Understanding the Buzz About Buzz Marketing - What is Buzz Marketing?
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Buzz marketing is word of mouth marketing. It is a term used in the marketing industry to describe activities that companies do to generate favorable word of mouth publicity about products and services. Buzz marketing is in essence a unique form of viral marketing, so to truly understand buzz marketing’s far reaching effects for online businesses, we need to understand viral marketing.
Viral marketing behaves just like it sounds: it’s contagious! A virus reproduces by somehow replicating itself and spreading to new hosts or cells. Viral marketing is a form of advertising that essentially propagates itself by replication, spreading, and becoming a form of branding through its familiarity. It also encourages people somehow to pass along the form of advertising to someone else, whether on purpose or unwittingly. Those who use Yahoo! mail, for example, if they send an email, are forwarding on the Yahoo advertisement at the bottom of their emails. This is a form of viral marketing. And very successful word of mouth advertising creates buzz, hence the name buzz marketing.
Buzz marketing is contagious, but it is usually spread with purpose. It attempts to make each encounter with a consumer feel and appear to be a completely spontaneous and unique personal exchange of information, rather than some form of advertising. Software on a website that encourages you to “tell a friend” or “email this page” relies upon buzz marketing.
Before media streams from the Internet, television, or even radio, people had to rely upon word of mouth advertising. There was a very popular technique used that we see in virtually every sales letter on the Internet. You’ve seen them; heck, you’ve maybe even bought something based on a particularly influential letter. The advertiser has an AMAZING product, and is willing to let YOU in on the secret! The advertiser reveals bits of intriguing information about a product or a service to you, gaining your confidence or interest, which makes you believe it is only available to a very precious few people in the know. And, yes; you, too, can be one of them!
Further evidence of buzz marketing in sales letters is that they are virtually always accompanied by many testimonials from others who bought the product or the service, and how it absolutely changed their skin, their hair, their dating habits, their careers, their health, and their lives. These are people like you: everyday, ordinary moms and dads, college students, senior citizens, and business people. They get you to believe you will be missing out on an opportunity of a lifetime should you pass it up, and they are the people you can relate to in exactly the same situation and stage of life as yours. It’s definitely hard to resist.
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