In a recent podcast with Billy Bateman and Sterling Beck, Beck highlights his success using viral growth to propel his company, ListReports. Maybe not the obvious approach, he has been able to increase sales with less cost. His solution? Word of Mouth.

Marketing Techniques

The history of marketing is a long and involved one, but what do we have to show for it today? Here are some of the top marketing strategies currently used by marketing professionals in the work field:

• Paid advertising is perhaps the most common marketing tool. Companies litter the internet, television commercials, and print materials with ads to get their brand out into the world.
• Relationship marketing, like word of mouth, focuses on the relationship with the customer. By increasing loyalty, the company creates its consumer “tribe”.
• Undercover marketing (also known as stealth marketing), although controversial in ethics, advertizes to people while they are unaware they are being marketed to.
• Transactional marking involves coupons, promo codes, and discounts. This pushes people to come to events or buy items, feeling like they are getting a good “deal”.
• Word of mouth is huge in the world of marketing strategy- and the point that Sterling Beck pushes in his podcast. Convincing people to share and promote your company, not only reduces cost but basically gives free promotion for your company. This use of viral marketing leads to viral growth!

Let’s dive deeper into the idea of promoting your company primarily through viral marketing and word of mouth instead of paid advertising, as Beck suggests.

The Issue With Paid Advertising

Two of the heaviest used and more commercialized forms of paid advertising are Google advertisements and Facebook advertisements. Over 1 million companies actively use Google Adwords– while a baffling 3 Million use Facebook ads. With this much heavy competition, the high demand for ad space causes skyrocketing prices and limited space. Not to mention banner blindness and poor targeting that inhibit ads from effectively reaching an audience.

“There was that knee jerk reaction after the last presidential election and Facebook kind of got a bit overzealous in their enforcing of rules that basically said, hey, if any of your ads have anything that mentioned anything financial, political, basically they had a whole string of complicated rules that ended up leaving a lot of companies alerts were basically all their ads got pulled down for being political content, even if their ads had nothing whatsoever to do with politics,” Beck argues that this type of dependency on one ad platform can be detrimental to a company’s success, and although some companies are happy and willing to push their way to the front for this ad space, it might not be the most beneficial way to market your company.

Cue viral growth.

Why Use Viral Marketing?

ListReports uses direct referrals- with premium content available to costumers so long as they refer a friend, they have marketing in the bag. This is cheap and self-sustaining, while simultaneously creating customer loyalty to boot. Boom. Marketing that almost runs itself, without the arm and leg that it costs for traditional advertising methods. Besides, the world of viral growth is expanding. It is essential for your business to be in constant revision and analysis. How does your business’s marketing compare to others in the business world. What is it that you could be improving on? Right now, it’s probably your word of mouth.