With mass communication being achievable with just the click of a mouse, the internet has become the world's biggest marketplace. That is why most advertisers believe that viral marketing is the most effective way to get customers to buy your product. As Tom Kinnear, executive director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan tells Forbes.com, "It [viral marketing] can be referred to as word-of-mouth on steroids."
The movie "Snakes on a Plane' is a good example. While the film didn't do so hot at the box office it got a huge amount of buzz when people started writing songs and creating videos based on the title. When the media picked up on it, word of mouth for Snakes on a Plane took off like wildfire. This required no effort from the filmmakers after their initial advertising push. That's the essence of good viral marketing.
You may not have a movie studio or Samuel L. Jackson to help you out but there are ways you can adapt viral marketing to your internet business.
The Fun Page
If you are a serious marketer, and you don't have enough funding for a major advertisement, this is one of the best techniques that you can use. Make a page on your site with funny or interesting videos or images, or even create a mini-game that is focused on your product. Be sure to include a 'tell a friend' link to ensure that your 'fun page' gets circulated. Creativity is the key. If your 'fun' page is cool enough, you can be sure that you'll get more hits for to your website.
Kind of Weird
Remember the Subservient Chicken? Burger King created a webpage that contained a 'video camera' with a command line below it. On the site, you just typed what you wanted the subservient chicken to do, and voila, the chicken did it. People were born curious. If you have some idea in your head, do it. The Subservient Chicken became so popular that people forwarded the links to their friends, and all Burger King had to do was to maintain the website. The downside is this strategy might create 'bad' publicity but as the old saying goes, bad publicity is still publicity.
Email Forward
Create a message with funny pictures or a video, and then send it to your friends or list of subscribers. If it is funny enough, you can be sure that this little message will reach a lot of people. Remember that the images or video should contain at least a brand logo or a website address. The best thing that you can do here is to include your 'name' on the video itself, like for example a guy wearing a t-shirt with your brand name on it, or a bunch of funny pictures dealing with your products. Most forwarded e-mails are viral marketing strategies. In this technique, you can always be sure that your e-mails are going to be opened, because they came from the friends of the e-mail owner.
Free is Good
Most people search the internet with 'free' as one of their keywords. Free stuff can boost your website's popularity. There are a lot of items out there that you can give out for free. Creating a downloadable Flash game is one of the most used today. But of course, you should make it interesting, and make the people think that without this free stuff on their desktop, they're missing out a lot.
Viral marketing may not answer all of your promotional needs, but it will surely help you in creating a buzz. It's cheap, easy and very effective. What viral marketing does so brilliantly is fuel our irresistible urge to tell somebody about a good experience. It’s hard to find any advertising better than that.
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