incentives | Nichevertising's blog on Social Selling, Marketing, Advertising

How to turn mistakes into a viral referral experience

April 9, 2013by Christopher Mance II in Viral Advertising tagged customer service, daddy blog, incentives, the hook-up, viral loop

Alert: This is a post from my Daddy blog series

When you are bootstrapping your business, it’s almost a must that you wear multiple hats. It’s likely that you do marketing and customer service or product development and product testing, or all of the above. As you push yourself to the limit to get your business off the ground, it’s inevitable that you will make one or two customer facing mistakes along the way. The key is that you don’t beat yourself up when this happens and turn this negative into a positive.

If you want to go viral, don’t pay for word-of-mouth referrals

April 3, 2013by Christopher Mance II in Word-of-Mouth tagged incentives, referral fee, referrals, the hook-up, word-of-mouth

I read a great article yesterday on the topic of companies paying to incentivize getting their customers to provide word-of-mouth referrals. The article was titled “The Real Truth About Referral Incentives” and the author Jeff Riddle puts into context a lot of what I have been blogging about over the last week. In my last post, I suggested that putting your best customers at the center of your advertising strategy was the first thing you should do to work towards achieving the coveted viral loop. In this post I want to share a few of Jeff’s ideas in the context of your desire to create a viral referral loop for your business.

Why focusing on your best customers is the first step to creating a viral loop

April 2, 2013by Christopher Mance II in Viral Advertising tagged best practices, bootstrapping entrepreneur, email marketing, going viral, incentives, referrals, viral loop, your best customers

Every bootstrapping entrepreneur knows that they need to spend more time on their advertising strategy, but for one reason or another don’t. I belive the reason for this is that it is often expensive and time consuming to figure out the ins and outs of all the various ways you can advertise your business to drive new customer traffic in the door. Everything from pay per click (PPC) ads, banner ads, social media marketing, yellow pages, radio and television is offered up by pushy sales reps trying to convince you that their solution will provide a ROI. I say ignore all of this and focus on this: YOUR BEST CURRENT CUSTOMERS!!!