Reviews or Advertising?

A lot of the times people will hear about products or services from advertising efforts from the direct company, or seeing the company at a convention center or some way that the customer interacts with the company with no interference. This is how most people think they interact with products. Well in a lot of cases that would be wrong. The new model that shows how people interact with a product or with a company has a middle man. This middle man is called an opinion leader. Although you may not think it yet I will give you some examples on how this happens.

We are going to be taking a look at the hunting/ outdoor industry. So what I have done is come up with six different opinion leaders that I have found very easily by just a quick search on Google, and on Twitter.

Google –

So what I did was type into Google “Hunting reviews” and at first you see companies that sell products such as Cabela’s and the reason for this is that they are paying for their company to show up first. But the next few sites all produce your opinion leaders. North American Whitetail, Outdoor Life, and Hunting Life all of these websites are used for writing reviews on products that they have field tested to give the consumer a “helping hand”. But what consumers don’t really know is that on the sides of these pages are all advertisements for different companies and products that are sponsoring these reviews or paying to be put there. These websites then turn into an opinion leader because they are the middle man in the process of a customer reaching out to a company or product.

Twitter –

Finding opinion leaders on twitter is a little bit harder, but what I did was search for a hash tag such as (#Hunting) after typing this in Twitter automatically pulls up top results that show the different people and organizations that use this hash tag the most. After this just clicking through and finding the pages that promote products, and have advertisements on the side of their page you will notice that Outdoor Hub is one that does product reviews and also posts stories on up to date events happening in the hunting industry. What you may not see is that the people following them are the companies that you see reviews on. Same goes for Predator Hunter, and American Hunter, these organizations are a way for companies to put their names on these pages that have a lot of followers to market their product through reviews, and just by putting the name out there. The organizations that do this are what they call opinion leaders because they are getting an idea of a product or company inside the consumers head which will pose the consumer to purchase these products.

Business help with the 5 S’s of E-Marketing

If you are new to the marketing world you may not have heard about this thing called E-Marketing, this is the exact same thing as Marketing except for the fact that it is done over the internet. For someone that is just looking to find the basics of what you will need to know you have come to the right place. Lets go over these 5 S’s that introduce us into this concept of E-Marketing.

The first of our 5 S’s is selling. Something that really stood out to me in all of this is that having an online presence is almost more important than selling the product or service online. This is because just about everyone and their brother has either access to the internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. And with having access to all of this if a company can get inside of that to try and sell a product online or get you to look at a product off of one of these social media sites they will have you more attracted than if you were to just see an ad in a magazine.

Next we have serve, this is how well a company is able to add value to the consumer to get them to buy the product or service. Let’s go back to the social media examples, if someone is friends with, or likes a certain company like for instance an auto repair shop and something goes wrong with that persons car, they will be more likely to take their car to the place that they are friends with than a place down the road, so if that repair shop can post on their page that they are having sales or deals or rewards cards or something than this will influence the consumer to want to come their over the competitor.

Speak is the next S we are going to talk about. Speak is just how well the company can communicate with the end consumer. Getting to know the consumer on a more personal base will allow for a more long term relationship between the company and consumer.

Our fourth S is save. Saving is how you can save money through different ways of E-Marketing. Using E-Marketing will help save money through the company by allowing for more ads for a lower price so you can distribute them to more of a market than you could with using a print ad. Also it lets the customer pick what they want to see other than the company trying to predict what to put on the ad and where to put it. This distributes your ads in a more effective target market.

Lastly we have sizzle. Sizzle is how to add an experience to your marketing campaign. When you have a product for sale online you don’t just want one option. For instance if we have that repair shop and a customer comes in to the shop looking for tires they have a select few to choose from, but if they are online the company could set up a way to have an interactive way of choosing a tire most suitable for that customer. So you would go through and say you are looking for an off road tire, on a 17 inch rim, that is 35 inches tall. This is a way for the consumer to get what they want other than what is available.

So when starting a business or looking into putting your business online to find new markets these are the basic objectives that you would want to look at before starting to put the pieces together.