Viral marketing is proven to work extremely well to bring in traffic and potential customers to your business site, but many people don´t really understand what viral marketing is or how it works. What makes something viral? How can you create your own viral marketing campaign?
While the name doesn´t sound so nice, viral marketing is called this because a good campaign will spread like a virus. Maybe only one person has it in the beginning, but a cough or a sneeze and BAM! Ten others have it. Each of those people infects ten and so on and so forth. Within days, it´s possible for a virus (or marketing campaign) to become an epidemic . . . even though just one person had it in the beginning!
It can be tough to predict exactly what will go viral, but you can certainly get a good idea by paying attention to what has already been used as a popular viral marketing campaign. Most viral items have a few things in common:
Emotion. They evoke an emotion, happiness, anger or empathy.
Useful. While the odd thing goes viral simply because it is so bizarre, the majority of people will be far more interested in something that is useful to them.
Free. Putting a price on your viral marketing project will instantly cool the hype surrounding it.
Well written. Let´s face it, you aren´t going to pass an ebook so full of grammatical errors that you can barely understand it!
Another way to help what you are offering to become viral marketing is to allow anyone and everyone to distribute it without paying royalties. This will really give folks a reason to help you out. If they enjoy what you have to offer and feel that it would be useful to their friends, family or readers, you can bet they will be happy to share!
Viral marketing can be a very handy way to spread the news about your business. Study existing viral marketing campaigns and figure out why people passed them on. Look at the emails that you forward to friends, why do you do it? What elements are in these emails that you could include in your viral marketing campaign?
Caroline
Small Business Mavericks
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