Viral & word-of-mouth marketing

The Eleven categories of WOM marketing

The main categories of WoM give a practical checklist of thinking through which WoM activities you can and could apply in future.

• 1. Buzz Marketing: Using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.
• 2. Viral Marketing: Creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.
• 3. Community Marketing: Forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums); providing tools, content, and information to support those communities.
• 4. Grassroots Marketing: Organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach.
• 5. Evangelist Marketing: Cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf.
• 6. Product Seeding: Placing the right product into the right hands at the right time, providing information or samples to influential individuals.
• 7. Influencer Marketing: Identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others.
• 8. Cause Marketing: Supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause.
• 9. Conversation Creation: Interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertainment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity.
• 10. Brand Blogging: Creating blogs and participating in the blogosphere, in the spirit of open, transparent communications; sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about.
• 11. Referral Programs: Creating tools that enable satisfied customers to refer their friends.