An "All-Volunteer Army" Will Enhance Your Small Business Marketing Battle Plan
Want to employ a winning strategy for marketing your small business? Creating an "All Volunteer Army" of clients or customers who are willing "to go to battle" for you, will help ensure your small business's success. Word of Mouth Marketing (sometimes called "Buzz" marketing) is just the weapon you need in your marketing arsenal. Word of Mouth Marketing provides a cost-effective marketing strategy with potentially "explosive" results with long-lasting positive impact.
Creating a loyal customer base is no longer enough for a small business to succeed. For real success, a business must get its loyal customer base acting on its behalf to encourage others in their social network to patronize the business. By actively engaging families, friends, neighbors, and other social acquaintances to serve as "foot soldiers" in a true "word-of-mouth" marketing campaign, any small business is getting a valuable weapon in its battle for local marketing success.
By creating a small army of "Word of Mouthers" actively talking up your small business, you have the potential of expanding your customer base, by creating even more loyal customers, who will talk up your business even more.
Word of Mouth Marketing, by its very nature is considered a form of Viral Marketing. Wikipedia describes viral marketing as "a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily." That's exactly what you want in your Word of Mouth Marketing efforts for your small business - an army of happy customers willing to spread the good news about your business!
Here are the "4 C's" that will help make your Word of Mouth marketing efforts successful:
Contented Customers - those who already know about you and are pleased with your product and/or service, and who engage in...
Conversations - what you want those contented customers to engage in on your behalf with others by ...
Creating Community - by reaching out to others and establishing conversations, your customers will help create a sense of trust for your business or product, thereby encouraging ...
Commitment - from others who will perceive your business or service as desirable and trustworthy because of the inherent value of a positive recommendation.
The four elements listed above are crucial to achieving your small business marketing goals. There are many other elements that are involved in a composing a viable Word of Mouth marketing strategy. Certainly, understanding your competition is important, and so is understanding your target market. Knowing who you are trying to reach and how to enlist them in your "All Volunteer Army" will serve you well in your small business marketing "battle plan."