Peer-to-peer marketing is a strategy that relies on building relationships to create marketing opportunities. We all know that people don’t like it if we force them to buy anything. Nobody likes being told directly again and again to buy a particular product. People are more likely to make a purchase if they trust the trust. If they hear about a specific brand from their friends and peers, they will be more inclined to visit that shop and consider purchasing it. That’s why recommendations from friends and family have a more substantial impact on people’s buying decisions than the advertisements run by companies for months.
If you understand this concept, you’ll be able to grasp what P2P marketing is all about. A P2P marketing strategy can be a bit tricky. It’s like you build up to something with the sole purpose of selling it, but what you tell your audience is that you just want them to know about it. Suppose you can entice certain community members that your product is excellent and worthy to the point that they start recommending it to their peers. In that case, you can penetrate the entire community.
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The most critical aspect of peer-to-peer marketing is the trust factor. People trust sellers that are spoken positively about by their friends and peers. This post will discuss a few tips to build your P2P marketing tactics. But before getting into the nitty-gritty and the benefits of using this strategy, let’s define P2P marketing in business terminology.
What is P2P Marketing?
P2P marketing is a promotional technique of encouraging customers to promote a product or service in their professional and personal networks. It can work wonders for small and large organizations that do not have a heavy budget allocated for advertising but want to penetrate a market at a good pace. Peer-to-peer marketing is built on the concept that people trust their friends and peers more than business organizations. If they hear or see someone buying from a particular brand, they will be enticed to try out that brand as well.
P2P marketing becomes particularly effective if the business provides an outlet to its customers to show off something about their purchase. For instance, if your friend tells you that they got a discount coupon from a particular retail store for their next purchase from there, you might also feel like shopping at that store to get access to that coupon. If your colleague shows you their new handbag that came with a free makeup kit, you would surely want to ask them which brand is running this campaign.
P2P marketing is not just based on sending out marketing messages in text form to encourage your customers to talk about your brand. A carefully drafted P2P marketing strategy is about taking concrete actions that give solid reasons to your customers to announce their purchase from your business before their peers.
If you just launched a business and started to build your P2P marketing plan successfully, you might not even need to spend a lot of money on running ad campaigns. Instead, you can set up simple incentives and promotional campaigns for your first few customers. If you do this right, customers will rush to buy from you just to show off their experience of engaging with your business in their social circles.
Marketing techniques such as customer loyalty programs, referral marketing campaigns, and affiliate programs overlap with the concept of P2P marketing. All such techniques cash on the fact that you have a greater chance of acquiring new customers if your existing customers are delighted with your business.
Tips to Develop a Successful P2P Marketing Strategy
There are several different ways to build and implement a P2P marketing strategy. Here are a few tips that will make you successful in the process.
1. Make Your Customers Your Evangelists
One of the best ways to do peer-to-peer marketing is to mobilize your current customers and turn them into evangelists for your business. Your existing customers already know about your products and can thus influence others about them from a moral standpoint. If they are happy with your products, they will definitely speak positively about them. You can indulge in social listening and reach out to the most active fellows to find your best advocates. Those already sharing your marketing content with their friends will be excited to participate in a contest you offer, where they have a high chance of winning rewards. This is a great way to get your P2P marketing started.
2. Be Specific With Your Requests
You cannot demand from your customers that they promote your products. The most you can do is humbly request your satisfied customers to participate in your marketing campaigns in return for some good incentives. You also need to convey to them clearly what you want them to do. For example, if you’re going to engage a social media influencer to market your brand, tell them exactly how you want your posts to appear and how frequently you want them to mention your brand. Unclear guidelines will only cause frustration among both parties and will not make your P2P marketing efforts successful.
3. Be Consistent in Your Message
Once you clarify what you want your satisfied customers to do in promoting your brand, you need to remain consistent on the strategy. Fluctuating your brand message too often will confuse your ambassadors. You want them to stay motivated by making them feel that they are doing a good job. Clear and consistent call-to-action instructions are key aspects of effective peer-to-peer marketing. Consistency in your marketing ensures that when a peer wants to try out your product, they know what they need to do next.
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4. Tap into Social Media
Social media is among the most robust platforms to use for P2P marketing. It is effortless for social media users to share posts that they like with their friends and connections. What one user posts becomes visible to everyone in their friends’ list. This gives apps like Facebook and Instagram a lot of leverage in terms of marketing. For top-notch peer-to-peer marketing, make sure you make full use of these social media sites. Find out the most significant influencers on various platforms and engage with them to spread your brand message among their followers.
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5. Be Authentic
Businesses and brands need to be authentic in their brand messages. You shouldn’t market a service in ways you know you cannot deliver. Do not say that your product has certain extra features when it actually doesn’t. Businesses that are not authentic in their campaign often face problems in the short and long run. Sending out messages that are not honest seriously hurt your brand image. Be as genuine in your P2P marketing as possible.
6. Offer Referral Incentives
Referral programs are a great way to indulge your audience in peer-to-peer marketing. A referral program offers a reward to a customer in return for bringing in another customer. This reward can be in the form of a discount on their next purchase, a sure percent cashback on their current purchase, a special link to participate in a contest, or even a completely unrelated physical product reward mailed to the customer.
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7. Nurture Your Brand Loyalty
For your P2P marketing efforts to be consistently successful, you need to keep fueling the crowd with added incentives to continue promoting your brand. Nurture your brand loyalty by developing new and creative customer reward programs. Give extra rewards to your most loyal customers who repeatedly bring business for you. For example, offer a giveaway every time a customer renews their contract with you or upgrades their plan for using your services.
If you notice, most of the activities in your P2P marketing can be conducted online. This means no matter how many social media sites you use for implementing your P2P marketing strategy, you would still need a one-stop platform where you can gather all the crowd. This platform can be your brand website, where you showcase all your products, services, programs, and campaigns.
But remember, you cannot spend too much budget or time getting your website ready. What smart entrepreneurs do these days is create their websites using a website builder. Many of these website builders provide ready-to-use templates for web design.
The simplest way to create your website is to sign up on Strikingly and select one of our website templates. Once you are inside your Strikingly editor, you can add any content you like and get your site running. Write about all the loyalty programs you are running on your web pages. Attract your customers to your site to learn more about your upcoming campaigns. By creating a highly appealing website, you can make your customers excited to participate with you in your P2P marketing initiatives.
