Marketing on a Small Budget – What is Buzz?
Published February 27, 2009 | 
Marketing is one of the most critical parts of business that entrepreneurs must learn and understand to maximize their potential for success in today’s volatile marketplace, and the cost effectiveness alone is enough to help insure the successful impact of the marketing strategies on the bottom line of business. Most of today’s marketing still focuses on how to use advertising and other tools to influence each customer individually, ignoring the fact that purchasing is part of a social process, and Buzz and Word-of Mouth don’t just happen without some effort that starts the social process. Instead, it must be carefully cultivated and strategically crafted with an underlying architecture to direct the natural forces to a specific outcome.
An entrepreneur’s marketing agenda is vastly different than that of a member of the Fortune 500, although some of the same principles are the same and never change; it is in the details where we find the differences, and it is important to understand the theory of creating buzz or word-of-mouth has the primary investments of time, energy, and imagination, so in other words, you are shooting for a high return on imagination as opposed to a high return on investment.
The public has long known the value of word-of-mouth recommendations, which is one of the most powerful methods of building perceived value for products and services, and no one creates value like family and friends, and networks of family, friends and social contacts. According to over 25 years of research, Americans today are far more likely to turn to friends, family, and other personal experts for value reinforcement than to use the traditional media for ideas and information. Thus the huge changes in marketing strategies from institutional hard-print media to methods of strategically placed and highly targeted messages placed using social media tools designed to create buzz and grow to the ultimate goal of the viral stage.
More than eight in ten people say that their personal networks is among the two to three best sources for new information for any service or products they are interested in purchasing, and this is extremely significant, since the response is nearly 50 percent higher than all other traditional advertising sources combined.