This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless
competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry
going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.
It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed
website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not
going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.
While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites
today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in
the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.
While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all
computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer
virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone
has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.
Viral Marketing Overview
Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing
technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They
use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting
the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a
person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product
or company advertisement along with it.
In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a
media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain
media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one
may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products
description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because
they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral
marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a
person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it
and open it as well.
Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in
spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral
marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive
they can be attributed with.
Using Viral Marketing to your advantage
The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of
publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to
generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity
and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great
number of people and announce your existence.
Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectiveness of Viral
Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with
other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine
Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating
games.
Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your
company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low
cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it
takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still
out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals
and gossips to make them more popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch
Project”?
The Many Facets of Viral Marketing
In the beginning, e-mail was the only way that viral marketing was
started. Since that long ago day, viral marketing has gone from a marketing
strategy to an art form and there are many ways to accomplish the objective of
creating a successful viral marketing campaign. Seven of those ways are:
1. E-mail: It was first but it is still around and still used. It is, however,
getting a little harder to use as more and more government restrictions are
placed on it. Still… it does work.
2. Newsletters: This is an extension of e-mail but it is a very effective tool.
If you include enough timely and valuable information, a good newsletter can
drive up the number of visits to your website.
3. Blogging: Providing the tools on your website to enable bloggers to interact
with one another is a terrific way to get the message about your product of
service out there and being talked about. Bloggers have their ears to the ground
for new products and services.
4. Chat Rooms: A chat room on your website can and does encourage interaction
among your customers and that can’t be a bad thing. Also, you can use the chat
room to schedule special events like having an expert available to answer
questions on a given day at a given time.
5. Tell-a-friend Script: If you add this with a statement saying that e-mail
addresses supplied will never be shared with third parties, you can increase
your potential customer list greatly.
6. Video Clips: Including cool video clips on your website will keep the
interest up and increase traffic.
7. Flash Games: Although they are a little costly to start, they are an
extremely effective tool to get your viral marketing campaign going. Once they
are launched, they require nothing more from you.
6 Ideas for Viral Marketing
Here are six ideas to help you start your viral marketing campaign:
1. Purchase the branding rights to a viral E-book. Allow people to give away
your free E-book to their visitors. Then, their visitors will also give it away.
This will just continue to spread your ad all over the Internet.
2. If you have the ability to set up a forum or other bulletin board, you really
have a great tool. Allow people to use your online discussion board for their
own website. Some people don't have one. Just include your banner ad at the top
of the board.
3. Do you have a knack for web design? Create some templates, graphics, etc. and
upload them to your site. Then, allow people to give away your free web design
graphics, fonts, templates, etc. Just include your ad on them or require people
to link directly to your web site. Make sure that you include a link back to
your site in the copyright notice and require them to keep your copyright notice
in tact.
4. Write an E-book. Allow people to place an advertisement in your free E-book
if, in exchange, they give away the E-book to their web visitors or E-zine
subscribers.
5. Write articles that pertain to your product or service. Allow people to
reprint your articles on their website, in their E-zine, newsletter, magazine or
E-books. Include your resource box and the option for article reprints at the
bottom of each article.
6. You can easily find products on the Internet that will sell you a license
allowing you to distribute the product free of charge to other people. Look for
those products that provide "branding rights". That is where you can include
your own name, website, and contact information.
"Folksonomies" - a New Viral Marketing Tool
A new consumer phenomenon is called "tagging" or "folksonomies" (short for folks
and taxonomy). Tagging is powerful because consumers are creating an
organizational structure for online content. Folksonomies not only enable people
to file away content under tags, but, even better, share it with others by
filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.
Here's how tagging works. Using sites such as del.icio.us - a bookmark sharing
site – and Flickr - a photo sharing site - consumers are collaborating on
categorizing online content under certain keywords, or tags.
For instance, an individual can post photographs of their iPod on Flickr and
file it under the tag "iPod." These images are now not only visible under the
individual user's iPod tag but also under the community iPod tag that displays
all images consumers are generating and filing under the keyword. Right now
Flickr has more than 3,500 photos that are labeled "iPod."
Tagging is catching on because it is a natural complement to search. Type the
word "blogs" into Google and it can't tell if you are searching for information
about how to launch a blog, how to read blogs, or just what. Large and small
sites alike are already getting on to the folksonomy train. They are rolling out
tag-like structures to help users more easily locate content that's relevant to
them.
Although tags are far from perfect, marketers should, nevertheless, be using
them to keep a finger on the pulse of the American public. Start subscribing to
RSS feeds to monitor how consumers are tagging information related to your
product, service, company or space. These are living focus groups that are
available for free, 24/7. Folksonomy sites can be also be carefully used to
unleash viral marketing campaigns - with a caveat. Marketers should be
transparent in who they are, why they are posting the link/photos and avoid
spamming the services.
Four Good Reasons to Use Viral E-books
It is a well known and widely accepted fact, that E-books….FREE E-books…are one
of the best weapons in a viral marketing campaign arsenal. Here are four good
reasons why this is true today and will continue to be true for the foreseeable
future:
1. E-books are cheap to produce and don’t take long to set up. If you have
articles that you have already written about the subject you are promoting, you
can simply combine these articles into an E-book. If, on the other hand, writing
isn’t your forte, you can use rebrandable E-books that have been produced by
others. Just use your favorite search engine and do a web search for
“rebrandable E-books”. You will get a lot of hits and have many to choose from.
One way to distribute these E-books to visitors to your website is to give them
as a free gift for subscribing to your newsletter. If your E-book contains
material that people will want to share with their friends and family, they will
pass it along to them… they will pass it along to others…and you will make
money.
2. E-books are capable of reaching a large audience. The only limiting factor is
the enthusiasm or the participants. Therefore, it is absolutely vital that your
E-book contain something that people will want to share like timely information
or humor. Remember that people like to know something that the rest of the world
needs to know. They will pass along something that makes them look like they are
in-the-know.
3. E-books are a way to sell other products other than the one you originally
targeted. For example; if you are selling garden products, your customers could
also be interested in E-books about lawns, trees landscaping, etc.
4. E-books are effective in building your reputation. It is an implied
recommendation if you give a quality E-book and users willing pass on to others.
Humor Turns E-Mail Viral
A study by Sharpe Partners, an interactive marketing agency, revealed that 89%
of adult Internet users in America share content with others via e-mail. This is
excellent news for those companies who use self-propelling word-of-mouse” e-mail
techniques to sell their products.
The study generated some interesting results regarding the type of content that
is most often forwarded, as well. The most popular content is humorous material.
The second most popular category is news, followed by healthcare and medical
information, religious and spiritual material, games, business and personal
finance information and sports/hobbies… in that order. So it is easy to see that
humor is the best content for your viral e-mail campaign.
Cartoons, jokes and funny video clips are among the things that can be added to
an e-mail to insure that it will go viral. People will want to pass along
something that makes them laugh.
They are a lot more likely to hit the forward button and send your email to
their friends and relatives if it is an “advertainment” rather than an
advertisement.
Not long ago, about 35 million people got an e-mail containing a picture taken
in Disneyland. It took a minute to see it but there was Donald Duck lying prone
in front of the famous Cinderella Castle. The title of the picture was “Bird Flu
has hit Disneyland”. It was a viral e-mail advertising Disneyland and used the
edgy strategy of making light of what’s serious… and it works.
I’d guess that most people who own a computer have seen that picture… and thus
the advertisement for Disneyland. The bird flu epidemic is newsworthy and has
the potential to attract an enormous amount of attention to any brand that
might, for whatever reason, associate itself with it.
Remember that people are much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture
than anything else so you would be well advised to include humor in your e-mail
campaign.
Successful Forum Viral Marketing
In order to be successful using forums to do viral marketing there are some
things that are required.
Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research.
1. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary
sales market. For example, someone involved with a health related product, many
types of forums could apply….everything from holistic medicine to stay-at-home
moms.
2. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on
forums that few members and few posts. Page ranking and the amount of active
members are two good ways to check for this.
3. Choose forums that allow sig tags. If it’s possible read the rules before
joining and pay attention to them. Your time is important, too. It is better to
find out that a forum doesn’t allow posts with sig tags before you go to the
time and trouble of joining.
After You Have Joined: OK…you have chosen two or three forums that meet your
requirements…now what?
1. Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit
yourself to one link, preferably to your main website.
2. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This all but
a universal rule and only displays the marketers lack of experience if he does
so. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors….at worst, it is
grounds for being banned.
3. Work the room. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an
hour each day there and take the time to get to know the users. Take the time to
introduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum’s topic.
As a marketer becomes a regular member, they will hopefully develop a good
reputation and without saying a word about their promotion, those who are
interested in their product will approach them.
Using Chat Rooms in Viral Marketing
Spamming chat rooms or instant messaging systems with undifferentiated marketing
messages is certainly not a very good idea. But if they are used the right way,
these channels can be great to communicate with the market - especially to
establish a dialogue with customers.
Have you ever been to a chat room and posted a message. If you have then you may
learn some free web-advertising secrets on how to market your products and
service in chat rooms. Chat rooms are usually broken into categories. You will
need to find the right chat room where your targeted audience would gather. If
there isn’t one, then you may need to create one.
It will be of no use to create one that is obviously for the sole purpose of
selling your product or service. Rather, it needs to attract people who would be
interested in your product or service. For example: If you sell garden products,
your chat room should be on the subject of gardening and not the brand name of
the products you sell.
Another way to use a chat room to promote your business is to include a chat
room on your web site. Host a free online seminar in your own chat room about a
subject of your expertise. Use your chat room to meet with your current
customers and answer any questions or address and problems they may have.
Regularly schedule free events in your chat room and be certain that your
customers are made aware of when they will occur.
For example, you might have an expert in the field available to answer questions
on a certain day and between certain hours. You might, also, host other people’s
chat rooms as an expert yourself. You, of course, could charge for this but it
might be wise to do it free to gain publicity.
Using Videos in Viral Marketing
More and more advertisers are adopting video as broadband continues to rise and
ad-serving technologies become more sophisticated. Online video advertising is
really taking off. Users’ attention can be captured and ads stand out from the
crowd in an increasingly ad-cluttered online environment. It is true that video
formats cost five to ten times more to serve than standard banners and they
involve a lot more production and implementation work but they may well be worth
all of that if they achieve greater response rates.
Like everything else, there are good ways and bad ways to use video advertising.
Right now most marketers are incorporating their audio-visual content into
existing embedded ad formats like banners or over-content formats like pop-ups.
Though this could reach a potentially large audience, viewers are likely to be
less captivated and more annoyed by these disruptive and distracting placements.
Cached or streaming video on a specific destination site offers the best chance
of creating interest with consumers in brand messages, but it is not likely to
reach a large audience unless it generates a viral outcome.
Whatever you come up with, don't forget to make it easy to open and distribute.
File size is important, as is the media format. If your viral video has been
created for a particular type of software that not many people use, how will you
get people to spread it like wildfire?
Also, if you've made a video the impact will be better if you send the clip as
an attachment rather than stream it. It's cheaper and, if you're not hosting it,
it's more viral, too.
Viral Marketing Goes Mobile
Mobile devices, mobile phones and PDA’s are one of the last great frontiers of
viral advertisement opportunities. However, we have become experts at filtering
everything, our air and water, our e-mail and pop-ups, and our mobile devices as
well. We are good at filtering.
The very idea of unwanted advertising streaming through our Blackberries is
abhorrent. Mobile devices are the ultimate opt-in medium and, therefore, a great
way for marketers to connect with users…if that’s what the users want. “WANT” is
the key word here. How should marketers approach the medium?
There are three main ways to achieve this. They are:
1. Offer exclusive content. Anyone can offer ring tones. It’s the unique
content, such as exclusive mobile images of new brand concepts, that drives
interest and calls them out in other media like e-mail campaigns, newsletters,
websites, etc. So a wireless campaign is most effective when it offers exclusive
content for wireless devices.
2. Make it useful and timely. Think about what would be handy and helpful to
have on a mobile device. Last year, for example, Food Network enabled Sprint
customers to download shopping lists for their Thanksgiving dinners. There was a
lot of “Sprint-envy” going around among non-sprint customers.
3. Clearly define objectives. Usually, one of two business objectives drives
successful mobile experiences: incremental revenue of brand intimacy. On the
intimacy factor, a text message usually takes priority over almost any other
form of communication. Why? Because we haven’t yet been saturated with mobile
spam, and this is what causes us to prioritize wireless messaging over voice.
Mobile marketing has been out there for a while but we marketers have new
territory to explore. Video offers fantastic opportunities for engagement.
Consumers already bypass their filters for highly useful or entertaining content
and will do so for rich exclusive, compelling content.
What Works & What Doesn't in Viral Marketing
Stop with the enforced e-mail forwards already! Trying to force or bribe people
to forward your info to a friends or family in order to be rewarded or win looks
skanky in today's ultra-permission-based world. Especially when you tell
visitors nothing about their friend's or family’s privacy in the space directly
next to the e-mail form.
A true viral campaign gets forwarded because buyers are compelled to do so by
the glory of the content, not because you bribed them with points or something
else.
What absolutely will not work:
Suggesting that e-mail recipients forward your message to their friends and
family will not work. Adding a line at the bottom of your e-mail that reads
“Please feel free to forward this message to a friend” is more likely to get it
deleted than forwarded.
What absolutely will work:
Offering something worthy of sharing like a valuable discount, vital information
or offering an incentive for sharing like additional entries into a sweepstakes
or an added discount or premium service will work.
Relevant or timely information, research, or studies that are included in your
e-mail might encourage the recipients to share with their family and friends.
Interactive content like a quiz or test, especially if it’s fun, will inspire
forwarding.
Jokes and cartoons are almost always forwarded to everybody the recipient knows.
Why? Because they are entertaining and entertainment is meant to be shared.
A really cool multimedia experience is always going to achieve a lot of
pass-along. Rich media is new and the novelty and tech factors alone are often
enough to make the e-mail recipient eager to share it.
Oops! Almost forgot one really important thing….You can craft a brilliant e-mail
following all the rules, but if a consumer visits your site and has an
experience less that what was promised, you are going to achieve viral
marketing, alright…the bad kind. So be certain that your product or service is
ready and is as advertised.
You can receive valuable insights, techniques and information if you sign up
for our FREE Infohatch Business On Line Internet Marketing course below:
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