How To Use Buzz Marketing To Build Interest in Your Brand (2025)

Have you ever had a friend tell you they have a secret, but they can’t reveal it? Imagine if they announced this to your entire friend group and promised to share more in 10 days. Frustrating, but you’d probably be talking about it in the meantime.

Your friend has successfully created buzz. This is one version of a strategy businesses use to promote products and services through word-of-mouth marketing. Known as buzz marketing, it can help you raise awareness, build excitement about your brand, and boost sales.

What is buzz marketing?

Buzz marketing is a strategic approach for building excitement or interest (i.e., buzz) around a business to increase demand for a product or service. Buzz marketing strategies differ from traditional marketing strategies in that they rely on word of mouth. A company creates a campaign so entertaining, exciting, or intriguing, audiences want to talk about it. They might discuss the business in social settings or share content with online communities or on social media channels. The campaign may even go viral.

Why use buzz marketing for your ecommerce business?

Buzz marketing can help your ecommerce businesses boost brand awareness and increase sales. Here’s an overview of the benefits:

Improved brand awareness. Buzz marketing generates interest in your company, encouraging audiences to engage with marketing materials and increasing the odds they’ll remember your company. Successful campaigns can also earn free media and press attention, raising brand awareness further.
Increased word-of-mouth marketing. Buzz marketing gets people talking about your business. It can motivate them to share your content on social media or talk about your company in person, helping attract more customers.
Unique brand image. You can design a buzz marketing campaign to promote a brand image resonating with your target audience—whether that’s edgy, clever, principled, or any other brand personality trait you want to reinforce.

Successful buzz marketing requires sharable content, communication channels for sharing, and a value proposition that converts increased awareness into increased sales. Here’s how to build a buzz marketing strategy in five steps:

1. Research your target audience

Understanding the types of content that resonate with your customers can help you generate positive buzz. Conduct audience analysis and market research to discover their needs and pain points. You can also identify media consumption preferences and review audience responses to competitor marketing, identifying activities that sparked buzz among your target consumers.

2. Decide how you’ll generate buzz

There are many different buzz marketing strategies, but efforts that generate buzz tend to do so in just a few ways. Here’s an overview of the types of buzz marketing campaigns:

Controversial. Controversial campaigns create buzz by engaging with disputed or contentious topics. Companies can also weigh in on an issue as part of the campaign—see, for example, Nike’s Emmy-winning Colin Kaepernick spot.
Novel. An unusual or remarkable product or service can also generate buzz. If you’re launching a waterless dishwasher, you might design a campaign highlighting the product’s novelty.
Outrageous. Outrageous products, services, or campaigns—like Red Bull’s skydive from space—are also an effective way to get people talking.
Intriguing. Intriguing buzz marketing campaign efforts capitalize on the desire to be in on a secret by hinting at the news while withholding key information until a specific date. For example, many brands use Coming Soon pages to announce product or campaign launch dates.
Funny. Research shows 90% of consumers are more likely to remember humorous content, and humorous content also performs well on social platforms. Ikea’s BookBook commercial—a parody of Apple’s advertising style—is one example of humor-driven buzz marketing success.

Audience research can help you determine the best way to generate marketing buzz, taking note of what other companies in your market tried and whether they were successful. Consider your brand personality, product or service, and industry, too. The best buzz marketing strategies use your natural strengths, respond to customer needs, and reinforce and complement your brand identity.

3. Plan your campaign

Once you’ve chosen a technique, plan your buzz marketing strategy. You can follow the same process you use to plan your other marketing campaigns. Keep in mind that buzz marketing achieves its goals by spurring interest and making it easy to share that interest with others. Here are a few tips:

Set goals

Set goals for your buzz marketing effort and identify corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs). Common buzz marketing metrics include social media likes, comments, shares, and hashtag performance.

Select distribution channels

When choosing distribution channels for your campaign, identify social media platforms and other outlets that resonate with your target customers.

Plan for sharing

Think about how people will share your content. If you’re planning an offline event—like a public art installation, for example—imagine how you’ll capture the event for digital content and encourage customers to spread the word online. Many companies create branded hashtags to facilitate social sharing.

Consider boosting strategies

Your buzz marketing efforts might take off on their own, but you can increase your chances of success by investing in content that gets the ball rolling. Influencer marketing collaborations are one popular strategy. You might pay influential bloggers or social influencers to promote products and services as part of your campaign. This helps generate buzz, creating a solid foundation for future social media shares.

Create engaging content

Content marketing involves creating content with entertainment or educational value for target audiences. Buzz marketing is a type of content marketing, so you can use content marketing best practices to create content that speaks to your audience.

4. Launch your campaign

Decide how and when to launch your campaign, and go live. Here are a few tips for a successful launch:

Develop teasers. Before launch, many companies release teasers, or nuggets of information that create intrigue and build buzz in anticipation of the public rollout.
Engage the media. Send press releases to online and traditional media outlets covering your industry or have a history of picking up buzzy marketing stories.
Host an event. Some companies also host attention-grabbing launch events for clients, media representatives, or the general public.

5. Monitor performance

Use tracking tools to gauge success, focusing on the KPIs you identified during the planning phase. Social media analytics tools are one popular choice. They can report on social media metrics across multiple platforms, and many tools include social listening and sentiment analysis features which can distinguish positive and negative buzz.

You can also use Google Analytics and your website performance dashboard to monitor site traffic volumes, traffic sources, and purchase behavior and better understand the impact of marketing buzz on your business.

An example of a buzz marketing campaign

The Australian beauty company Fluff offers a good example of how product drops can create excitement. The company opens four times a year, for week-long intervals, selling its refillable makeup containers and letting existing clients buy refills.

Products are also limited-run.

“With each drop, we only have a certain amount of our cloud compacts and our refills to sell,” founder Erika Geraerts says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.

The strategy supports the company’s sustainability mission and creates excitement in advance of each product drop.

This differentiates Fluff from other beauty companies, and Erika also notes that product drops create space to highlight the company’s unique approach.

“It really allows us to focus on messaging that we really care about that isn’t product related, that helps build our brand and helps build our community,” she says. “It’s an opportunity or an invitation to founders to really think about the messaging they want to receive.”

She encourages business owners to consider what messaging feels overwhelming for them, what feels appropriate for them, and what is a genuine conversation.

Buzz marketing FAQ

What is the difference between buzz marketing and viral marketing?

Viral marketing is about quickly reaching as many potential customers as possible through user-driven amplification of online content, often through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X. Buzz marketing involves creating excitement about a business’s product or service to encourage social sharing, prioritizing authentic interest in conversations with staying power over rapid growth.

Is buzz marketing expensive?

Successful buzz marketing can be a cost-effective way to reach potential customers. Instead of using paid advertising to raise awareness, buzz marketing encourages consumers to discuss your business in social settings and online, inspiring them to share your content on social media platforms.

How does buzz marketing work?

Buzz marketing involves promoting products or services by creating content that starts a conversation. A successful buzz marketing campaign gets people talking about your company—both online and offline—helping you raise awareness and boost sales.