Viral marketing has matured a bit over the years. There seems to have been a shift to the web not just being seen by agencies and brands as another tick box for any ad campaign, which is significant enough, but now being the medium where a campaign is launched to create a buzz before it hits TV and print. Even before a movie is released which used to be seen as the pre-launch buzz-generation activity. Big business gets it.
Buzz works. It can work for small and start-up businesses, as well. The planning stage of a viral campaign will set out objectives and develop the viral theme for a buzz. There are three core components to any viral campaign and businesses of any size can use them. They are:
1. The creative material: the viral agent that embodies the message you want to spread in a digital format (image, video, text, etc). The trick is to put together material that people will be eager to share with their family and friends and people are much more eager to share entertainment and advertisement.
2. Seeding: distributing and placing the agent online in places that provide the greatest potential spread. Direct viral material downloads or links on specialist viral third-party web sites in order to create awareness and spread before users get to the campaign destination site.
3. Tracking: Measuring the spread of the campaign to provide accountability and prove success. It is absolutely vital that you know what is or is not working. The only way to get that information is to track the results of your seeding.
Lessons have been learned, trends have been developed and there is definitely some science involved in creating a buzz successfully. The buzz technique is here to stay and, if used strategically, it can make a difference to the success of your e-business.
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Obinna Heche 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.
Obinna Heche Viral Marketing
They use viral marketing by e-mail as a marketing tool. What do you think I meant? Viral marketing can work well for B2B providers, as long as the following is true:
1. The product or service has to add value for the sender, as well as, the receiver.
2. The offer has to be deliverable. You do not want to offer a product that you can not deliver if demand grows rapidly.
3. The offer has to be easily transferable to others. E-mail and Web pages provide the best medium to facilitate this.
4. The vest viral marketing campaigns use existing networks to move the message along.
The basis of viral marketing has been around for a long time. The idea is that you incite your customers or referral sources to pass on something about your business to their network of colleagues and friends. Those that pass on your information get something in return. The something might be a gift or service related to your business.
Using e-mail makes it incredibly easy to pass information on to a friend or colleague, especially if it involves something fun or free. With millions using the Internet worldwide, the potential for exponential growth is tremendous. The great things about viral marketing are that it is free and works virtually by itself. Once you make an offer and provide the facility for referrals, viral marketing spreads like
well
a virus
but the good kind.
To implement viral marketing at your business; first, start with your customer base. Incite existing customers to refer new ones. Second, go to your referral sources. Service providers, your outside network and colleagues can be encouraged to provide referrals that lead to business.
If your customers are stressed business owners, offer a reward that provides relaxation and leisure like a weekend away.
Obinna Heche Viral Marketing
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 is 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 Flicker 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 not 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.
Obinna Heche Viral Marketing
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 do not 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 is not 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 interesting 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.
Obinna Heche Viral Marketing
