Grassroots marketing for your crowdfund investments involves organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach. It requires that you develop relationships with other stakeholders or representatives to make them enthusiastic about the entrepreneur’s product or service so that they become advocates, spreading the word about it and becoming an additional sales force.
And it means that you do all this without being paid (because entrepreneurs are cash poor).
Why grassroots? Because this is the earliest stage of marketing and, if planted correctly, it has the ability to grow wild like grass. The planting can take place via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or any other social networks, as well as face to face when you talk about this new product or service with your friends, business associates, and people you meet at a bar.
A specific kind of grassroots marketing is called buzz marketing. It’s word-of-mouth marketing among potential consumers and users of a product or service. Buzz marketing works because individuals are easier to trust than organizations that may have a vested interest in promoting the product or service.
This word-of-mouth marketing among peers amplifies the original marketing message, creating a vague but positive association, excitement, or anticipation about a product or service. Positive buzz is often the goal of viral marketing, public relations, and social media.
The term refers both to the execution of the marketing technique and the resulting goodwill that is created. Here are just a few examples of buzz marketing: the Pebble Watch, Harry Potter, Beanie Babies, and the hundreds of Carly Rae Jepsen “Call Me Maybe” spinoff videos.
