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Map a Viral Marketing Campaign for your Enterprise
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Posted On Jan 23, 2008
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 A very familiar term ‘Viral’ most of us encounter as ‘viral fever’ but not many know this term has a more dominant meaning when used with ‘Marketing’. Every organization crawling on the web today wants their brand to me recognized, their marketing message to be passed along willingly and convince people for their product. But how is all this possible? The Answer is VIRAL MARKETING, VIRAL ADVERTISING VIRAL PROMOTION.
WHAT IS VIRAL MARKETING?
It is a marketing technique that uses pre-existing social networks to promote via the Internet and even offline creating spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, mp3 clips, images, interactive Flash games, advergames, or even text messages.With the rising social networks on web, a hit email marketing campaign can only be a success if it’s ‘viral’ and if organization‘s message creates a viral effect. But do people understand what it is that makes their marketing message worthy of being passed along? *
Look at my list of viral marketing strategies that you can insert your marketing message into - most are simply tools. Not marketing strategies but marketing tools.
Be Creative
It’s all about being creative. How can you engage, entertain and inspire your mass audience. Just like any movie or game live or die on consumer’s imaging and acceptance, the same goes for a Viral Marketing campaign, it also completely depends on the ability of it to communicate with its audience. Just confirm if your Viral Marketing campaign makes it a high concept enough to capture mass appeal?
The trick here is to put together material that people want to read and would be eager to share with friends and family. The viral agents that can personify the message you want to spread are digital format (image, video, text, etc). This example examines the most successful viral marketing campaign in the past few years, and as we will see the extent the marketers can go to in terms of creativity in order to get people to talk about a product.
One of the companies that realized the potential of the Internet in early years was none other than HOTMAIL. They took full advantage of the networking powers of the Internet and well we can all see where they all today. In Dec, 1996, they had 500,000 registered users, and less than a year later they had over 12,000,000 users! How did they pull off such a achievement? Just one smart move by the company got them a long way. Each email sent from a Hotmail account included a small, subtle ad for Hotmail, and as your user-base continues to grow into the millions, this means that you get all the free ads you will ever need to succeed.
As the company approach 1998, Microsoft acquired it for hundreds of millions of dollars. Since then though this company has been challenged by competitors a number of times, they still stand out as today’s one of the world wide web’s most popular free email services. In all these 12 years this is not a small achievement for the company and it shows just how effective can Viral Marketing be.
Personalize the Email Approach
We all spend time reading something coming from our friends, they suggesting a Youtube Video, or some New Video Game taking on everyone. The response rate definitely increases when users can see that a message is coming from a friend, so it is best to personalize the email message to show that it's coming from a recognizable source.
Get an email list ready, and think about how can you spread your message beyond that list and how can you make the recipients to do your work for you. Follow a strong angle to your approach and promotion, make it have a ‘Wow’ factor, it should be unusual and different that gets the message to other people how are not in your circle of approach.
Forums make another very interesting power on the Internet. Just be careful of not advertising your product, but try and evoke curiosity among people by adding an original signature line to every post you make.
Track and Evaluate your Outcome
With any kind of marketing campaign tracking the results and optimizing performance over time is absolutely necessary. Email marketers can track insightful data that can be used to assess performance. Important metrics to analyze are pass-along, click-through, and conversion rates. Marketers should separate the click-through and conversion rates by original customers from referrals and evaluate their respective performances. These metrics will alert a marketer to which offers and customers drive the highest ROI.
Other then the points I have given you, there are some other main factors as well that you need to keep your eye balls on. First is the vision of the campaign – whether it is brand exposure, conversion, or lead generation – it should be clear from day one. From idea to implementation and reflected in the User Interface, make sure you’re setting the stage for achieving your goal.
All good viral marketing campaigns have real value at their center. To get people’s attention about your new product, you could write a free report giving away some information that will tempt people into going ahead and buying your product. Make the report worthwhile and valuable, and you’ll be giving people a reason to recommend it to others.
Luckily for Internet marketers, the word of mouth effect is transferable to the internet, and the rise of sites such as YouTube has made it much easier to reach a specific audience with a viral video that gets you noticed.
Lastly consider your customers’ likely reactions to what you are promoting before you start your viral marketing campaign, as these will greatly influence its overall success.
Some Related Articles:
Is S Viral + Monetizable = StartUp Magic Quadrant
The Secret Strategies behind Viral Videos
OfficeMax’s Perfect Viral Campaign?
Is Sharing the New Search?
Will Viral Marketing Sink or Swim?
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