Find a job - The Money of Marketing

Specifically we’re going to examine two marketing models
• network marketing (the act of building a network or organization of customers who, through effective word of mouth systems, create additional customers) and
• internet marketing (we’ll look at direct response marketing online and affiliate marketing).

What is Network Marketing

The concept of network marketing is so smart, so simple, so hasslefree and potentially so lucrative that it would benefit every employee to quickly become familiar with it. The challenge is in not falling victim to this same simplicity and turning it into a “sales job” which is what many untrained network marketers tend to do.

What then, is network marketing? It’s the business of word of mouth marketing. Giving an incentive (financial incentive in the forms of wholesale discounts and commission checks) to a satisfied customer in order to have them educate a friend, family member, coworker (etc) about a product/service. There are a few more technicalities but let’s keep things simple for the time being.

It may also be useful to better understand what word of mouth marketing is and why it’s so effective in business.

Why Word Of Mouth?

Even the world’s largest advertisers, Proctor and Gamble, have their attention focused on word of mouth because, depending on the research you look at, consumers rank the recommendations they receive from friends and family as the 92% most influential in their buying decisions (vs. traditional advertising).

Large phone service providers offer the customer an opportunity to receive all their mobile calls free to the friends and family that join the network from word of mouth referrals. Web host companies offer a free month service for every new customer referred.

Even McDonald’s used a word of mouth strategy in launching their Red Box DVD rental machines. They launched a contest that asked a person to sign-up for a password and then tell all of their friends to go to McDonald’s and rent a DVD from the Red Box machine.

When friends entered this same password as a coupon code, they received their first night’s DVD rental for free, while the original referrer was entered into a contest to win $1000.

Instead of putting up billboards, running television advertisements and hiring celebrities to promote these new Red Box DVD rental machines, McDonald’s recognized the intelligence of word of mouth marketing and simply created an incentive to encourage customers to refer and create more customers.

While the majority of businesses ignore the growing strength of word of mouth in this sea of too much information where consumers are becoming desensitized to advertising messages that bombard them everywhere they turn… some of the smarter firms (including the majority of the Fortune 500 companies and other new emerging fast growth innovative leaders) are looking at how to create a word of mouth (how to create a network marketing) structure.

And typically, the best of these companies are the ones that are on the forefront of a lot of other "new ways of thinking" and "new technologies". They aren't the me-too product developers. Some of these companies take an approach to completely devote their entire advertising/marketing efforts to effective word of mouth. They develop strategies to get their customers talking (to create more customers).

These are the “network marketing” companies. This simply means they have a referral-incentive program and a compensation plan based on standard network marketing compensation models.