing? Well, to you and I and everyone on the street it is simply “word of mouth”. Communicating with another person to tell them about something you think they may be interested in. The world of marketing thinks “word of mouth” is to simplistic though so they give it the fancy name of Viral Marketing (kind of like the way supermarkets now call ‘shelf-stackers’, ‘store replenishers’).

From this point on I am going to call it Word of Mouth or in this newsletter ‘WoM’.

I want to give a few tips and pointers on WoM marketing in this newsletter as I am personally in love with the online version. I would very much like 10Yetis to become an expert in this field and have read up and studied extensively about what makes it work and yes, we are looking for clients who want to join us in developing this area.

It is widely accepted that in the commercial world WoM was first used electronically by Hotmail and the way in which it ended every email communication with the message “Get your free email at Hotmail”. The following two statistics prove how successful the Hotmail campaign was:

1. It is now the largest email service provider in Sweden and India… and has done no paid-for marketing at all in those two countries.
2. Hotmail is used in over 220 countries even though it is only available in one language; English.

Another excellent and more recent success story is FriendsReunited. At the time of its launch it spent no money on advertising yet had one of the fastest growing registration rates of around 10,000 to 15,000 per day. At present, according to stats from the website it has around 10 million registered users!

As I said in April’s newsletter, before you launch any campaign you have to make sure you are ready and it is no different for WoM. You must first understand who your audience is, where they can be found and what methods need to be used to get them to engage with your brand/product or service message and then encourage them to forward it on. As part of my research into WoM I read a great book by Russel Goldsmith called, “Viral Marketing – getting your audience to do your marketing for you”. In this book are a number statistics showing the most approachable demographics of people who are most likely to be influenced by electronic WoM messages. Goldsmith commissioned a survey using Tickbox.net to find out people attitudes to WoM campaigns and the results should help you to tailor your messages:

I consider the next stat to be vital for helping to decide what goes into your campaign…

I personally believe a short funny video clip, linked to your product or service, preferably on a landing page somewhere on your website is the way forward. In today’s fast-paced, lifestyle driven society messages need to be quick, easy to understand and more importantly simple to forward on. Whilst some still recommend attachments in emails I think that as people become more educated to not open attachments that they don’t know the origins of and as many of your target audiences will be sat behind company firewalls that prevent your messages getting through, landing pages on a site are much more effective.