Posts Tagged ‘Viral Marketing’
Increase Your Audience – Online Marketing Goes Viral
Do you really need viral marketing software? Here’s a look at the five elements of an effective strategy. After you study these, you may decide that what you need is something different.
Offer something free. What you choose to give might be simply information, an ebook or even software. For example, you might offer a free download of a “basic” software program that you have created. However, to get the “premium” version or membership, the customer would have to pay for it.
Quite a number of video game providers use this method. You may play these games free, but to get certain features or limited time, you must pay for the “complete” version. People that love the game and get addicted to it in the trial, will often pay for the extended version. Viral marketing software cannot tell you what to give away. Only you or a company that offers personalized service can determine that.
The second element is to design a method that allows your specific offer to be transmitted from a single person to everyone they know. Most often, this is done through email marketing. When a person surfs the net and comes by something useful, funny or interesting, they tend to share it with on average up to 6 friends, according to surveys. You can envision how the number of people that you can contact grows very quickly, which brings us to the next element.
You must be able to effortless and effectively handle the increased influx of business. Oftentimes, this means that you need an auto-reply generator or other “assistants”. You might need to increase your stock, if you are selling an item or even overhaul your site to handle massive traffic. If you provide a service, you will need to determine just how many new clients you can handle. Is is possible that viral marketing software do that? No.
The fourth element is to take advantage of common reactions. So, for example, a reaction to a picture of food that looks tasty is hunger. If you sell food, you want photos in your e-mails and on your websites that are “appetizing”. Another example is the “what can it do for me” mentality. Consumers probably don’t want to know all the details about a car’s reinforced side beams. They really just want to be sure that the car will be as safe as possible in the event of a collision or accident. Show and tell a potential client what your product will do for them and you will have a new customer.
Last, but not least, is to take advantage of existing communication networks. That’s the one thing that viral marketing software might be able to do for you. But, it cannot offer everything that you need for your campaign to be a success.
Getting Word of Mouth – Online Viral Marketing Strategies
What is online viral marketing? It is basically a successful advertising campaign. The phrase was a creation of a business school graduate, popularized by the media and a media critic named Douglas Rushkoff. This simply refers to the potential to reach an thousands of people by starting out with only a small amount.
If you tell me something that I think is interesting, I will tell my friends about it. If they like it as well, you can guess that they will also tell their friends. They probably know people that I do not. So, the potential of growth is virtually limitless. It traditionally was called word of mouth advertising.
The main difference between word of mouth advertising and online viral marketing has to do with the sheer potential number of people that someone can or does speak to daily. Let’s use me as an example. In my personal life, I speak to my immediate family members daily. I might talk to my extended family members and my friends at least once a week.
Some, I haven’t talked to in years, “live”. I communicate to everyone at least once every day or so via e-mail and social networking sites. If I find something that I think is interesting or something that makes me laugh out loud, I will send it to a minimum of 30 people.
Surveys say that the average person shares this kind of thing with only 12 people. So, I may be a little outside of the curve. The point is that the 30 people that I know will share with others. With very little effort, the information moves through this mass of people. Will the free ride eventually end?
If you have an effective online viral marketing strategy, you may be able to generate numerous waves; when one crashes, another forms. There are countless different strategies, but all of the effective ones isolate one key element. There is a free item for people to share.
In some cases, it is simply a well-done commercial. Sony had one some time ago. It was posted on YouTube and people got it out there to people they knew. To date, it has had hundreds of thousands of views. How many people made a purchase? Who could be aware of?
The point is this. If you wanted to reach thousands or millions of people not so many years ago, your olny option would have been via television advertising. And, of course, you would have had to buy space on the most popular shows and the costs are prohibitive. With online viral marketing, you can reach that many people for next to nothing.
What’s All the Talk About Going Viral On The Internet – Marketing at the Top
Internet viral marketing comes in many shapes and forms. People use email and videos and even simple text links. They may buy mailing lists or get lists from free services like Mail-chimp. In order to be truly successful with this campaign, there are several steps that you should follow.
Initally, of course, you need to have a great product or service for sale. You may envision that you have that. Initially, you need to isolate what sets your product or service apart from thousands of others.
Once you isolate those features, you need to spin them into benefits for your clients. That is how you will write unique content for your site. You could attract millions of visitors to your website with an internet viral marketing campaign, but if the copy on your website does not “sell” them, then it really won’t increase your business.
If you have a great product and website, the next thing to do is identify your market or niche.You might have quite a few.
For instance, pretend that you have written an e-book that will help men build muscle and dump excess fat. Your target group is men. Specifically, it is men who need to lose weight or really want to build muscle. People that might be interested in your book might also be interested in health and fitness.
There are social networking groups under all of those categories. If you can’t find your target market, you can simply create one. Groups and clubs work well as a platform for internet viral marketing.
When you send mass e-mails, be sure that what you have to say is relevant, unique and interesting. Otherwise, you could be wasting valuable time. Your e-mail should be grammatically correct. Spelling errors should be corrected. If English is not your “forte” get someone to read and edit your communications for you. Some people might not notice, others will.
While this type of campaign does not require a huge monetary investment, it does require an investment of your time. Don’t worry too much if you have zero time, just find a business that can get you started. Internet viral marketing can be a great way to grow your business. Make sure you are prepared. It can be very overwhelming.
The Basics of A Referral System Revealed
Most everyone who has a company or works for themselves would love the day when they don’t have to market their services any more because buyers come to them through their referral system. The reason that most people don't have great referral networks or develop referral systems is that they are afraid to ask. People cannot read your mind, unless you specifically ask them to refer other people to what you offer; then you might not get a referral.
If someone is elated with your product and tells you so, then say thanks, if you happen to hear of anyone else who might benefit from what I have to offer, then please refer them to me. A slight variation of this is I'm so happy youare happy, perhaps you know someone else who would like to lower their second mortgage repayments.
The above is idealistic, people are usually pleased with what they have received, but because we don’t act right away and make a point of asking them, or the opportunity will come and go.Another interesting way of creating a referral system is with a thank you letter in which you thank a person for their business and then end saying that you enclose one or two of your business cards for them to give to other people.
There are occasions however, when the above methods of developing a referral system do not work, especially in the financial sector. The fact of the matter is that people vary rarely discuss their finances with others, and so wouldn't be sure who might be interested in the services that you have to offer. Keep in mind, there are a couple of approaches to compiling a referral system that are far more likely to work.
Many successful companies have found that it is imperative to stay in touch with their clients and ask them if they would like to sign up for a monthly newsletter. This should give them helpful financial tips and at the end you could ask if they know anyone else who might appreciate receiving your news letter.
You should network with other businesses and try and get people together referring business to each other. When people meet like this, they are far more likely to make referrals in case a client of theirs needs the services that you have to offer. These things are proven methods of building a referral system, but it won’t happen in a day.
If you are going to build a successful referral system that will still be working a long time in the future then you need to have patience.
Word of Mouth Marketing Gets an A for Influence Among Its Own Customers
In many respects marketing by word of mouth can be said to be the “hidden statistic” for all programs, as it’s well near impossible to actually gauge the effectiveness of marketing done this way. Saying that, however, it should be noted that almost every product in this increasingly digital age has, at one time or another, relied on this method of marketing to increase public and corporate awareness of product or service availability.
A recent study showed that fully two thirds of online marketing is expected to be done on this basis alone in the coming year, which when coupled with the advent (in leaps and bounds) of Web 2.0 social networking and social marketing sites point towards promoting your product by word of mouth may be both more cost effective, and have an increasingly better ROI than more “traditional” online advertising media.
Think about the business model of the current social networking sites. There has yet to be a successful site of this type that charges for any sort of membership, relying instead as they do on ad generated income to fuel their corporate engines. While there is no metric that can be used to measure marketing by word of mouth, there is one method of knowing if your campaign is worth while – sales.
A company should know from their output volume exactly the change between before a campaign, during a campaign and after a campaign. This in itself gives businesses a measurable statistic to show effectiveness of this marketing methodology. It is true that not all businesses need or desire this form of sales technique, but is also through that not one business turns away prospects garnered from the by word of mouth method either.
Whatever you sell, a great study completed by Hill and Knowlton in February this year showed that decision makers are largely influenced by personal experience’s (58%), with recommendations and industry reports coming in at 51%. Coming in at a smaller than expected third was direct marketing at 21% with internet advertising lapsing to 17%. These figures may only reflect the purchasing habits of key decision makers, but a young lady in Oregon deciding to buy one car insurance or another IS the key decision maker for that purchase, and her buddy Becky telling her to go with this company over that company will have a greater influence than any gravel-voiced actor pushing the product in a TV advert.
In essence, this statistic can be shown to reflect into any industry, any segment or niche, if every purchaser is considered the key decision maker. This makes the re-appearance of the world’s oldest method of marketing a no brainer – so get talking or tweeting, but tell everyone!
