Marketing, whether you are employing wholly online or social marketing or a more traditional offline marketing approach can still be an expensive exercise.
Which is fine as long as you see a return on that investment.
Perhaps the greatest cost to any marketing campaign is the time that it takes for the small or medium sized business to implement it, particularly if that business is a sole trader and having to do it all themselves.
But what your customers? Your pre-qualified fans and brand champions? They are an amazingly valuable resource to you because they already love you! All you have to do is put them to work – get them to do your marketing for you!
And here are 5 easy ways to make that happen.
1. Facebook Profile Images.
There are more than 750 million people using Facebook – that’s a pretty big direct salesforce, just waiting to work for you. What if 100, 1000, even 10,000 of them changed the image on their Facebook Profile from the photo of them holding their own smartphone 2 feet away from themselves for the classic ‘self-portrait’ to an image that you have provided them? That image, of course, is something containing either directly or indirectly, your branding.
Better yet, how about get them to be creative and use your logo or product in an image that they take themselves – the most creative of which wins a prize.
Remember, you don’t need to promise these people a car or anything huge like that. They are already your fans, you just have to provide some recognition and an excuse for them to show something to their own network – most of which may not have been exposed to your brand yet.
2. FourSquare Check-Ins.
If you are a Twitter user, you know the kind of people who check-in to places on FourSquare (or Facebook Places) and tell the whole world about it every single time (OK, I’m sorta one of those people sometimes).
While some people might be annoyed by that – and there is a simple solution if they are – it’s also a fantastic opportunity for the market to do your marketing for you. The great majority of people who use both FourSquare and Twitter use them in conjunction: they check in to a place, and share that check-in with their network on Twitter, with or without some comment about why they are there, who they are there with or whatever.
You need to make the most of that. Imagine this check-in at your cafe, “The Eggs Benedict at this place is SOOO good and only $8! (@ABC Cafe) http://4sq.com/abcdef“. Whether you lead them along and ask them to comment a particular way or on a particular product, or you just leave it up to chance, either way this kind of marketing is invaluable because it’s FREE!
3. Twitter Hashtags
Still on Twitter, one of the simplest ways to harness the power of word of mouth marketing is to get Twitter users to spread around a particular hashtag that promotes a product, service or special offer you have running.
Hashtags are one word tags used in tweets that make it easy for other Twitter users to follow a particular conversation or topic.
So, if you want the world to know that ABC Cafe has the best Eggs Benedict in the world, you could encourage your fans to use the hashtag, #besteggsbenny, when talking about you on Twitter.
Better still, get them to use that hashtag when they check in on FourSquare too: ”The Eggs Benedict at this place is SOOO good and only $8! (@ABC Cafe) http://4sq.com/abcdef #besteggsbenny”.
4. An Engaging Facebook Page.
This one might seem really obvious but so many people are still getting it wrong.
If you make your Facebook Page engaging, attractive and interesting, people are going to want to interact with it. Simple huh? But every time someone interacts with your Facebook Page, they are also potentially telling their hundreds, or in some cases now, thousands of Facebook ‘friends’ about your business.
That’s the true viral potential of a platform like Facebook. Just put something out there – in this case a great Facebook Page – and let your brand fans chat to each other on it, all the while alerting others in their own network about your business or product and how great it is. So simple.
5. Guerilla Marketing.
We have used this technique with varying degrees of success. The potential problem with it is that people are over-exposed to your brand or not exposed to it in the best light or best way.
The premise is that you encourage a select few of your biggest fans to spread your marketing message in the community somehow.
One of our most successful examples of this was when stickers were made up pretty cheaply that included a very succinct marketing message in a sentence and then a QR code that sent people to an introductory video of a local surf and skate business.
These stickers were placed all over the place in the local area (on power poles, park benches and so on) and they lead to quite a good conversion to the video and a definitive increase in foot traffic over the month they were around.
The hardest part was having to go around to everywhere they were placed after the event and removing them again!
Have you had any success with any of the above suggestions? Which easy ways to get your customers to do your marketing for you have I missed?
Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You could get Facebook fans from http://www.getfansservice.com, they are great!
Wow, what a spammy comment to have first up on this post, and so quickly after I posted it too! I think the practice of buying fans is not only a dumb move from a business and PR point of view but also a pointless one if you are actually trying to build a business or a database that you would like to sell something too.
Purchased fans – like from the spammers who just left that message – are not clients or customers and in most cases they aren’t even real people.
Thanks for your comment though and for reading my post!