Pre-Marketing Strategy: 8 Ways to Build Buzz Factor
Christmas is coming! Can you feel the buzz? Or more specifically, are you generating pre-season buzz now? If the Holiday season is your time to make hay, today I share eight ways to get the buzz going now, while it’s only August.
My professional life — and personal life — is consumed with the air of Christmas for about six months of every year. In my personal life, I’m a performer with a world-renowned choral organization, and I oversee the marketing and selling of concert tickets, other events, recordings and fundraising.
Last May we pinned down our Christmas and Spring Season themes. Planning continued through June and July. This summer we introduced content marketing campaigns to warm our patrons to the fact that tickets would soon be on sale.
And now that it’s August, the Christmas and Spring season is announced with tickets on sale. The first week of sales smashed prior records, due in part from the pre-buzz. Starting in September, the marketing focus narrows to only the Christmas Show with heavy email, social content, social targeting, video and direct mail.
Why is this campaign successful? It’s in the “pre.” That is, generating buzz that creates energy and demand for a product or event before it goes on sale.
8 Ways to Build Buzz
When anticipation builds over time before the product goes “now on sale,” a floodgate of demand opens. So here are my eight recommendations for a pre-marketing, buzz-building strategy.
- Create content that teases without revealing the entire story. Let your audience know you’re planning and that they’ll learn more in increments.
- Give your prospects and customers the future timeline of when your event or product will become available. Then, on the day you go live, make it a big push!
- Flood your prospective customers across every channel available to build story. We primarily use email and social media pointing to video. Facebook has become very effective. We embed video for high visibility boosted with sponsored digital ads served to Facebook users who were matched from our email list, and who have visited our website in the past 30 days.
- Encourage your social media followers to share your teaser posts with their followers and friends.
- Pose pre-launch questions about making your life better, such as: “Wouldn’t it be great if you could …”
- If it’s a product launch, take pre-orders and/or create and promote an event to make the announcement.
- Post milestones of pre-order quantities, or seats sold (and seats remaining), leading up to the event.
- Have a closer strategy. Direct mail remains our deal-closer channel. Yes, email and social media sell for us, but we’ve learned that when we mail more frequently in the season, we ultimately sell more tickets.
Enjoy the buzz of marketing your long holiday season!
(My new book, “Crack the Customer Mind Code” is available at the DirectMarketingIQ bookstore. Or download my free seven-step guide to help you align your messaging with how the primitive mind thinks. It’s titled “When You Need More Customers, This Is What You Do.” )
