Browsing Category: "Viral Marketing"
Take for example the Blendtec Company, a maker of food processors and blenders, who placed a series of YouTube videos called “Will It Blend?” Arising our curiosity and sense of dark humor Blendtec blended golf balls, an iPhone, and even a bag of marbles. It was fascinating to watch a glowing iPhone being reduced to black powder and shredded plastic. In a short matter of time Blendtec logged 8 million visitors while sales increased over 800%. Don’t we just enjoy watching things being destroyed?
Burger King launched an interactive video on their micro website with a man dressed as a chicken. In the message bar you can insert a command and the chicken-man would jump, run, dance, and play dead. You get the picture. People loved the creativity, fun, and sense of control. Within 24 hours the site received 1 million hits and by the end of the week eight million. Not bad for a chicken man.
Down in Orlando Florida, Universal Studios launched a new attraction based on the Harry Potter series. Instead of deploying expensive advertising through mass media, Universal teamed up with the author J.K. Rowling, to give a special webinar to the top seven Harry Potter maven fans. Afterwards, the seven maven fans shared their news on blogs and forums with great energy and enthusiasm. The media picked it up and ran with the story. Meanwhile, Universal setup a micro site for bloggers and the media to ascertain more information on the park’s new attraction. In just a few weeks this viral marketing tactic spread the news from seven people to over 300 Million. Of course, it helps when you have an established base of loyal Harry Potter fans.
TRUST: Content Democratization: We are migrating from push advertising to pull; allowing users greater access, participation, and control based on trust.
In the last ten years both the media and information technology industries have been migrating from a traditional push advertising environment (TV & newspaper ads) to interactive (pull) advertising using interactive content. The days of advertiser content dominance is being transformed into a democratization process whereby quality content is interacted, shared, and rated. The democratization process allows the consumer greater control and influence to recommend products and services to their peers. In the end, it’s creating trust between the buyer and the seller. Trust builds loyalty and repeat business. Trust is the glue that will cement the relationship and it’s done by allowing an interactive participation in the communication and collaboration process. There’s nothing more powerful and trustworthy than when a good friend makes a recommendation.
If you own a website or an e-business that needs promoting, viral marketing techniques can be a great way to publicize your business and generate traffic. Viral marketing techniques can also be quite effective sources of sales leads and targeted customers. If you have never explored viral marketing techniques for web promotion, or if you find the word “viral” distasteful, read on to learn more about some of the most popular and effective viral marketing techniques.
Viral marketing techniques attempt to capitalize on the urge felt by all people to discuss and share information. Word-of-mouth publicity is deceptively simple, but don’t be fooled by the lack of sophistication. Most of the hugely successful viral marketing techniques use word-of-mouth either directly or indirectly. Some viral marketing techniques use individuals as inadvertent or unwitting promoters of a website, product or service. These marketing ploys can be said to be viral marketing techniques, in the truest sense of the word.
Some simple yet effective viral marketing techniques
1. Word-of-Mouth: As mentioned earlier, it is easy to overlook this simple marketing strategy for its lack of sophistication. But word-of-mouth publicity is highly effective as a viral marketing technique and should be the back bone of any marketing campaign. If you own a website, use a simple “tell a friend about us” link. If you have an RSS feed, a newsletter or some other subscription service, include a line at the end, politely urging the customer to spread the word.
2. Branding: Another easy and effective viral marketing technique is branding. Ensure that there is a logo or trademark displayed prominently on your website or product. Branding is a great viral marketing technique to get people talking about your product or service. An attractive logo, a catchy jingle or a memorable slogan can all add amazing marketing mileage to your business and make it instantly recognizable.
3. eBooks Marketers savvy in the latest viral marketing techniques were quick to take advantage of this new and exciting marketing channel. EBooks can be downloaded and distributed easily across the web. They can be packed with relevant links and advertisements. As long as the publicity material is relevant and unobtrusive, people would not really mind, as the eBooks can be quite useful for their content. A High-quality, informative and instructional eBook will get distributed very fast. The greatest advantage of this viral marketing technique is that if the eBook is useful, readers will take care of the distribution themselves, through social networking and peer to peer file sharing.
4. Viral Software: The eBook viral marketing technique can easily be extended to software. An eBook can be substituted with a simple, yet useful piece of software to achieve the same marketing effect. Indeed, some might argue that viral software is much more effective than eBooks, since more people use software than read eBooks.
5. RSS: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the new kid on the block when it comes to viral marketing techniques – well not really. RSS has been around for some years, but its popularity is increasing by the minute. RSS is a tool designed to disseminate information quickly across the internet. It is used by websites and blogs to keep regular visitors posted on updates to the content of the site or blog. With Microsoft’s announcement that RSS is to be integrated in to the latest Windows operating system, RSS is unquestionably the hottest viral marketing technique around.
Viral marketing has grown to be one of the most effective and successful methods of getting customers in the online world of business and has been referred to as an advertising miracle. This is because viral marketing can make your traffic grow exponentially from just one new visitor to become an avalanche of potential customers to your website.
Done well, viral marketing is an inexpensive marketing method with a rapid and widespread response. The term viral marketing became popular in 1997, when used to describe Hotmail and their viral marketing campaign. They attached an advertisement for their service to each e-mail sent. Customers spread the word because the very use of the service promotes further use.
Burger King is one company that has used viral marketing very effectively. In 2004, they created the Subservient Chicken website, which is one of the worst web-sites the writer has ever seen, and then used viral marketing principles to get traffic to the site. Word spread quickly, with the help of a ‘tell-a-friend’ link, the site received 10s of thousands of hits in the first few months and eventually millions. Viral marketing succeeds by bringing in massive traffic when the right tools and strategy are used.
Viral Marketing is not just about when your existing website visitors, subscribers and customers refer you to others or when other webmasters send traffic to your site. Everybody knows that recommendation is by far the best way to be introduced to others. Viral Marketing is about using ‘leveraging devices’ to multiply each stage of the recommendation process. Viral Marketing is about making it advantageous for others to help you while helping them-selves and it being advantageous for you to help others while helping yourself. The motivation is not altruistic it is ice cold commercial common sense.
Here are a few examples of viral marketing.
Submitting Articles to Article Directories and Submitters is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get instant free publicity to your web site and is also an excellent way to get links back to your site but it only becomes viral marketing when you load your article with your links and allow the article to be copied without alteration and used by any-body, anywhere.
Writing your own e-book is another method. Write a book on a subject you are familiar with and, of course, there is a market for, pack it with links to your web-site and/or your affiliate sites. Enjoy the retail sales income and the commissions from your affiliate links and for as long as you can get the full price. Then reduce the price to half with a blaze of, “I’ve made my money and now I want to help people etc.” “The price will be going up again soon etc.”
When you’ve milked it almost dry and the retail sales drop off give it away free of charge with full retail rights and allow others to sell it and keep 100% of the retail sales money, (a good opportunity for more self gratifying BS about helping people). Many people will give it away as a free bonus and you continue to get the sales from the affiliate links. This is an old ‘Guru’ trick that’s been going on for years. Easy long term money!
Using a ‘refer-a-friend’ script on your site can be very effective. Put a simple “TELL A FRIEND” link that leads to an outgoing e-mail window, pre-written from the visitor to who-ever they choose with a message and link back to your web-site. Brilliant and very effective!
Indeed, viral content is a wonderful concept and especially important to us all because we all want to expand our activities and businesses. But if you’ve never used viral marketing, these are a few ideas where you can get started. These ideas all make good viral marketing. We will not write about other methods such as: great lists, videos, email accounts or chicken and hamburger sites, those are for you to investigate.
We’re going to finish off this article writing about Viral Traffic Expansion Sites, there are several: the TrafficPowerHouse, FreeViral & VitalViral are three of them, the rest you’ll find in Google. You actually get a clone of their web-site; put your own web-site on theirs in THE prime position, quite free of charge. You then market the clone, others join and market their own clone with your web-site in the second position etc. etc. The concept is explained fully on their web-sites, they are just great and they’re all free, exponential expansion is what they provide and they’re a lot easier than writing an e-book!
Only you can decide which method of viral marketing is best for you. Inform yourself while surfing the Internet. Be doubly aware of the sites you visit and look out for a viral marketing element that the site is uses. Can you do it too?