Buzz Marketing – What it is? Why is it Effective? How to do it?

Buzz refers to the sound of something that is repeated virally. Something similar happens in Buzz marketing.

If a brand offers a quality product or service, people will talk about it. The more people talk about it, the more popularity it achieves. This is the effect sought by buzz marketing.

It makes your customers promoters and prescribers of your product or service by creating a spontaneous flow of your brand’s information in their conversations.

83% of consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends about products and services – [Nielsen]

If your main objective as a brand is to be talked about both in the online and offline world, buzz marketing may be the solution. This post is an easy and simple guide that explains what buzz marketing is, how it works and why it is effective – with examples.

Let’s begin with the basics.

What is Buzz Marketing?

Buzz marketing is a viral marketing technique that focuses on maximizing the word-of-mouth potential of a particular campaign or product. This technique can occur through conversations between consumers’ family and friends or through larger-scale conversations on social networks.

These conversations between close people, such as family or friends, generate trust

74% of consumers consider word-of-mouth a key influencer in their purchasing decision. [Ogilvy Cannes]

Your clients speak for you when you implement buzz marketing. The more people show interest in your brand, the more impact you will achieve with your actions.

The goal of creating such campaigns is to increase brand awareness. If users talk about your products and services, you will increase online traffic and, therefore, sales and profits.

A buzz marketing example that marketers use a lot is creating an event in which real testing of a product is done. Attendees get to experience what’s on offer. They are then asked to share their experiences and opinions on social media.

But to be successful at it, you should know who this type of technique is aimed at. The types of clients that normally follow your strategy of commenting and sharing their experience on your product are:

• Those who like to try new products.
• Those who are easy adopters.

Surely, you might know or have this type of people around you who like to be up to date with news and like being the first in everything. Directing these campaigns to this type of public can be difficult, but if you succeed, your brand will be on everyone’s lips.

Is Buzz Marketing Effective?

Let’s have a look at the growth rate and ROI of businesses that use some form of Buzz marketing.

91% of B2B buyers are influenced by word-of-mouth when making their buying decision. [USM]

Buzz marketing is a very practical and effective technique that many companies have been using for many years.

The goal of Buzz Marketing is to increase brand awareness using a word-of-mouth approach. Word of mouth carries more weight with consumers as the message comes from people they trust and not directly from the company.

Brand awareness increases your online traffic by getting users talking about your products and services, which leads to better sales and other benefits.

What is the Difference Between Viral and Buzz Marketing?

Viral Marketing	Buzz Marketing
In this, the objective is that the brand is known – you wish to enhance the reach of your product and services.	While with the buzz strategy you will go one step further. Once you achieve the reach, you want the community to talk about it.

What Are Basic Principles of Buzz Marketing?

Buzz marketing has four basic principles:

Content: You must create a powerful, unique, and updated message. The message must affect the user.

Emotion: Use the value of your brand to create emotion for people, creating exciting content that is easier to spread. It does not matter if the content is humorous or useful, the message must transmit on its own without the intervention of the company or brand.

Virality: You have to benefit from the virality of your message.

Curiosity: The content must arouse the curiosity of the recipients so that they share it.

How to Create A Buzz Marketing Strategy?

Buzz marketing attracts consumers quickly and without much investment. Although you need to invest in content creation and social media marketing. To know how to use Buzz Marketing successfully, it is recommended to follow these phases and guidelines:

Phase 1: Segment Your Audience

The first thing is to segment, that is, define your target audience. Brainstorm – Who are you addressing? What does your client need? To do this, you can create several persona buyers with the help of real data regarding demographics and behavior.

Phase 2: Create Teaser

This is the phase where the brand’s product or service is not yet in the public eye. It is a moment where your objective is to make the audience interested in your product that you will soon launch.

Take Gmail as an example, which initially was limited to exclusively for a few. It helped in creating expectations and generating great curiosity among people. By the time it all came out, there were millions of people who were interested to have it.

This phase is a clever way to start showing the world how much they need the solution that you are about to offer them. If you do this, you will be able to create a buzz without any effort.

Phase 3: Build Trust

To be successful with a Buzz Marketing strategy you will need to generate trust in consumers from when the campaign is created, as well as throughout the dissemination of the product.

You can do so with paid advertising with influencers, bloggers, and experts in the sector. Also, you can use demonstrations that help to see that your product really has many benefits.

Phase 4: The Revelation

This phase is about the revelation of the product or service that you are offering to the market. That is when it is finally free to be purchased by anyone who wants it. It is considered the one of the most important phases that needs to be executed well.

Phase 5: Marketing

Once this point is reached, the product or service generally needs the support of marketing techniques for promotion to more potential customers.

Buzz Marketing strategies at this point tend to vary, and you have to think very carefully about what will best favor the entire campaign.

There are those who opt for press releases, viral content on social networks, Street Marketing, online advertising, or all of the above. There are six key points that you must include in your campaigns:

The Unusual: something that has not been seen before in the market; by form, or by content.

Taboo: Refer to something prohibited or that generates controversy, debate, and, therefore, moves the information.

The Extraordinary: A feature of the product or service that makes it stand out from the rest.

The Secret: It never fails, if you want someone to talk about something, tell them “don’t tell anyone”.

The Hilarious Thing: You already know that provoking emotions in customers invites them to share your information. So, use hilarious things in your campaign to generate excitement.

In 2010, Old Spice – Men’s deodorant product company rebranded its advertising strategy to incorporate humorous meme-friendly commercials. In one of their commercials, you will see actor Terry Crews shouting and riding a tiger.

Phase 6: Measure And Take Control

It is useless to achieve a viral effect around your product or service if you do not have the ability to control it. And if it gets out of hand, this can be a reason for failure.

The best way to control and enhance the viral effect is by monitoring, analyzing and correcting your buzz marketing strategies. As time goes you will have to keep coming up with new ways to stand ahead of the crowd.

Note: Be careful with the way you launch the messages within your buzz marketing strategy. When implementing buzz marketing, it is important to bear in mind that this type of marketing is far from mass technique.

It is not about trying to spread the messages to as many people as possible. It is about using the power of personal word of mouth messages one on one with audience segmentation.

Word of mouth carries more weight with consumers as the message comes from people they trust and not directly from the company.

Advantages of Buzz Marketing

• The first is that it does not need much investment.
• The goal is to circulate the message by word of mouth.
• Before launching the product or service, you will design several buyer personas.
• With them you will define the target audience and, therefore, when your product is on the market, it will have a better reception.
• When creating Buzz, you will also be creating a community.
• The more people show interest in your brand, the more impact you will achieve with your actions.

Some Examples of Buzz Marketing

Ice Bucket Challenge: You all have seen the video posts on social media of individuals pouring a bucket of ice water over their head. This was a buzz marketing campaign to promote awareness about ALS ( Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis).

With the participation of people like Bill Gates in the ice bucket challenge, the campaign achieved the desired goal of raising donations for ALS organizations like the ALS Therapy Development Institute.

Wendy’s Twitter: In 2020, to promote its new breakfast options, Wendy’s locked its Twitter account, making it available only to followers. This strategy motivated individuals to follow their accounts. Within just 36 hours time, they received over 10,000 follower requests. Also, you will see Wendy’s Twitter account is full of edgy humour content roasting other brands.

Dell’s Live Broadcasting of a Gaming Event: In 2016, Acer sponsored one of the biggest gaming events in Europe. It was an All-Star Event, a League of Legends that brought together more than 18,000 people at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona.

The brand wanted to promote the sponsorship of this event on social networks and link itself more to the gaming sector. To do this, they launched a daily broadcast of the most important activities of the event.

Through the Acer channels, 20 videos made during the 4 days of the event were published. In addition, the news of each day was broadcast live.

They also collaborated with some influencers who interviewed some of the players and tried some of the Dell products.

How to Perform Buzz Marketing With Influencers?

Online buzz marketing is often driven by people with the power to influence. These people may be the first to adopt your product or the first people who want to share their opinions of your product. This way you can start a social conversation about it.

These types of people usually have an established online presence and usually use social networks. They are chosen because they have a fairly solid fan base.

Reviews from these influencers reach more people and can have a positive effect on sales and product awareness. In the type of current strategies, contact is sought with this type of person to make a brand’s products take off.

Some marketers target well-known influencers or well-known social personalities. Others, however, go for celebrities who can lend instant credibility and exposure to a product.

How Social Media and Buzz Marketing Relates?

Social media marketing is the main component of buzz marketing. Today it is not possible to explain the concept of buzz marketing without referring to social media marketing strategies.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the main social media platforms that brands try to maintain their presence on. By using these sites, companies can interact with customers, receive feedback, address problems or concerns, and promote their products and services.

But they may not get the interactions they’re looking for. Sometimes it’s hard to push users into doing what you want them to do. For this reason, brands take help of people (Influencers) with a large number of followers to transfer a brand’s message.

Brands create collaborations with these people. They ask them to use and test a product for free or for a fee before it is released. Influencers then make a mention of the product on their networks. It helps make the product go viral and be on everyone’s lips to increase your sales.

Key Takeaways

Buzz marketing can create hype for your brand in less time and with minimum investment. However, note that the buzz marketing strategies have changed with time.

Earlier, people used abusive pop-up ads, banners, or newsletters. However, today, users find these techniques annoying. Also, there is another problem of creating a piece of content that gets people talking but doesn’t let them identify or connect with the brand itself.

Nowadays, buzz marketing generally consists of creating humorous, controversial, sentimental online campaigns. Campaigns that hope to cause a specific sensation and feelings in users.

The goal is to make people talk about it and share it through social networks for as long as possible until it becomes popular.