Viral marketing is one of marketing’s hot topics, and everybody is excited about the possibilities if offers us. It’s not hard to see why when you consider the potential return on investment.

To qualify as true viral marketing a campaign needs all of the following…

• A mechanism for infecting others (e.g. a ‘mail this to your friends’ form)
• A motivating factor that has one person want to infect another (a marketing version of one’s own sex drive)
• A sales or marketing benefit for the promoter of the virus

A mechanism for infecting others

Technically, a built-in mechanism for infecting others isn’t required for a marketing campaign to go viral. If the viral campaign is good enough it will spread on its own (e.g. one person emails it to another).

My view is that leaving things to chance increases the odds that human inertia prevents a campaign from gaining enough traction to go viral. One way to improve the odds in your favour is to provide people with one or more ways to tell others about it.

You can see an excellent example in this fun quiz from online sex-toy retailer Electric LadyLounge. I suggest you click the link, visit the site, and take the quiz (2 minutes tops). On completing the quiz you’ll see a results page that tells you your score, rates your knowledge (a giggle) and gives details on how your friends have done.

It also offers several ways to spread the virus – including Facebook, Twitter and Email. This makes it incredibly easy for people to spread the virus.

A motivating factor

Giving people the means to spread your marketing campaign doesn’t mean it will happen. People also need a reason to do so. The aforementioned Electric LadyLounge has provided 3 motivations…

• It’s fun:
  People are going to want to spread this, just to see how well their friends have done.
• There’s an incentive:
  Every time someone you refer takes the quiz you get an entry into their competition. The more people you tell, the more entries you get.
• It’s about sex toys:
  Let’s face it – we’re all interested in sex, and enjoy a good laugh. If one of your friends is told s/he is ‘a danger to self and others’, it’s good for a giggle.

Most of us aren’t going to be able to use sex to help our viral marketing, but we can make it fun. And we can introduce one or more incentives.

A sales or marketing benefit for the promoter

The benefit of the above viral to Electric LadyLounge is obvious. They get to…

• Have fun with potential future customers (as well as existing ones)
• Showcase some of their products (you’ll note they link to them)
• Strengthen their relationship with customers
• Bring more people to their website

This particular viral marketing application could continue to generate traffic (and sales) for years, yet the cost to deliver it is relatively low (and fixed). What’s not to love about that?

online promotion, viral marketing, Web Marketing

Social media is all well and good, but does it have any practical marketing application? Of course it’s immediately embraced by the woolly side of the marketing community, where ‘top of mind’ and ‘buzz’ are taken seriously. But what about the hard-nosed world of direct marketing?

In the direct marketing world things are measured properly, and any new idea is only taken on board if it can be tested and shown to work (i.e. impact directly on the bottom line).

Social media does indeed have a role to play in the hard-nosed world of measurable marketing. There are several ways to make use of it…

• Social media can be used to provide client service. And yes, I do consider client service to be an essential ingredient in the marketing mix. Take a look at this real-world example.
• Social media can be used as a source of leads in lead generation. Here’s an example.
• This guy uses Facebook to generate 80% of his business. His story is very interesting, and I plan to write about it someday (if he’ll let me).

There’s another way to use Social Media to generate traffic direct from the application itself. This involves cooperating with an organised group dedicated to helping each other out. Here’s how…

Let’s say you start the ball rolling by bookmarking a recent blog entry in your Delicious account. You then email everybody else in the group and ask them to do the same. If your group has 10 members, your bookmark will occur 10 times in Delicious. For some keywords, that’s enough to get it onto page one.

If your group has 100 members, your bookmark will occur 100 times in Delicious. That’s enough get to most content onto page one, and pick up visitors from Delicious. There may well be additional benefits associated with being on page one of a major category in Delicious.

And of course, Delicious is only one of several social bookmarking applications. This can be rolled out across all of them.

Are you interested in putting such a concept to use in your business? If so, here’s what you need…

1. A Delicious account
2. A willingness to cooperate with others on a quid-pro-quo basis
3. Some form of regular content creation (e.g. a blog, video series, podcast, slide show/presentation series)

Assuming you meet these minimum criteria, get in touch with me and let me know you’re interested.

social media, Social Media Marketing, Web Marketing

Here’s a heads up for those of us who want to learn about web marketing as a discipline, rather than wallow in the usual hype and empty promises. It’s an in-depth series of articles about the Web Marketing Process. It’s being released in bite-sized chunks on The Lead Generation Blog.

Here are direct links to each part. Naturally, I suggest you start with part one!

1. An overview of The Web Marketing Process.
2. Objectives – 1st installment
3. Objectives – 2nd installment
4. Objectives – 3rd installment

The next instalment (still on objectives, thus hinting at the depth of information on offer) promises a marketing plan you can use when running your own campaigns. In fact, this is what parts 2-4 have been building to.

As new instalments go live, they’re announced on this Twitter page. I suggest you start following it, so you can continue with the series.

Web Marketing, web marketing process

What’s your web marketing strategy? It’s the kind of question many small business owners don’t give much thought to. After all, now the site is up and running what’s the point of having a strategy?

The thing is, a web marketing strategy should be written before work starts on the site. Why? Because a web marketing strategy dictates the purpose and objectives of the resulting site. In particular…

• What the business aims to achieve on the web
• The revenue the business expects to generate
• The budget (i.e. amount of money) the business is prepared to invest to achieve its revenue target
• The specific components required to achieve the site’s aims

If these high level items aren’t thought of before the site is built, what’s the purpose of the web site? How much can the business afford to spend on it? How can the business owner know whether or not the site is successful?

And how can anybody know what should or shouldn’t be included in the site?

When the web marketing strategy comes first, it’s much easier for all concerned. Everything falls out of the strategy…

• What content to include (i.e. focus)
• What content to exclude
• Whether or not some particular component is too expensive
• Whether or not some particular designer or programmer is too expensive

These four things can tie up a business owner’s time for months. Yet an Internet marketing strategy can be created in less than a day.

It needn’t be a complex document. It’s not a business plan. In most cases, it won’t be used to secure financing (by a small business owner). Its purpose is simply to define what the site should achieve. It becomes a tool for making good choices, and doing away with nice-to-have components the business owner can’t really afford.

The plain fact is, your web marketing strategy only needs to state what you want to achieve, how much you expect to earn, how much you’re prepared to invest, and give a date by when you want to achieve your target.

marketing strategy, Web Marketing