Buzz marketing is an approach that implies creating a funny, unique, and controversial advertising campaign or event and engaging influencers for its promotion. It's aimed at evoking a sensation and making people talk about a specific product. The technique helps brands expand their reach, increase engagement, promote certain products or campaigns, establish a positive image, and save costs.
In this article, we'll review the effectiveness of buzz marketing, its benefits, and examples, figure out how it works, and discuss the process of creating a buzz marketing campaign in more detail.
Why is buzz marketing effective?
Pay-per-click ads, email campaigns, paid ads on social media platforms, and pre-roll videos on YouTube are less effective than word-of-mouth promotion. Since 92% of customers rely on friends' recommendations, it can even be considered the most powerful way to promote products, which is the key reason companies implement buzz marketing.
This type of marketing relies on opinion leaders and their recommendations. This approach implies creating a viral campaign, event, or product and causing a sensation and helps boost word-of-mouth promotion, making people talk about a certain product and recommend it to their friends and family.
Many companies consider this strategy for a reason. It's time to discover the benefits you can reap after successfully implementing a buzz marketing campaign.
Benefits of Buzz Marketing
Gripping, intriguing, eye-catching, unusual, and hilarious are just a few words you can use to describe buzz marketing campaigns. They make people curious and excited and evoke certain emotions and interest in a promoted product. The technique is considered effective because it has proved to bring the following benefits to businesses:
- high brand awareness;
- minimum advertising costs;
- organic traffic;
- popularity on social media;
- wide reach;
- strong online presence;
- high level of engagement.
If you successfully implement the technique into your business, you can get even more pros. To do everything right, you also need to know how buzz marketing works, so it's time to walk you through this process in more detail.
How does buzz marketing work?
The process is quite simple. It's usually implemented with the help of social media marketing, its main component. Brands ask influencers for help to drive interest in their product. Opinion leaders share certain info about this product on social media, talk about its benefits, and share their thoughts on it with their followers.
Since influencers hold sway over their audiences and can win their followers' trust, they can easily create buzz around a specific product or brand. Remember, 61% of people trust opinion leaders' recommendations. As a result, companies attain brand awareness, bigger sales volume, credibility, and extra exposure among consumers. This way, marketers expect their target audience to talk about their company's product and recommend it to friends and family members.
Now that you know how everything works, we'll jump into the next section to unveil how you can create a buzz marketing campaign.
How to Create a Buzz Marketing Campaign
Only a few steps separate you from developing a perfect campaign for your brand. Let's jump to our step-by-step guide to provide you with enough information so that you can start developing your buzz marketing campaign right away.
- Study your audience. You should learn more about your customers' preferences and needs before creating any product or campaign. Moreover, your audience expands when you implement buzz marketing, and you need to work harder to predict their needs and meet them. Make customers your top priority when creating content.
- Create and share teasers with your audience. To be able to predict your audience's reaction to your new product and campaign, you need a teaser that is useful and close to people. Once you release your teaser, you'll be able to see people's reactions and emotions to your upcoming product. Excitement, curiosity, and attentiveness indicate customers' readiness to accept your product. In addition, your will gain more attention, increase your outreach, and expand your list of subscribers.
- Consider creating a branded hashtag. Hashtags are extremely helpful when it comes to new advertising campaigns. With a branded hashtag, people can find the necessary information on social media while brands can boost social media engagement and awareness. You can also see customers' responses once the campaign is released.
- Drive interest and provide value. Once you are done with the basics, you'll need to create an engaging content strategy and communicate the value of your product. Make sure to deliver the most important information about your product to reach your target audience and engage them.
- Create a video. Considering video advertising for your new campaign is an excellent buzz marketing idea. According to statistics, 54% of consumers prefer to watch videos from brands, as video content is more engaging and easy to recall. This way, you can be sure that more people will remember your company.
- Search for opinion leaders in your industry. You need a person who will be your brand ambassador and effectively promote your product to have a wide reach. In the buzz marketing world, brands choose influencers. Why? They have a large following, popularity, credibility, people's trust, and influence. Consider finding an opinion leader in your niche to promote your product to their followers, tell them about its benefits and value, and recommend it.
If you still have no solid ideas for your buzz marketing campaign, let's proceed to the examples so that you can grab some inspiration.
Examples of Buzz Marketing
Apple is a well-established brand that was always successful in generating buzz around its products. There are a lot of ways a company can make people freeze in anticipation of something amazing and brand-new. However, the most significant ones appeared in the days of Steve Jobs — in 1998, to be exact. Brand reps used the "One more thing…" sentence at the end of their presentation to create a sensation, which was Apple's "wow factor." Afterward, people talked about the brand's new products with excitement and curiosity and became word-of-mouth promoters.
Another perfect example is Dell and its latest campaign. The technology company decided to support school children by providing them with laptops. The campaign's primary goal was to make online learning accessible to everyone in England. It attracted many people, authorities, and businesses, and they donated devices and provided financial help.
Hope our tips and examples will encourage you to create something big and exciting. Start thinking about your new viral campaign right away!
Last Updated: 05.07.2023
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