This is an online technique that uses pre-existing online social networks to increase brand awareness and/or directly increase other marketing objectives such as sales growth.
Word of Mouth (WOM) has always been a strong marketing tool and existed long before the Internet and online activity. The presence of the internet has however meant that WOM marketing can now be greatly enhanced by use of this medium, it can actually be achieved at a much faster rate than previously although it is important to be aware that bad news tends to travel faster than good news, unless the good news is revolutionary and/or of significant difference to guarantee interest among the target audience.
There are numerous ways of using viral marketing some that are listed below.
Informative Articles
You can attract interest in your company by writing articles about every aspect of you’re market sector, your knowledge, your experiences and you can then offer it to complementary sites to post on their site as free content. You should ensure that the article includes links back to your site where relevant. The article could go far and wide, especially if it is carried as part of e-mails to others who will distribute the same article to their network of contacts.
Educate, Advise and Teach
Create simple videos and tutorials and make them available on sites like You Tube and VEOH.com, offer them to trade and industry sites as well. Everyone is keen to learn, make your products and services the ones in the users eye.
Use Micro sites
Create micro sites that talk about your brands, products and services in away that builds awareness. This will help increase the opportunity of potential customers finding out about your brands and products via search engines as there will be far more pages to find. Talk to your suppliers, and customers, see if having these inked to their site would help them, in doing so it will help you.
Set up an affiliate program to encourage links to your products
Affiliate programs are a form of network marketing that provides financial incentive for other sites to link to yours. The level of networking can be as detailed as you wish, it can be just a click through which pays a fee, it can relate to actual sales if you have an ecommerce site, or it could create vertical integration between suppliers in a chain, giving a seamless service to customers and business to you all.
News Releases
Send out news releases that have a newsworthy event, contest, free service, or digital download. Send these to Trade and Industry bodies, Online trade magazines and the national and local press. If the news release is carried by just 5% of the media you send it to, you could have your URL in front of tens of thousands of readers quite inexpensively.
Encourage Word-of-Mouth Recommendations
Word-of-mouth is the best advertising, because it is unsolicited. Below are some ways to encourage friends and contacts to share with their friends and contacts, and use their networks to promote your business.
• Add a “recommend it referral system” to your site
• Build an email this page to your friend function into your site.
• Create an online newsletter and encourage readers to forward it to a friend or colleague.
• Have special offers on products that are of interest to the target audience and encourage them to forward them on.
• Offer free downloads and ensure they carrying a marketing message.
• Send in comments to industry related blogs and include mentions to relevant products and services you sell, plus put in details on your site.
• Take part in industry forums, get people talking to and about you, plus you will learn what others are doing.
• Use your everyday emails to add to your marketing, put banners in your signature and vary these for different offers, even when you forward jokes and funnies your message will be getting out there.
• Most important of all, it is important to think of unique ways to build viral marketing techniques into all future marketing. Campaigns that carry a strong viral marketing component will get you more traffic for the investment than straight advertising.
Viral marketing is also very cost effective as whilst their needs to be an initial investment in setting up the collateral it does not need printing and the distribution of the collateral is left to others to generate, the trick is to make it compelling enough for the reader to want to forward onto or send to a colleague or friend.
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