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Buzz Marketing and The Power of the Word of Mouth

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I remember way back in my college days how many professors would stress to us the importance of word-of-mouth in marketing. Even before the digital age, consumers have always been one of the most powerful advertising agents. Although brands can spend millions of dollars in amazing advertising campaigns, sometimes it just takes a “free” reliable recommendation to make up a consumer’s mind. 

Word of mouth has gained even more valuable meaning in the digital age. It has evolved from a personal one-on-one conversation to a very public and loud statement. And today, with the overwhelming amount of options and online advertising invading our daily lives, marketers are always trying to find new ways to cut through the noise and generate connections with their audience that can eventually grow to the point of advocacy. 

Buzz Marketing is a great way to achieve that. With the right content, you are not only going to create awareness and get consumers interested in your brand, but you want to get them talking. The more the consumers talk, the more interesting your brand becomes. Getting that “buzz” or word of mouth is not an easy task. We have to create a compelling story, get the audience interested in it and facilitate its distribution. So it’s not only us, the brand, telling it, but the consumer itself, sometimes even in their own words, sharing our story with others, making it more believable.

You can check out this fun example https://www.buzzfeed.com/jeannettevigil/top-5-bourbon-drinks-you-must-try-this-summer-20t9fr2zyq

Building Your Brand With SEO and SEM

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When we talk about digital marketing and analytics, we almost always think about metrics, the performance of our website, our advertising campaign results, number of conversions, clicks, etc., but rarely the concept of branding is the first thing that comes to mind. But there is a lot we can learn about our brands through analytics.

During the Digital Branding Analytics Miami 2019 Conference I attended recently, I heard an incredibly valuable talk by Hector Hernandez, Chief Digital Officer of McCann Worldgroup, about assessing brand value through Web Analytics.

At #DBAMiami, Hector made some very interesting points regarding digital strategies like SEM and SEO and how should brands implement these to help build their brand value over time. When we are designing our strategies and defining objectives for our SEM or SEO efforts, we have to understand how people are going to find us. In of his examples he mentions the brand “Nike”, and while a strong brand as such can rely heavily on branded traffic, with keywords such as “nike sneakers”, smaller companies might want to take a more generic approach in the beginning with terms like “running shoes” to continue generating traffic, increasing awareness and building their branding progressively.

It’s extremely important that we understand our industry and market from the beginning, and how our potential customers are going to look for us online. Competitive analysis, keyword research tools and our own information from our analytics can give us valuable information about our audience and performance, and this will help us make the right decisions when we are creating our digital marketing strategies.

You can watch Hector’s full presentation in the video below:

Personal Mission Statement… Think Big!

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Developing a personal brand is fundamental to standout in a highly competitive and changing market. We want to be sure we are portraying a unique image that will help us attract the audience we need, whether we are looking to get a promotion, finding new opportunities or maybe establishing ourselves as thought leaders in our community.

A strong personal brand starts with a clear mission. This goes beyond your professional goals or having an eye-catching profile on social media, it’s about finding your purpose, your passions and talents. A personal mission statement plays a fundamental role in our personal brand strategy and what we want to achieve, when it’s clear and we embrace it, that generates more credibility and value.

This brought to mind the words of Joni Fernandez Marmo, former SVP of Consumer and Corporate Marketing at Univision, who gave a wonderful presentation at the Digital Branding Analytics Miami 2019 Conference #DBAmiami. She reminded us to not limit our possibilities and “think big”. Regardless of where we stand in our current career path, when we think about our goals and future we can’t limit ourselves to what we want to accomplish and how we are going to do it. Our mission comes from within and it will give us the fuel to go at it every day and work on achieving our goals.

You can see the entire presentation by Joni in the video below.

Customer Experience and Omnichannel Marketing

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It’s quite amazing when you stop and realize how much has marketing evolved throughout the years, especially thinking about channel marketing.

Today, industries traditionally centered in physical stores, like retail, for example, have already started making a switch to adapt to the new shopping behaviors of the digital era consumers, merging analog and digital worlds to create an integrated, omnichannel experience.

I recently attended the Digital Branding Analytics Miami 2019 Conference #DBAmiami and while listening to Kathy Mayor, CMO of Boxy Charm and former SVP & Chief Digital Officer of Carnival Cruise Lines, this whole concept of omnichannel marketing and customer experience really started to take form. Kathy spoke about her experience on Carnival and referred to a “7 part framework” highly focused on the consumer, their thought process, passions, experiences, and how to use this knowledge to find the best ways to approach them.

Brands that work with omnichannel strategies focus on understanding their audience, their customer journey and how the right combination of channels, campaigns, and content can finally influence purchases. As Kathy pointed out, they want to be able to reach all kinds of segments in the market, that’s why Carnival works not only through multiple channels, like social media, events, and activations, but with different partners like Amazon, Buzzfeed or celebrities like Ellen Degeneres or Guy Fieri and leverage the associations and distribution of these brands to help them tell their story and relate to their audience.  

Kathy mentioned a great example of how Carnival incorporated partnership into actual parts of their product with their work with Guy Fieri. Not only is he a spokesperson for the brand, but they have worked together in several campaigns, like “Carnival’s Kids BBQ Challenge” in Texas, the “#thankyouburger” campaign in support of the military and the launch of the “Guy’s Burger Joint” restaurant on board their ships, bringing all the positive associations with the celebrity’s brand into an actual experience for consumers.

Understanding their audience, and the benefits of each channel can help brands craft stronger strategies that will ultimately allow them to engage with their customers and offer them a far more rich and unique shopping experience.

 

You can watch Kathy’s incredibly insightful presentation in the video below.