Viral Marketing – How Small Business Owners Do It Effectively
59Viral Marketing – How Small Business Owners Do It Effectively
When you own a business, it is very important for you to be able to find a way to market it. Since you put your energy and thought into it, you need to make sure that your efforts do not go in vain. You cannot belittle the money, time, and effort that you devoted into your business; therefore, it is important for you to do all that you can to see it prosper and grow. It is comforting to know that at the end of it all, something good has come out of it. As a business owner, you need to focus in finding an effective way to market your brand.
Going Back in Time
In the past, when you need to promote something, you rely on “word of mouth”. You make sure to serve each client well enough, so that he or she comes out of your business satisfied. The clients’ experience will be reflected on the words they impart to the people they meet. It does not matter if it is bad or good feedback; one person will tell five to ten of his friends, and these friends will tell five to ten of theirs. “Word of mouth” has been a truly effective means of marketing small businesses and it has worked well for years.
Spreading It Like Virus
Today, people are no longer content with “word of mouth”. Sure, it gets the word out and it is still effective at some scale; however, if you truly wish to run an effective means of marketing a brand or business that you have, you need to be more creative. “Viral marketing,” just as the name implies, works somewhat like the common virus. You have seen how viral outbreaks can cause havoc in movies and how fast the widespread goes. When you create a marketing virus and you set it up in the right venues, you can expect the news to travel so fast and go through the right portals and channels.
Viral marketing targets specific clients, in order to generate more precise results. Compared to “word of mouth” where you hit a handful of people, a viral marketing campaign can cover a great number of people and reach several locations at one attempt.
Getting Infected with the Virus
Often dubbed as “guerrilla marketing”, viral marketing is a very clever tactic that was started by Hotmail in the late 90s. By attaching an ad at the bottom of every email sent through them, they were able to promote their service to every email recipient who might be interested in getting “free” mail, as well. It was effective as it was infective and it soon became a true phenomenon until it became a real practice. To use it, all you have to do is to:
- Directly ask clients to “tell-a-friend”. It is the most desperate form and has somehow become spam messages, but it is still a tactic that many people find useful.
- Offer rewards to clients who can “refer a friend.”
- You can also disguise your ad within the messages sent to potential clients.
