Emerging trends in online marketing

A successful marketing campaign will follow a simple formula – adapt to the right medium and develop a convincing message to generate the desired sale. How ever, the choice of the right medium and the message has always been a quest in the marketing world.

To the eyes of a normal person the world appears quite compact and well networked. But when he is a media strategist the same disguises to a vast array of endless opportunities quite uncanny to understand. Words like blogs, pod casting and e-zines have gone from what are those to mainstream media in less than couple of years. Thus, the attention span of the consumers and their media preferences has also changed drastically. The ever-changing wired mediums and complex life style patterns has left nothing but a perplex matrix for any marketing strategist to ace.

Today, the on-line world has moved on from the dotcom revolution to the next generation of web services called ‘web 2.0’. This new revolution gives the power to manage the media time according to ones own comfort. The next question is obviously, what kind of a marketing tool can compass to the needs of an individuals time? The answer is quite simple to guess.

Word of mouth marketing is emerging as a new tool that lets the strategist capture their niche crowd in the online world. The market research predicts US adult internet users who can potentially influence other customers/buyers are expected to grow from 23.7 per cent to 34.4 per cent by 2011. It’s now obvious that buzz marketing can be made more powerful than conventional marketing. But to make WOMM a success story, you ought to have a strong product. Word of mouth is all about cultivating relationships. WOMM believes People do business with people they have confidence in. WOMMA (the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association) defines WOM as "the act of individuals providing marketing information to other people."

The key elements of WOMM include:

· People are already talking. You just need to join the conversation.

· Happy customers are your best advertising. So, earn the respect and recommendation your customers. They will do the marketing for you, for free.

· Negative word of mouth is an opportunity. Listen and learn.

· Always remember ethics and good service comes first.

by Emmanuel Obadia

Now you can get more leads, new customers, increased sales and improved brand awareness through WOMM.