The 9 Best Buzz Marketing Examples [+How to Create Buzz]

Buzz marketing is a bold and strategic form of word of mouth marketing intended to promote a spike in consumer interest and social media coverage over a product, brand, or service. It’s like viral marketing, but you’ve got more control over when and how the buzz spreads. 

How to leverage buzz marketing like the pros? In this article, we cover:

• Why buzz marketing works
• Benefits and drawbacks of buzz marketing
• Different types of campaigns that generate buzz
• Top buzz marketing examples
• Tips and strategies for effective buzz marketing

What is buzz marketing?  

Buzz marketing involves campaigns designed to create lots of rapid “buzz,” or excitement and conversations around a brand or product, in short, sudden spurts.

Businesses have generated buzz with campaigns long before the internet age. Take this ad for Harry Houdini from 1923, which incorporated many of the key elements associated with buzz marketing today (we’ll dive into them in just a bit!)

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Thanks to the web, it’s even easier to generate buzz quickly if the marketing is done right. But social media users are bombarded with marketing messages, so how to grab (and keep) their attention? Successful buzz marketing requires creatives that are new, fresh, and exciting in combination with an established fan following (and sometimes, the help of influencer marketing).  A buzz-worthy marketing campaign can go viral quickly if enough fans share. 

Buzz marketing vs. viral marketing

Buzz marketing is similar to viral marketing in some ways. Both appeal to FOMO (fear of missing out) But there are several key differences. 

Viral marketing is centered on social media posts and exclusively focused on generating excitement over the content. Buzz marketing, on the other hand, is a more purposeful and planned approach designed to promote the brand and its offerings (and often, to extend the conversations beyond digital channels). 

Buzz Marketing	Viral Marketing
Strategic: Your brand launches a buzz campaign after calculated audience research	Spontaneous: Less control over spread because your audience chose to make a campaign go viral
Generates rapid, widespread buzz	Could generate rapid buzz, but could also slowly pick up speed and compound with each campaign
Commonly uses digital marketing, but could be offline	Generally online-only Focused on social media marketing
Audience usually knows it’s advertising	Branded, but often doesn’t feel like advertising Often takes the form of memes and entertainment-based videos

Benefits of buzz marketing

Why choose to generate rapid buzz, even though a campaign may be one-off? Buzz marketing has a few distinct benefits that set it apart from traditional marketing:

• Way to disrupt the market– Disruption has its roots in small businesses having to come up with non-traditional and unique ways to distinguish themselves from more established players.. Customers love the element of surprise, and buzz marketing can help you shake things up.
• Potentially viral word of mouth – Buzz marketing is designed to generate rapid word of mouth, both online and offline. Launch the right campaign, and you’ll get a spike of conversations that make you look cool or interesting. You might even create virality, resulting in a spurt of traffic that continues to compound.
• Increased brand awareness –  Thanks to the WOM it generates, you’ll instantly have more sets of relevant eyes on your brand when it matters.
• Boost in customer acquisition – People want to try out what others think is cool or unique. Generate the right buzz, and you might have a wave of new customers flooding in thanks to social proof.

Drawbacks of buzz marketing

For all its positives, buzz marketing does have a few drawbacks:  

• Buzz marketing isn’t an evergreen marketing strategy. Buzz marketing tactics create one-off campaigns that suddenly reignite engagement.
• It also can’t solve problems related to a less-than-satisfying product or bad customer service. Even with an interesting campaign, people still won’t recommend you if your brand doesn’t provide a good experience.
• And if you aren’t careful, or aren’t aware of your market’s preferences, opinions, and sentiments, you could generate negative buzz, the kind that paints your brand in a bad light.

How to avoid a tanking campaign? Keep these points in mind

• Buzz marketing isn’t meant to be forced. The idea is to generate genuine interest, and this will happen organically if your content comes from a space of authenticity with respect for the  audience. Customers can spot a gimmick a mile away.
• Timing is everything. Tune into the pulse of the target market and understand the underlying trends and dynamics of pop culture before launching buzz marketing campaigns.
• Watch out for negative talk. Use social listening tools to get real-time insights into what people are saying. Step in and manage PR before things get out of hand at the slightest whiff of controversy or backlash. 

Buzz marketing strategies

Having said that, what are some ways you can start implementing buzz marketing strategies straight away? 

We’ve incorporated a few different examples across the cost spectrum. So whether you’re a startup, a small business, or a fairly established brand, you’ll find a strategy that works for you: 

• Creating communities around a brand – Create your own brand communities through your website or social networks. Make it easy for your followers to comment, share, and engage with one another. Incorporate gamification and inspire user-generated content (UGC) to popularize your brand fast.
• Harnessing influencers and ambassadors – A quick-win strategy is to use influencers or brand ambassadors who already have a solid and highly engaged fan following aligned with your brand’s interests. 
• Creating unexpected/surprising social campaigns – Check out some of the examples later in this article for examples of different types of marketing campaigns you can use for inspiration. 
• Answering customer questions in creative ways – Wendy’s does this amazingly well. Hop on over to Wendy’s Facebook page to see why this brand has over 7 million followers. They actively respond to commentators, and hilariously, we might add.
• Building anticipation surrounding a new product launch – Got a spectacular new product that’s guaranteed to be a game changer? Create sneak previews and teaser content to create the sensation of exclusivity and scarcity. 
• Releasing content designed to elicit a reaction – Try marketing strategies that will generate laughs, tug at the heartstrings, or spur people to greater things. Spark a reaction!

Steps to execute a buzz marketing campaign

Want to dive into buzz marketing more deeply? In this section, we’ll cover the key steps to executing a successful buzz marketing campaign from the ground up. 

1. Understand your target audience

Knowing your buyer persona will help you target your campaign so you’re maximizing the ROI on limited resources, especially if you have a tight budget. Your buyer persona is fictional in nature, but embodies the key traits of the real person most likely to purchase your product. Think demographics, location, profession, values, goals, pain points, and spending power. How can your product help them solve their problems?

For small businesses, the easiest and most effective method is to talk with potential customers and ask questions. If you have a sales team, sit down with the team members and take notes. Your customer-facing team members are a rich, unignorable source of user persona insights. 

Use survey and feedback tools with your existing customers and potential prospects. Also, listen in on conversations taking place in online communities and forums revolving around content related to your brand or product. Search using hashtags for the relevant keywords in social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. 

Once you have raw data, you can use free tools like HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to generate a complete user persona profile. 

2. Set buzz marketing goals (and define ways to measure them)

Set a clear-cut goal for your campaigns. Are you looking for sales numbers, website traffic, or engagement? Define what action you want viewers to take after seeing your campaign and measure your results accordingly.

• Social media tools can help you measure how many people engage with your content (like, comment, or share)
• Brand mention tools will let you keep tabs on the conversations that crop up, and who has started them
• Analytics tools can help you pinpoint direct visits related to searches for your brand.
  • If you’re using GA4, look at organic search to main pages when your name is listed.
  • Sure, you might not know if every visit comes from your buzz campaign, but if you get a sharp spike during or shortly after, it’s probably due to your buzz campaign.

3. Time your campaign

Timing is critical when executing a buzz marketing campaign. Aside from being aware of general socio-economic and political trends, it’s also important to have a solid understanding of the way people may react to a new campaign before launching. Reactions are not possible to predict with 100% success, but research and prepping can help swing the odds more in your favor. 

We recommend test-running your campaign in front of a diverse group of your own team members, to pick up on any potentially sensitive areas prior to the official launch. You want to avoid catastrophes like Bloomingale’s disastrous “spike your friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking” campaign.

The copy featured a woman looking away while a man ostensibly uttered these words to the reader. Not surprisingly, backlash was fast and furious. Some critics referred to the ad as “creepy”, while others felt it condoned rape culture. The company issued an apology shortly afterwards.

4. Create unique and engaging content

Buzz marketing thrives on disruptive messaging with the intent of attracting attention. Deploy uniqueness, creativity, content that evokes an emotional connect, and seamless shareability. Don’t be afraid to use humor. 

Research the social media platforms your audience uses and how they fit in with your goals to maximize impact. Get a feel for these channels, and how they work, so you have a robust understanding of how to leverage them.

Keep in mind: Video has a decisive edge over other formats, given the visual medium results in the most engagement.

Need inspiration? We’ll cover specific examples of different types of buzz marketing campaigns later in this article.

5. Promote your campaign

Reach out to influencers, brand advocates, and “connectors” and aak about a possible partnership. Research them beforehand to see if there is synergy in terms of content, tone, and personality alignment. Get an understanding of their audience size and the potential returns of engagement. 

Broadcast the campaign on the social media channels (and other channels) your audience frequents most. Consider sending out teaser previews before launching the full-blown campaign. Aside from helping you drum up pre-launch buzz, it also helps you pick up on early reactions (positive buzz or negative hype?). 

Last but not least, consider using branded hashtags. They can help people find your campaign quickly. 

6. Analyze your campaign’s success

Last but not least, measure the ROI on your campaigns and how successfully they actually turned out. Did you meet the goals you set at the start of the process? Metrics can provide a good gauge for what didn’t work well and where you need to improve the next time around. 

Most content marketing tools come equipped with analytics, so you can see the flow of engagement at various parts of the pre-designed customer journey. So, for example, where does someone go after watching your campaign?

Types of buzz marketing (+ examples of each)

Buzz marketing can be segmented into a few different types. Up next, we’ll cover what these are and specific examples of each. 

Click on the images to view the videos associated with each campaign.

Taboo

Taboo marketing focuses on topics that people generally avoid talking about in social circles because they’re considered off-limits or potentially offensive. Take the example of Elvie’s “Leaks Happen” 2020 campaign featuring an outdoor 20ft bespoke “peeing” billboard for tackling the topic of urinary incontinence head-on. 

Elvie refers to itself as one of the original FemTech brands dedicated to the cause of technology that empowers women. The Leaks Happen campaign, incidentally, wasn’t part of the original plan. The campaign was a reaction to having a brand video flagged as “graphic” on TikTok. 

The reason? The female weightlifter featured in the video accidentally peed while squatting with weights. 

Elvie capitalized on the opportunity to not just highlight the very untalked-about topic of female urinary incontinence, but also position itself as a female-first brand. At the time, the campaign would result in a 109% spike in the number of Google searches for “Elvie.”

Source

As of today, #leakshappen has elicited over 13 million impressions on TikTok. Worth noting is the organic engagement of influencers such as Tova Leigh, Claire Bourne and the brand Bumps and Burpees. 

Taboo ads can be remarkably effective at racking in the numbers, but they can also backfire quickly if they’ve not been well thought out. Run the ad with a diverse “test” audience beforehand and ensure they’re not an evergreen strategy but the rare cheat meal in an otherwise healthy diet. 

Secret

Brands often use secretive buzz marketing techniques to generate an aura of exclusivity and rarity around their product. They’re also designed to create a sense of urgency and anticipation so viewers can’t wait to get their hands on the product. The technique is often used with established brands that already have a loyal fan following. 

Think of the Spider-Man movie franchise, for example. The trailers for the SPIDER-MAN:NO WAY HOME movie released in 2021 reportedly racked up over 355 million views within 24 hours of its release. The movie would eventually go on to collect a whopping $1.91 billion in revenue. 

Unusual

Unusual buzz marketing techniques are best used by tech brands at the forefront of innovation. They can generate a huge amount of pre-release hype by featuring never-before-seen product features that are ahead of anything else out there in the market currently. 

Apple’s eponymous Vision Pro ad, released in June 2023, has garnered over 63 million impressions on YouTube. The 2024 product was the company’s first major product since the Apple Watch. It’s a mixed-reality headset that enables you to manipulate digital content with your eyes, hands, and voice. 

Need we say more?

Hilarious

Purple Mattress and its “How to Use a Raw Egg to Determine if Your Mattress is Awful” ad campaign is quirky, fun, relatable and utterly memorable – all the things that connect quickly with the target audience and guarantee virality. The ad features Mallory Everton as a Goldilocks “bed expert” who uses raw eggs to test the quality of popular mattress variants in the market. Naturally, the Purple Mattress is the only one that passes. 

Despite being four minutes long, the ad has gained a total of 194 million views, proving that the length of an ad doesn’t matter! People will watch and rewatch if they enjoy the content. And if it’s funny, even better.

Brands often don’t do humor because it’s hard to get right. But if you can make your prospective customer laugh, it’s an easy sell. 

Remarkable

Remarkable ads often showcase a brand’s commitment to and interest in the community that represents their ideal customer at large. Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches campaign still gets talked about today and evokes the same kind of emotions it did when it came out a decade ago. 

More of a social commentary than an actual ad, it throws a spotlight on how women often judge their appearance more harshly than they should. It makes you think and question your beliefs about how you think the world sees you. In reality, as Dove’s winning ad caption states, “ You’re more beautiful than you think.”

The ad reached a phenomenal 70 million views on YouTube.

Outrageous

Warning: Toilet humor.

Lots of it. 

PooPourri launched their ad campaign on the promise that their toilet spray will leave your bathroom smelling better than you found it. The still-scandalous-by-todays’-standards ad campaign features a well-heeled and sophisticated young woman sitting on a toilet seat for most of the 2:15 minute run time. 

The actress (also company spokesperson) Bethany Woodruff mouths all manner of obscenities describing the everyday thoughts of the average woman who has to use a restroom outside the comfort of her own bathroom. 

“I just birthed a creamy behemoth from my cavernous bowel,” she says with barely concealed glee at one point. You get the picture. Or maybe not. 

The ad was an instant hit, chiefly because it was so outrageously relatable and ridiculously funny. Last we checked, the ad has racked up 44 million views and counting. 

Outrageous buzz marketing tactics have shock value and so can polarize strong opinions either for or against. When done right, outrageous marketing. This is one of those marketing strategies that need to be pre-tested before the actual launch. 

P.S.“Yes it is a real product. And yes it really works.”

3 (more) successful examples of buzz marketing

Looking for more examples to inspire your next buzz marketing campaign? We’ve got you covered!

California Milk Processor Board’s “Got Milk?” campaign

Arguably one of the most successful buzz marketing campaigns in American history, the “Got Milk” campaign was so popular that celebrities (the erstwhile influencers of the 90s) wanted to get in on the action even if it meant they had to forego much of their usual fee. Just some of the long list of celebrities featured on the ads included Kermit the Frog, David Beckham, Harrison Ford, and Heidi Klum. 

Originally launched by the California Milk Processor Board and afterward a joint effort with  MilkPEP,  the campaign aimed to arrest falling milk buying trends and make buying milk more popular. The campaign established an instant connect nationwide. 

Source

At one time, the famed “milk mustaches”that were part of the ad campaign, became an ubiquitous feature of pop culture. The campaign resulted in an increase in milk sales for the first time in over a decade in 1994, a jump from 740 million gallons in the previous year to 755 million. 

The campaign ran for two whole decades before being retired to keep up with emerging food and beverage trends.

The Dollar Shave Club’s “Our Blades Are F**king Great” Campaign

The Dollar Shave Club’s “Our Blades Are F**king Great” campaign features a number of rarities. The uber-confident CEO Michael Dubin (also improv student/comedian) takes center stage in the ad where he pokes fun at the absurdities of the shaving industry while showing exactly why his own company’s blades were so “f**king” great.

Aside from being disruptive for the time, the campaign is also remarkably authentic – a real person telling you why you’re losing dollars on buying blades for $20 a month with extras that you don’t really need when you can easily have high-quality razors delivered to you for just $1 a month with the Dollar Shave Club. 

The video was reportedly made on a budget of $4500, but nobody could foresee the impact. The Dollar Shave Club’s website crashed because of the sudden spike in interest, and when they got it back up the next day, they had over 12,000 new subscribers. The video reportedly garnered over 4 million views within the first few days. As of today, the total viewership stands at over 28 million.

Dior Forever Foundation Campaign

Dior opted to get ahead of the curve when it launched its Dior Forever foundation in 2021. The ad campaign intended to showcase Dior’s commitment to inclusivity through its range of 67 foundation colors (one of its core marketing USPs). 

The idea was to have 67 influencers (one for each shade of foundation) post once each consecutively for 67 days. Shortlisting influencers was no mean feat, considering the influencers had to be among the top performers in terms of engagement and also had to match at least one unique foundation shade each. 

In the end, however, the results spoke for themselves– a combined influencer audience reach of 2.66 million, 1.65 million impressions, 591k engagements, and an impressive 120% engagement rate.

Harnessing the power of buzz marketing

Buzz marketing can be an impactful word of mouth strategy when executed right. Use the tips we’ve provided in this article, together with examples of campaigns that worked and those that didn’t, to guide you.

When done right, your buzz marketing efforts can be well worth the investment because  they can give you returns for years to come, no matter the budget. 

Keep in mind, though: Even though buzz marketing can generate rapid WOM spikes, it isn’t an engine for continued word of mouth.

Want people to keep talking about you reliably and consistently? Make sure your product, customer service, value, and/or brand story sets you apart. Then, once people are consistently talking about you, consider launching a referral program to increase the WOM you already have (and reward sharing through incentives).