Viral Marketing Stampede Imagine getting thousands of visitors to your site, or logging in to YouTube and seeing the number of views of your last video climbing into the millions. What might that kind of attention do for your business? Would you earn more sales? Gain more customers? Make more profits? What if I told you all that is possible with just a little effort and a nifty little marketing tactic known as Viral Marketing? Think for a minute how a real virus spreads, and you'll get a sense of what a viral marketing campaign looks like. It starts with one person, who passes it on to several more people, who each pass it along to several more people, and before you know it, you have thousands – or maybe millions – of people all continuing to spread the virus to their friends, family, colleagues, and customers. Now that's not so nice when it happens with the seasonal flu, but when it's your brand that's spreading at an exponential rate, it can be pretty good for the bottom line! Definition of Viral Marketing Web Marketing Today defines viral marketing like this: "Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence." What does that mean, exactly? Basically, the goals of a viral marketing campaign are to • Get readers/viewers/customers to share your content via social networks, email, or any other communication network • Extend the reach of your message through this sharing, and provide exponential growth of your customer base. • Increase your brand recognition • And do it all without a huge advertising budget – that's the magic of viral marketing. There's something else to remember, though: Just because it's viral, doesn't mean it's marketing. A funny video of your cat fighting with itself in the bathroom mirror might very well go viral on YouTube, but so what? What good does it do you? Did it get your brand out there? Do all the millions of people who love funny cat videos care about your brand? Remember the big marketing rule about finding a targeted audience, because lots of traffic doesn’t mean anything if they're all just passing through on their way to somewhere else. Sometimes in a viral campaign, the campaign is the product. Think of Nicole Dean's Blog World Tour product for example. She was guest blogging as a way of promoting her new product about guest blogging. She incorporated her campaign right into her product, with spectacular results. In this ebook, we're going to look at some examples of great viral marketing campaigns, and examine what works and what doesn't when creating a viral marketing strategy for your business. We'll talk about the parts of a successful viral marketing campaign, and I'll provide examples you can use in your own business, whether you work online or off. Finally, we'll look at how different business models can use viral marketing to make more sales and improve their bottom line. Ready? Let's start a stampede! History of Viral Marketing Even though you're probably most familiar with the term as it relates to Internet businesses, viral marketing has been around for as long as marketing has existed. Before computers - before the invention of the television, even - people relied on word-of-mouth advertising and viral campaigns to bring in sales. Think of the barnstormers that roared across the United States just after World War I. They'd fly low over a small, rural village, catching the interest of the locals, then set up makeshift air field at a farm outside of town and wait for the crowds to arrive. And the crowds almost always did. Why? Because the news - and excitement - of the flying machine spread like a virus, even without the help of modern communication. Now you can see that even though the old barnstormers used a form of viral marketing to bring hoards of curious onlookers and wannabe stunt pilots to see them perform (and spend their money), this virus had a limit. Rural towns and villages are small, and travel at the time was slow, so the crowd size was naturally limited. Here's another example you might be familiar with: The Grateful Dead. At a time when record labels and bands were searching fans at the door to make sure they weren't carrying any recording devices into a live show, the Dead actually encouraged it. They wanted their fans to enjoy the show, and to share it with their friends and family. Whether on purpose or not, the Grateful Dead were utilizing a viral marketing strategy that built their fanbase quickly, and that continues to work today, 25 years after Jerry Garcia's death. Today, advanced technology has made it possible for viral marketing campaigns to spread across the globe in a matter of hours. Unlike the barnstormers limitation of playing to just the local crowd, or the Grateful Dead's reliance on physical cassette tapes passed hand to hand, marketers today have the advantage of an enormous web of interconnected computers. Even the smallest marketer in the tiniest corner of the Internet has the potential to reach millions of potential customers, all without leaving her office. Some of today's largest companies have their roots in viral marketing campaigns – although in this case it's called network marketing. Amway Corporation – ranked by Forbes as one of the largest private companies in the United States – relies heavily on network marketing to recruit new partners and keep their business growing. With sales of $8.4 billion in 2009, it's clear their campaigns are successful. Whether you call it network marketing, viral marketing, or something else, the practice is sound, and can work for virtually any business model. Let's look at some viral marketing examples that have performed well online.

4.95 USD InStock