Situational Marketing (3)

By word-of-mouse
Word-of-mouse is simply digitally augmented word-of-mouth. We can still refer to it as online marketing, or marketing via the internet. This method of marketing has been necessitated by the present business dispensation, which has been aided by technology. And it covers grounds where you may ordinarily not cover through the word-of-mouth, in an unprecedented dimension.

Promoting most businesses today would largely be digitally-influenced and digitally-enabled. The web-community is progressively changing the face of marketing from what we used to know a couple of years ago. And this change will continue to happen. We have more people customers and prospective customers we want to sell our product-services to online per time than anywhere else in the world! I’m thinking that marketing in this era should assume fresh posture too and not lag behind. After all, what actually is the reason for marketing if not to get in touch with people (in their numbers) with your valued-offerings? And what better way can we meet this objective? Thus, if we want our product-service to be found, we’ve got to take them to where majority of seekers seek.

What is this the idea of this word-of-mouse? You have surely heard about Facebook and may even have an account there. How did you get to sign-up? Have you seen their TV ad or billboard? But I can tell you that that idea called Facebook is booming (although there are other factors to consider). Let me borrow the words of Seth Godin, a marketing guru, ‘Facebook turned into an idea virus’.

The bottom-line is that someone you know and trust infected you with it. Imagine my business and your business spread across the world by word-of-mouse like Facebook, Yahoo or Google. You’d certainly be the richest Nigerians if you could discover ways to infect the right people with your product-services by word-of-mouse. If your product-service offers a solution to people, then express it using a viral platform.

Our concentration here is how you can spread the information about your offerings virally. To achieve this, it must be a product-service that could be captured or summarised as a valuable-idea, and would hence be spread as a virus! It’s then that marketing by word-of-mouse would be very useful and successful. (We’d examine this in details some other time).

The online marketing has got an advantage. It’s convenient, relatively inexpensive, fast, and gets to large number of people at the same time. (Indeed, today’s business landscape calls for it). To add to its benefits, you’d own your media platform that you can creatively control and influence the market at will. Those who have mastery of this art of marketing are smiling to the bank nowadays without fear of their rivalry.

Several changes have happened in our world by the advent of internet-technology. It’s obvious in the world today that virtual (internet) presence has come to validate our real presence, and also those of our product-services. There are certain product-services that could best be vended via word-of-mouse. Remember that online community is the largest community in the world today; more people spend time on internet that they do on TV and radios.

This should call for a strategic action plan by the marketing arm of any outfit. I have experience a situation where buyers of certain product-services are more concerned about the marketer’s web-address among other valuable things. If getting through to people has tilted towards online, then, companies who are not maximizing their online presence are short-changing themselves unknowingly.

Viral marketing or marketing by the word-of-mouse is the future in the present, and one of the effective ways of promoting your business solutions. It’s true that technology has made marketing much simpler than what we used to know. But this can best function when you have the right people with the mouse, and target it at the computer screen of the prospective clients. If you get it right, the idea spreads and your cash flows without restraint!

It’s not every business that can be marketed online (for now). Marketing by word-of-mouse has also got its own demerits. Neither is it every product-service that needs online presence; everything depends on your intended scope of market and influence. You don’t necessarily have to have an online business but if you are building a global business, you should have an online presence. Does that make sense?

By advertising
It’s on record that for the last 100 years, the single best way to determine whether a company was going to get big or stay small was to look at its (size of) advertising. Time and time again, aggressive companies with great advertising—regardless of their industry—have managed to make the ads to pay-off; they grow and become profitable. In fact, such outfits used this means to dominate the market in the past but it’s not the same these days.

On a critical evaluation, the clutter in the marketplace has finally made advertising even less effective. I could say that a threshold may have been reached. And with hundreds of TV channels and cable stations, thousands of magazines and newspapers, access to countless radio stations (even on your cell-phones and online), dozens of bill-boards, and literally millions of websites (including blogs and portals), there’s just too much clutter to reliably interrupt people and break into their attention-web. These buyers, we should bear in mind, have other things that also occupy their attention and interest.

Before writing on this subject, I took time to listen to number of ads on TV, radio jingles, look at billboards and newspaper adverts with keen interest and curiosity. At the end of the day, I tried remembering the most striking ads and could hardly mention up to three in all. And amongst the three, only one could move me to action to patronise the product-service. I wouldn’t know if that was peculiar to me or so. Even at that, not a few establishments still believe that with adverts alone, they can control the market. Please, think again.

I am not saying that advertising doesn’t pay; you must be sure that it’s one of the good ways of marketing your product-service to a large audience. Like Steuart Henderson put it, ‘Doing business without ad is like winning at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does’. Those words should be kept to heart. However, organisation should do much more than using the conventional advertising. John Wannamaker, a British executive, once said, ‘I know half of my advertising works; I just don’t know which half’. That somewhat facetious comment reflects the fact that we are not certain when advertising has worked, and the magnitude.

Research in America has it that seventy-six to eighty percent of consumers don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements. The figure could be more in Nigeria, yet a good number of product-services are marketed via ads. Dozens dramatically consider this method to be more powerful and positions their company and its product-service as clearly distinct from your competition. But it still looks like a guess work. There still exists the mediocrity of mass-marketing of some product-service through ads, and enlightened consumers are aware of this.

Advertising, by and large, does influence some buyers’ action by creating product-service alertness and also strengthening customers’ attitudes. It’s possible that the action a buyer has taken may have been persuaded by advertising seen long before the action. Before a product-service is positioned in the mind of a buyer, the customer must be aware of the product-service. It’s like expanding the scope of your leads; you wouldn’t know who may buy. One may be right to say that, the bigger your strategic-advertising-network the better for you. And it must surely contain creative-depth, be emotional and memorable.

On the other hand, organisations should run ads for different objectives: for information, especially of a new product-service; for persuasion, especially when the competition increases; for reminding the market of an existing product-service as it’s the case with Coke and Pepsi and similar multi-nationals. An outfit can also enhance or reinforce her corporate image using advertising, after all. If your purpose does not fit, it’s advisable that outfits look for other ways to promote their product-services.

Apparently, ads promote the image of a company’s product-service, and don’t really generate sales. I see it as a means of telling buyers ‘hear I am’. And it’s better for a product-service that this medium is most appropriate to spread the news about their offerings. Ads can help build brand-consciousness for a large corporation but I doubt if they really move them to action that much. Here’s a paradox if you want to grow big: you can’t grow without it. But you can’t grow with it alone, either.