Marketing Tactics: Word-of-Mouth Wild Fire

If conventional marketing tactics are failing to reach your younger target markets, you might be looking in the wrong places.  Never before has face-to-face, television or telephone communication seemed so obsolete.  The youth of today are flocking elsewhere to communicate - online.  Whether through instant messaging, message boards, blogs or social networking tools, young people are able to stay in contact through a staggering number of mediums, with one thing in common - they are all online. 

The online communities initiated by such forums are a marketer’s dream; a relatively uniform group of people with shared interests, driven and influenced by the group within which they belong.  It is due to this desire to belong that promotional web forum sites such as K-W’s FiveOneNine thrive (www.fiveonenine.com ). Founder and local concert promoter Shawn Cooper says it is a two-pronged approach of offering live social networking and concert promotion via the internet that not only brings together concert and music enthusiasts, but does so with minimal effort on his behalf.   Peer groups are a sure-fire way for a message to get through to the desired recipient.  Providing an online forum for people with shared interests to congregate means that advertising to them is simple.  It is much more effective than traditional methods because it is target-specific, usually welcomed and relatively free of clutter.

The fact that the youth of today are highly influenced by popular culture and the ideas and opinions of their peers is not a new concept:  online forums and blogs allow for those same ideas and opinions to be communicated to the masses.  Their success is extremely dependant on the credibility of the source, and for young people, a credible source is often a member of one’s peer group. “Because most forums, blogs, message boards and social networking utilities attract people of a similar demographic, gaining email addresses and personal information can be extremely valuable,” says Cooper.

Advertisers are no stranger to this online revolution; companies are spending heavily to have their products mentioned by reputable sources.  For example, according to Richard Harbridge of Concept Interactive, multi-national firms such as Microsoft have realized the benefits of ‘name-dropping’.  In the past Microsoft has encouraged employees to blog about new products they are working on, in hopes of having the message received more positively from a less “biased” source than advertising directly from the company.  (http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/ ).

So what does this mean for a small business owner with little to no knowledge of blogging and online networking? The lesson here is simple: the internet is here to stay.  People of all ages have flocked online, and what is important to know is where and how to reach them.  Using the wrong media will only result in wasted money and limited reach.

Many would argue that the most effective form of advertising is word-of-mouth.  By heading online, business owners can evaluate where their target audience is, and determine how best to reach them.  The critical thing to remember about the age of online communication is that you should put your effort towards locating where to find your target market:  once you have delivered your message, it’s time to sit back, witness, and benefit from word-of-mouth wild fire.

For more information about word-of-mouth marketing, check out the following websites:

• www.the-cma.org   The Canadian Marketing Association sponsors word-or-mouth marketing events and conferences
• www.buzzcanuck.typepad.com   Billed as “The official blog of Agent Wildfire - Canada’s Word of Mouth Expert

Article submitted by Deanna Dobson, 3rd year Marketing, Conestoga College.