The U.S. is facing tough economic times and many businesses are suffering.  How can you promote your brand when your marketing budget is shrinking? 

It’s time to focus on new tactics. 
It’s time to focus on low-cost, big-buzz alternatives. 
It’s time to drive word-of-mouth marketing.

Check out these 10 ways you can build your brand in a weakened economy:

Today at Brandcurve, I’m happy to publish a guest post by Herbert Ong of Genuosity Inc.  Herbert is an expert in word of mouth marketing.  You can read more about Herbert at the end of this post.  Without further ado, following is Herbert’s post, “Word of Love(TM) Marketing.”
Our team at KudosWorks has known and has evangelized for a while now that the most ideal word of mouth unit is the testimonial. When you think about it, testimonials from your customers are really the “positive word of mouth units” that are then spread from friend to friend. If you as a …read more

I’ve written before on my marketing blog about the importance of online influencers in terms of generating an online buzz about your brand which leads to word-of-mouth marketing, new customers and increased brand loyalty. 
Today, I came across a post on The Brand Elastic that discusses brand training, direct to consumers, which discusses how companies like BMW and Sephora are creating customer training programs such as the BMW Performance Driving School and Sephora University to teach customers how to get the most from the brand and products.
The post led me to think about the incredible possibilities training brand influencers could open.  …read more

With the new year in front of us, it seems like a good time to talk about what will be happening in marketing in 2008.  Today, I thought I’d focus on word of mouth marketing.
Word of mouth marketing spending is expected to jump by 33% in 2008 up to $1.3 billion according to a PQ Media report released in November 2007.  That’s actually a smaller increase than occured in 2007 (35.9% increase in spending over 2006).
It seems companies are finally recognizing the influence of the social web in terms of word of mouth marketing.  In fact, Paul Rand (vice president of …read more

Anderson Analytics surveyed over 600 members of the Marketing Executives Networking Group to learn what the top marketing trends are for 2008.  The results might surprise you.  First, take a look at the graph below that highlights the most important trends according to the marketing executives surveyed by Anderson Analytics.

Is it just me or does it seem like the marketing executives are missing the boat when it comes to marketing trends?