The Voice of Viral Marketing
Thursday, 26 January 2006
Generating buzz through word of mouth will help drive greater
sales and from your most important customers.
Viral marketing strategies can effectively generate traffic to
your website by creating buzz-building campaigns that excite and
energize your customer base. However, in order to most
effectively execute a successful viral marketing project, it is
important to build a significant understanding of your target
audience to tap into their social and psychological network.
By creating articles or newsletters, for example, that resonate
with your audience, you will encourage loyal customers to share
the useful information or unique advice with their family and
friends. Indeed, viral marketing is one of the most powerful
forms of product support as it consists of unbiased
recommendations from trusted sources.
Initiating a viral marketing campaign begins with the
development of unique and attractive content for your most loyal
customers. While articles that pertain to the product or service
you are selling will help draw visitors to your site, creating
resources that speak to your audience in a strategic fashion.
Once your marketing theme or ideas have been thoroughly
cultivated, you can begin to build a viral marketing campaign
around your most critical ideas. For example, post your articles
on message boards or deliver special content directly to
consumers. At the end of each article, add a link to your
website and encourage your readers to send along the information
to their friends. Your article, if delivered appropriately, will
begin to make its way throughout the web passing from friend to
friend and deliver a core business message that brings dramatic
business returns.
Newsletters and ezines are also extremely effective means of
capitalizing on viral marketing campaigns. As consumers become
inundated with spam and other e-mailed ?junk,? sites that can
break through the clutter by creating innovative means of
communicating with customers via newsletters are likely to
generate significant word of mouth traffic.
Not surprisingly, then, the newsletters and ezines that own the
greatest popularity serve as the most effective platforms on
which viral marketing develops. Utilizing word of mouth
recommendations, webmasters and small business owners can
generate more subscribers when they include tips, tutorials, and
relevant news clips that are quick and easy to read.
Indeed, making a successful viral marketing campaign successful
relies on more than just quality articles. The articles must
spur the reader to act and send information unprompted to
someone else. Therefore, online articles should serve as more
than simple sales letters. They need to provide readers with
something that is unique. Modern internet readers do not
appreciate being used as business pawns and will quickly exit a
site that wastes their time. By utilizing newsletters, then, to
promote something more than just your business, online
businesspeople can develop a better viral campaign.
Several high profile viral marketing programs can be used as a
benchmark for the ultimate marketing success. BMW, for example,
generated a tremendous amount of attention via a series of short
film clips they published online at BMW Films. More recently,
Burger King developed a commercial featuring a fighting chicken
that rode the e-mail circuit through word of mouth.
Marketing experts believe that viral marketing is actually the most powerful
form of product attention available to consumers. Unlike
television ads or other paid advertising, viral marketing can
not be purchased. Instead it relies solely on the
recommendations of individuals. Yet, while a successful viral
marketing campaign may be difficult to construct, the benefits
generated by unbiased attention will make your business strong
and successful.
? John Doetsch 2006. Online reprint rights granted as long as
the article is published in its entirety, including links and
resource box.
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