advertising through word of mouth only
Submitted by jlc on Thu, 10/11/2007 - 18:45.
Hi All,
The question I'm posing my seem strange given that this is a PPC advertising oriented forum. Please bear with me.
Have ya'll heard of State Farm? How about Geico? All State?
How about Erie Insurance, a Fortune 500 company? Erie has not spent a dime on advertising since it was founded in 1925.
They rely on word-of-mouth referrals only. Because they don't publicly advertise their services, Erie can maintain an exclusive clientèle that receives great rates.
I've spent money on PPC advertising, banner advertising, and ezine advertising. But nothing seems more effective than recommending my sites to others personally.
Any comments on the above?
Best,
Janna
Ever heard of a little company called Google? How much do you think they spend on advertising... $0. Same with YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Facebook and several other top web properties.
From December of '05 - Word of Mouth Marketing - Old is New Again...
http://www.quityourdayjob.com/blog/2006/01/04/word-of-mouth-marketing-old-is-new/
Word of mouth marketing is the holy grail of advertising. You have to offer a product or service that is truly unique and valuable before you can get millions of foot soldiers to do your advertising for you.
Some large affiliates like FatWallet and eBates have this kind of loyal following and don't spend hardly anything on advertising.
Best,
Jeremy
Ive heard of State Farm,Geico and All State. Why? because they advertise.
I have never heard of Erie. Why? because they don't advertise.
Word of mouth is a wonderful thing, but its not the only thing.
With Erie's great reputation they would double their business with a quality
advertising campaign.
As the old saying goes "there more than one way to skin a cat."
My take, Pogo
I couldn't image relying on word of mouth for affiliate marketing. Last month, I earned commissions on almost 3,000 leads. I don't know 3,000 people and since I work from home and I'm pretty much a hermit, I only spoke with about 10 people for the whole month. If I relied on word of mouth advertising, I would still have a day job. Sorry, I'm not sold on that concept.
My goal is to retire by the time I'm 45, so I need more than 10 leads a month. LOL
James
That's why I call it the holy grail ;) 99.999% of companies need traditional advertising. Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing is easier said than done.
Ive got to go with James/smile on this one.
Look at it from this perspective.
A corporation can go on forever. CEOs can come and go VPs can up and
quit, personel can turn over. The corporation can continue pretty much
indefintely. It can afford to slowly build up its business through word of mouth if that its desire.
You and I are normally a proprietorship, we have only our life time to
build our business, be it long or short,
Would you be content to wait 20 years for your business to build up through word of mouth? Probably not.
Advertising is most important for a Internet business. If you are a b & m
business you have physical presence in your market place. People know you, you are a member of the community.
If you are an Internet business you are just floating out there in the ether.
If you don't advertise(Adwords, ppc) its going to be a long,hard road.
Take Jeremy for example. Probably spent over 500,000. last year on
advertising and he has a lot more good word of mouth than we do!
Long story short, on the Internet its Advertise or perish!
Anyway thats my take on it! Pogo
LoL, James, you sound just like me, We are becoming a socity of Internet hermits. :shock:
Anyway, here's my take on "word of mouth marketing". It's not how many people you know or talk to. It's the army of other people who talk to each other and promote for you. A perfect example would be Jeremy & Anik's PPC Classroom launch.
I'm not sure of exactly how it went, but let's say Jeremy talked to Anik then Anik talked to some JV partners and the JV partners sent emails to their list and people on the list told their friends, etc. With 1500 members at $500 a pop I'd say it was a pretty successful launch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Jeremy spent any money on advertising.
Ok, think it only works when you have your own product? Have you ever heard of Travis Sago and his Bum Marketing Method? He has a tremendous following all from word of mouth.
Travis wrote a simple report about making money with articles and offered it for free on the warrior forum. He built a list of over 20,000 Internet marketers just by word of mouth. Now he sells affiliate products to his list and does very well.
John T
If I may weigh in again.
John T. Good post!
However I think we need to distinguish between the different products and
markets that we serve and promote.
Gurus have a much better chance of building word of mouth. If they have
a half decent program to promote they soon build an almost cult following.
Its almost like my Guru can beat up your Guru.
There is a personality cult that begins to build. Much easier to build word of mouth when you have an actual person and face that you can identify with and promote.
However if you are selling left handed spangler wrenches you have a much harder road to travel. Your customers normally come in ones and
twos. Very hard to build a following and word of mouth when you deal in
such products.(yes,it can be done!)
In short information sites, software sites, hobbyist sites,cause sites, and
perhaps many others can maybe survive off word of mouth.
For the rest of us wrench salesmen its Adwords and PPC.
As Forest Gump commented " That's all I have to say about that"
Jack/Pogo
PS For the best possible of both worlds. its good word of mouth AND effective advertising.
I think viral marketing is great if you can make it work. However, to do so without going down that fuzzy hype guru lane (promise the world and deliver nothing), you need quite a unique and interesting USP IMO - and thats pretty hard to come up with. pretty much all highly successful cases of viral marketing that I know had an excellent, one-of-a-kind product behind them. if you can develop such a product, honestly you dont need to be an affiliate :D
Agreed
When the product is good "Word of Mouth" or Viral Marketing can be the best marketing strategy. For example...
I have a friend in the PPC Formula forum who was a complete nobody a couple of months ago. No one knew of him. He created a type of landing page generator to help people avoid getting slapped by the Goog.
This is not one of those that just dynamically inserts keywords in the landing page. It dynamically inserts many types of content directly related to the keyword. The beta testers in the forum were giving it rave reviews. Now by "Word of Mouth" it has spread to other forums. It's even being talked about now in the PPC Classroom forum.
The man's name is Jonathan Van Clute and the software is called LPGen. If you haven't heard of it yet I'm sure you will soon. He said now several of the big gurus have approached him and want a piece of the action.
He was really struggling for a long time before he produced this software. He will be officially launching in 2 to 3 weeks and on launch day his whole life will change. So the moral of the story is if you produce something of REAL QUALITY and tell someone about it they will beat a path to your door.
There, from my mouth to your ears or should I say from my keyboard to your eyes. :wink:
John T
I don't mean to take the thread off topic, but James can I ask you a quick question?
Are you doing any email/zip submits?
I've tried several and I can't seem to make any of those campaigns profitable. Usually, it's because I can't get cheap enough clicks to make a profit with $1.50 commissions.
I guess one way to do it would be to front end them with something else, get their email address than back end them with the email/zip submit offers.
John T
Hi All,
Thanks for the great feedback. I agree with all the responses posted to my question on some level.
However, ending up with a lot of customers you don't really want is one consequence of unleashing huge marketing campaigns on the general public.
In both the retail and financial service worlds, I witnessed many incidences in which consistently whiny, unreasonable, late paying clients got 10 times as much attention as model customers of integrity and financial stability.
Customer Chemistry: How to Keep the Customers You Want-And Say "Good-Bye" to the Ones You Don't (Hardcover) makes this point more eloquently than I ever could.
People tend to have friends and business associates who reflect their values. I'll take an army of 10 dedicated model customers over an affiliate network of 5000 "get-rich-quick-oriented" affiliates any day. And twice on Sunday.
Best,
Janna
Hey John,
I'm actually using 100% PPC and my campaigns are 100% Pay Per Lead.
James