Internet Marketing Strategies Strategy 5: Viral Marketing
One of the virtues that a site must possess in order to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business is creativity. There are so many competitors and every method of marketing must be employed and utilized to compete. It doesn’t matter if you have an amazing, high converting product or a perfectly designed website. If potential customers don’t know that you exist, it will not matter. You are not going to make it big because of it. Worse of all, it could kill your business dead.
While there are a plethora of methods being used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some methods that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these aforementioned methods is Viral Marketing. While the term Viral easily puts thoughts of a virus in your head, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, everything is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads, malware and spyware.
Viral Marketing is a marketing technique used to build the public’s awareness of a product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by utilizing 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, family, and neighbors. 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 it is relatively low cost to the advertiser. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and will normally open it as well.
Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when you help in spreading their viral marketing message. They rely solely on the number of recipients as a viral marketing message gets from one person to the next in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be rewarded with. 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 is full of 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 viral marketing as part of your strategy could kill your business. Along with other strategies and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating wars.
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 fun addictive game, a funny story. Many ideas are still out there. Create gossip or buzz surrounding your product, as many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossip to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?
Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had a lot of success with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the viral marketing strategy and it has worked wonders for them. Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures. Create a funny story on video mocking a famous celebrity or politician, upload it to YouTube and Google Video, and put the link on a few social bookmarking sites. See how quickly that video gets circulated. It will do amazing things with your bottom line.
