strategic planning

I recently read some interesting customer origin statistics over at Robert Bradford's blog, which focuses on his experience and strategic planning thoughts. The statistic that surprised me stated that 46% of customers come from word of mouth, whereas only 10% are turned towards a business by advertising. At first, these numbers seemed a bit shocking, but in reality, this makes a lot of sense. It also explains why viral marketing is the next big thing when it comes to finding new customers on the internet.

Social media sites are the key right now, and because the idea of viral marketing is still relatively "green", there isn't too much restraint on the part of social media site owners and operators. It is assumed that the users will filter out the spam and unwanted solicitations for them. While this is a quality control theory that seems to work fairly well at some sites, at others it does not, and will likely cost the unknowing sites their readership in the long run if they don't delegate some sort of content management power to their regular visitors. It's not enough to allow visitors to report spammy content, because there usually isn't enough staff to react in a timely fashion. It is probably better to implement a democratic system of content elimination, as some sites have already figured out.

As more businesses begin to grasp the concept underlined by the statistics above, I suspect that we will see less PPC advertising and more strategic link baiting. It's all about word-of-mouth at this point and those who know how to stimulate that type of interest should do very well in the coming years. Hopefully I'll be one of them!