Viral Advertising – 3 Vital Steps For Success

Viral advertising is one of the quickest and most cost effective ways to reach your target market. And as your advertising message is spread by your customers/fans/supporters it’s much more targeted than traditional advertising and much more believable. First, people will only tell those who they think will be interested and second, most people are likely to believe what their trusted friends tell them about a product in preference to the world of advertising.

At present these are several different techniques that you can use to make your promotion efforts go viral. Videos, online games, pictures, website applications, ebooks, articles are just some of the online vehicles that you can use to expose people to your product or brand without using traditional advertisements.

However, if you want to make the most of the viral potential of the internet there are three vital steps to follow;

1. The Correct Approach

The main purpose should be to engage your audience by arousing their emotions. Forget about creating material that you think will interest your target market. You can’t please all of the people all of the time. However, you can polarize opinions all of the time.

So when you create your viral advertising material, try to whip up feelings of love, hate, agreement, disagreement etc. People won’t respond to anything that they feel neutral towards. Why should they? There are so many things competing for their attention these days. You must create something that commands their attention to such a degree that they feel compelled to share it with someone else.

If you leave them thinking, “Wow, that’s brilliant, so funny/unique/inventive/cool” etc or “I totally disagree. I’m so angry, how could anyone have the nerve to create that?” they will be much more inclined to pass the information on to people they know in order to obtain their opinion.

2. The followup

Once you’ve gained the attention of your target market, it’s absolutely vital to provide them with an easy way to pass on your content to other people. So make sure that the content is somewhere online that they can provide links to, allow them to embed your content on their own site or on one of the social networking sites etc. Make it easy for them or they won’t bother.

3. The Mistakes To Avoid

The final issue to bear in mind is accessibility. If you want your content to spread virally, it must be easy to find and easy to access.

If you make your content hard to find, or construct barriers around it, such as making people register to access your site, enter access codes or download software it won’t become viral, regardless of how unique, brilliant or controversial it is. Would YouTube have grown as quickly (or at all) if users had to register before they could watch the videos on offer?

The other fatal mistake to avoid is one which big corporations make on a regular basis. Too many marketing executives are so wrapped up in the greatness of their company/product/service that they focus on it to the exclusion of everything else in their viral advertising content. But people are selfish, they don’t want to be sold to and they don’t want to waste their time watching/listening/reading about the quality of a company or its services. They want something that’s genuinely interesting, entertaining, informative or through provoking.

So it’s no surprise to learn that the most effective viral advertising campaigns are those where the main product/service is incidental to the main story contained in the viral content. The narrative focuses on entertaining/surprising/informing the viewers rather than blatantly selling the product/service.

In conclusion, if you want your next viral advertising campaign to grab the attention of your target market, make sure that it arouses emotion, is eay to access, easy to spread and delivers your message as a secondary element of the main story contained in the vital advertising content.

Viral Marketing – 4 Powerful Promotions

Viral marketing is an extremely powerful method of promotion that can generate significant amounts of interest in your business. There are several successful techniques that you can use depending upon your circumstances, resources and business requirements.

The three main advantages of viral marketing are the speed at which your message can spread, the potential to run cost effective campaigns and the persuasive nature of the message which is spread by your customers rather than your business.

So with that in mind, here are four powerful viral advertising methods to consider for your next promotional campaign.

1. The Word Of Mouth Technique

This is the original form of viral advertising. Somebody sees or hears something which is worthy of comment and they tell everyone they meet about it. If these people are sufficiently motivated to spread the word, they tell everyone else they meet about what they have heard. And so the chain continues.

Within a short space of time, thanks to the exponential effect, thousands or even millions of people know about the latest piece of news. The more unusual or shocking the news the quicker and the further it spreads.

Originally this viral spreading of information was limited to major news and general gossip. But it wasn’t long until enterprising business owners realised that if they could get people speaking about their business it would be a powerful, convincing and inexpensive form of advertising. Viral word of mouth marketing was born.

This basic technique of aiming to get people talking about your business is extremely powerful for local promotion either online or offline. To achieve the best result, just make sure that your promotional content is extremely funny, entertaining, shocking, controversial, or just so good that people feel compelled to tell other people about it.

2. The Friends And Family Technique

This method is similar to the previous technique and relies upon people passing on information about your product, service or marketing message to their circle of friends and family.

Since the development of technology and the internet, the potential for this technique has exploded.

It’s so easy almost anyone can do it. You create a video about yourself or your product/service, post it on a range of video sharing sites and if people think it is funny or interesting they have the power to send the link to their list of contacts through email, instant messages, sms text message within seconds.

This method of cheap, quick and takes little effort beyond creating the video. And the great thing is that small businesses are on a level playing field with the multi billion dollar companies. Nobody knows what will become the next massively viral video on YouTube. Why shouldn’t you create it to promote your business?

3. The Ethical Bribe Technique

This method involves either of the viral marketing techniques mentioned above with one slight difference. Instead of relying upon the novel/shocking/controvertial/brilliant nature of the content to get people to distribute it willingly, you provide your customers with an ethical bribe to pass on information about your business to the people that they know.

This reward can take several different forms, including a discount on future purchases, a free gift, priority customer service or even cold hard cash.

The ethical bribe can be even more virulent than voluntary viral marketing techniques. The only disadvantages are that the campaign will cost much more and if people are aware of the rewards system the strength of the recommendation from their friends/family etc will be greatly weakened.

4. The Subtle Technique

How many times have you gone to watch a movie and then weeks later seen something in the shops, recognised it from the movie you saw and then thought “That’s cool, I want one”?

That’s an example of the subtle technique in action. This discreet form of product placement means that millions of people are exposed to the organization’s branding and message without being consciously aware of it.

And as you can imagine this discrete advertising can also be extremely viral. People see the movie and some of subsequently buy the products featured in the film. When other people who saw the same movie see these people with the merchandise, it reminds them how cool the product is, so they buy it and turn themselves into a walking advertisement for the product. That’s subtle viral marketing and it’s one of the best ways to increase brand recognition.

The only disadvantage of this method is that it can cost a significant amount of money to unleash the viral effect. However, thanks to the growth of online media and video sharing, the bar has been lowered for creative marketers with a more modest budget.

The Widgeteers take short trips to their offices everyday – their homes! Go behind the scenes to discover more of their job-killing strategies and traffic secrets like viral ads at http://www.thewidgeteers.com

Viral Adverts – Four Steps To A Billion Bucks

Viral Adverts – Four Steps To A Billion Bucks

The rapid growth of Hotmail is widely accepted to have been one of the first, and most successful, examples of viral adverts on the internet.

In 1996, hotmail began with just 100 users and within a couple of weeks more than 400,000 people were using their email service – All thanks to one line of advertising at the foot of each email and the power of viral adverts.

So let’s examine the vital elements of a successful viral advertising campaign.

Number One: You have to provide the user with a reason to spread the idea…again and again and again!

Why did the hotmail campaign work so well?

Simple! They provided people with a free email account, when all other providers were charging a monthly fee.

They gave people a reason to send their email using Hotmail (because it was free), then used the foot of every email to promote the service to other people. And due to the nature of email, when people saw how quick and easy the system was to use, they continued to send out messages on a regular basis.

So to make your viral adverts work, you must give your users an incentive to spread the word, either indirectly (through the use of a valuable service – such as Hotmail) or directly in return for some other benefit. The most frequently used incentives are financial (for example, affiliate schemes where users are paid for referring new customers) and social (where people can boost their reputation among their peers for telling them about high quality products and services).

Number Two: You have to make it easy for the virus to spread

Anyone who received an email from a Hotmail user was presented with a link at the foot of the email saying “Click here to get your FREE Hotmail account”

If they wanted a free email account all they had to do was click on the link and enter a few basis details. It was quick and easy.

Compared to what they were going to get (a free email account when everyone else was charging) the inconvenience of entering your username and a password was minimal.

Despite their great power to spread rapidly, viral adverts are very delicate. If you make it too difficult for people to spread your viral ads, the effect will quickly die out.

So don’t make your users click twice or fill out two fields when one will do. The easier you make it for people to promote your adverts, the faster they will spread.

Number Three: You have to make your viral adverts as infectious as possible

There’s no point creating a viral advertising campaign, giving users a reason to promote it, making it easy to promote yada yada, if the adverts don’t have any effect on the people who see them.

If your conversion rate is too low, people will soon stop promoting your adverts and the whole mechanism will soon collapse. Let’s face it, if 99% of people are immune to a virus, it’s never going to become a major problem.

Here’s a quick example. If your user base increases by 2% every generation of your viral ads, after 100 generations it will have increased by 624%. But if your conversion rate doubles and your user base increases by 4% every generation of your viral ads, after 100 generations it will have increased by 4950%. Doubling your conversion rate will lead to a user base that’s eight times larger after 100 generations of your viral adverts.

Number Four: Your viral ads must have as short an incubation time as possible

The incubation period of a virus is the length of time it takes from one person being infected to the time when they’re able to infect someone else.

It’s a simple rule. The shorter the incubation period, the faster the virus is able to spread. If we begin with ten users, and the number of users increase by 50% every generation of the virus, and each generation lasts one month, after 1 year (or 12 generations of the virus), there would be 130 users.

Now if we shorten the incubation period to two weeks, after 1 year (or 26 generations of the virus), there would be 37,876 users.

And finally, if we shorten the incubation period to one week, after 1 year (or 52 generations of the virus), there would be more than 1.4 billion users.

Now let’s consider Hotmail. If we assume that the incubation period ran from the time when someone signed up for a new account, to the time when their first email was read by the recipient, in some cases the incubation period was as short as a couple of minutes.

Within the space of 24 hours, it was possible for the Hotmail viral advertising strategy to pass through many generations. 1 user, 2 users, 4 users, 8 users, 16 users, 32 users, 64 users until they ended up with an extremely big number. Within the space of 12 months, Hotmail grew from nothing to become a business worth more than $1.5 billion.

So if you want to make your first billion, all you need to do is develop viral adverts that are highly infectious, easy to spread and quick to replicate, then put them in the hands of a small group of people who have a strong incentive to spread them over and over again.

The Widgeteers are an advertising company and publisher of content on free methods of increasing traffic like viral adverts to websites http://www.thewidgeteers.com

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!