Marketing is fundamentally about communicating the values. When you communicate someone about the value of a product or brand, this communication will also be called marketing. It is not necessarily for marketing that you should create advertising campaign to socialize the new product.
When you create a useful and valuable product; people starts talking about it. They share the information about this product with their family members and friends. This is what we say that communicating the values is called marketing.
From last few days, we started a series on “marketing” and recently discussed the introduction of Internet marketing and its benefits. In this article we will learn about the basics of referral marketing.
Referral marketing is a way of advertising in which you share information of a product with your friends and invite him to use that product. You refer him to your affiliate or from where you purchased that product. This is called referral.
Now this is a simple term which I used. When you telling orally to someone about a product or any online service and share useful information with him. This is referral marketing.
Now if we repeat same words with marketing terms that definition of referral marketing would be “Referral marketing is a method to promote the product or service to a new customer by word to mouth”.
Simply this is passing the information about a product from person to person by oral communication. This person to person oral communication is very simple as you tell someone the time of the day. This all is referral marketing and it can be also used for offline referral marketing.
Online referral marketing is not largely different from oral or verbal referral marketing. In traditional or oral and offline referral marketing, simply we share information mouth to mouth but in online referral marketing, we use some channels.
In online referral marketing, first we track the behavior of customers by using web browser cookies or similar tools.
Online referral marketing is more effective and leads to more sale as compared to oral communication. This is because we use many sources of communication in online referral marketing, like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, social media marketing, online campaigns, affiliate marketing etc. Not only campaigns but also in chatting and posting of images and videos of the product is also an effective sources to increase the sale.
When you choose referral marketing, it needs a lot of careful study. Actually in referral marketing you communicate and share the product information with those whom you know better like your friends, family, relatives, colleagues, ex-workers and friends of friends. It is a common sense that why a stranger will believe on your information. So in referral marketing you need a large network of your friends and those you know.
When you share product information with your friend, it means you are inviting him to purchase and use that product. You are doing the communication marketing. It should be ensured at any cost that information you shared with your friends should be correct, relevant and useful. As referral marketing is adopted to get the commission so your friend’s trust is more important than the product and retailer.
In referral marketing the source of communication and marketing is human. That’s why huge business corporations don’t use the referral marketing to uphold the temperateness and friendliness of human collaboration and communication and post-industrial scale.
