February 8th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
It seems as if viral marketing is one of the most successful strategies that one can employ with Internet marketing.
Viral marketing is an Internet marketing practice that employs referrals, recommendations, and reviews in order to quickly spread word about a product or service. Gmail, Utube, and various viral videos on the Internet have all been transmitted by the viral marketing technique. These online entrepreneurs have enjoyed immense success by employing the viral marketing technique. Think about it as an exponential effort once launched its benefits and effects only get stronger.
The Zagat of Internet Marketing
Viral marketing has been able to successfully allow marketers to increase the value of free services online, because referrals are the major way that most people market with free services. So, these tools of Internet marketing have been able to allow people to significantly pursue various affiliate programs in order to increase the value of these free services. When free services are everywhere to be found, they lose value. Therefore, viral marketing solves this problem by making people refer one another to a various product or service. When people receive referrals, they believe that a service is more valuable. This is simply a part of human nature. Therefore, viral marketing is a great Internet marketing tool that marketers can use to increase their web exposure.
In this way, many new companies have been able to compete with old-timer companies simply by employing the viral marketing strategy. In this way, people recommend one another to another service, such as gmail, and then their friends sign up for gmail. This is a great way to market your product. You can boost your Internet marketing campaign by employing viral marketing.
We Already Know That Referrals Work
If you look at the statistics, you will see that referral marketing is a highly valuable form of Internet marketing. In fact, it is so valuable that we will see referral marketing dominate the Internet marketing world in the future as well.
This is a great way to get the word out about your product, and it’s more organic and useful. People like it more, it’s less in your face, it’s more encouraging and delightful to use.
No one clicks on banner ads anymore; people have gotten smarter than that. It’s almost useless to use banner ads nowadays. It’s a waste of money and time. No one likes it when someone is shoving a product in their face. Always when marketing put yourself in the reader’s shoes the best marketing is that type of effort where you lend a hand or give advice. However, if a friend recommends a product to them, they are more likely to buy it. This is why viral marketing works so well.
Email is another great way to market your product, but unfortunately, The Spam Crisis created a lot of firewalls that prevent marketers from reaching their customers through email. So, if you’re going to employ email as an Internet marketing tool, use opt-in lists or safe lists.
Referral marketing dominates Internet marketing. Use it.
December 13th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
More and more advertisers are adopting video as broadband continues to rise and ad-serving technologies become more sophisticated. Online video advertising is really taking off.
Users’ attention can be captured and ads stand out from the crowd in an increasingly ad-cluttered online environment. It is true that video formats cost five to ten times more to serve than standard banners and they involve a lot more production and implementation work but they may well be worth all of that if they achieve greater response rates.
Where to use online video if wishing to maximize its effect, is what advertisers must carefully consider. Video to be used on the Internet should be information and communication focused while video to be used on television should be focused on entertainment.
Like everything else, there are good ways and bad ways to use video advertising. Right now most marketers are incorporating their audio-visual content into existing embedded ad formats like banners or over-content formats like pop-ups.
Though this could reach a potentially large audience, viewers are likely to be less captivated and more annoyed by these disruptive and distracting placements.
Cached or streaming video on a specific destination site offers the best chance of interesting consumers in brand messages, but it is not likely to reach a large audience unless it generates a viral outcome.
Whatever you come up with, don’t forget to make it easy to open and distribute. File size is important, as is the media format. If your viral video has been created for a particular type of software that not many people use, how will you get people to spread it like wildfire?
Also, if you’ve made a video the impact will be better if you send the clip as an attachment rather than stream it. It’s cheaper and, if you’re not hosting it, it’s more viral, too.
Mobile devices, mobile phones and PDA’s are one of the last great frontiers of viral advertisement opportunities. However, we have become experts at filtering everything, our air and water, our e-mail and pop-ups, and our mobile devices as well. We are good at filtering.
The very idea of unwanted advertising streaming through our Blackberries is abhorrent. Mobile devices are the ultimate opt-in medium and, therefore, a great way for marketers to connect with users if that’s what the users want. “WANT” is the key word here. How should marketers approach the medium?
There are three main ways to achieve this. They are:
1. Offer exclusive content. Anyone can offer ring tones. It’s the unique content, such as exclusive mobile images of new brand concepts, that drives interest and calls them out in other media like e-mail campaigns, newsletters, websites, etc. So a wireless campaign is most effective when it offers exclusive content for wireless devices.
2. Make it useful and timely. Think about what would be handy and helpful to have on a mobile device. Last year, for example, Food Network enabled Sprint customers to download shopping lists for their Thanksgiving dinners. There was a lot of “Sprint-envy” going around among non-sprint customers.
3. Clearly define objectives. Usually, one of two business objectives drives successful mobile experiences: incremental revenue of brand intimacy. On the intimacy factor, a text message usually takes priority over almost any other form of communication. Why? Because we haven’t yet been saturated with mobile spam, and this is what causes us to prioritize wireless messaging over voice.
Mobile marketing has been out there for a while but we marketers have new territory to explore. Video offers fantastic opportunities for engagement. Consumers already bypass their filters for highly useful or entertaining content and will do so for rich exclusive, compelling content.
June 16th, 2009 at 7:07 am
No doubt it is a super feeling to see money coming in from your internet business. That is, as long as the income is greater than your expenses. With PPC advertising campaigns having become in many cases quite expensive, as the cost of keywords are bid up, using low cost viral marketing techniques is an excellent way to efficiently market products. That is if you know how.
You may ask what is viral marketing anyhow? And why can it be so effective?
The term “Viral” is used to describe the use of marketing methods that once underway tend to multiply and spread themselves very quickly; like an infectious virus of the unwanted kind, say the flu.
The most common technique used by viral marketers is to create a product that has great perceived value and then give it away for free or at very low cost. Those who receive the product are only too happy to recommend it to their friends and Internet associates, who in turn recommend it to their friends, who pass it along to their friends. On the Internet this process can repeat itself extremely quickly with an ever more powerful effect as the number of folks making recommendations increases rapidity.
Thus the creator of the product only has to make the initial marketing effort and with the right product the product becomes self promoting. The key is that the product value has to be great enough, and the benefit to the referrer great enough, so that folks want to use and pass along information about the product right away.
The referrers recommendation may well be only the use of the product. Nothing else need be said. A good viral product has built in features for promotion.
If you want to really kick up the rate of “infection” with a viral advertising campaign make the product promote itself by the act of the users of the product only going about their normal daily Internet routines, like sending email.
One of the great viral marketing products of all time was Hotmail. The days of Hotmails explosive growth was back in the late 1990s when email was just taking off as a killer application for Internet use. Hotmail promoted itself only by automaticially inserting a link to Hotmail at the end of each email send out by its clients. All the client had to do to promote was to use the product.
As the number of clients grew so did the number of emails sent, each containing a little ad at the end promoting the free Hotmail email service. Hotmail went viral almost immediately and went from zero to a membership in excess of 30,000,000 within two years.
Another viral marketing technique often used to good effect is the use of “refer a friend” forms on website pages. Generally there will be room to refer from five to ten friends on one form. As friends are referred and they in turn refer their friends, and so on, the number of visitors to the website content that is being refered will grow exponentially.
Of course, this technique will fail unless the majority of the referred friends feel that there is value in whatever it is that they are recommending.
Which brings us the the key point about viral marketing. Unless the product is good enought to sell itself the promotion will likely fail.
What type of products meet that test today? Judging from the way video is taking off (Youtube for example) a funny or interesting video has amazing viral marketing qualities. A smart marketer using video can add a link at the end of the presentation and drive high amounts of traffic to his/her website.
Video seems to be the biggest “killer” application to hit the net since email.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
More and more advertisers are adopting video as broadband continues to rise and ad-serving technologies become more sophisticated.
Online video advertising is really taking off. Users’ attention can be captured and ads stand out from the crowd in an increasingly ad-cluttered online environment.
It is true that video formats cost five to ten times more to serve than standard banners and they involve a lot more production and implementation work but they may well be worth all of that if they achieve greater response rates.
Where to use online video if wishing to maximize its effect, is what advertisers must carefully consider.
Video to be used on the Internet should be information and communication focused while video to be used on television should be focused on entertainment.
Like everything else, there are good ways and bad ways to use video advertising.
Right now most marketers are incorporating their audio-visual content into existing embedded ad formats like banners or over-content formats like pop-ups.
Though this could reach a potentially large audience, viewers are likely to be less captivated and more annoyed by these disruptive and distracting placements.
Cached or streaming video on a specific destination site offers the best chance of interesting consumers in brand messages, but it is not likely to reach a large audience unless it generates a viral outcome.
Whatever you come up with, don’t forget to make it easy to open and distribute.
File size is important, as is the media format. If your viral video has been created for a particular type of software that not many people use, how will you get people to spread it like wildfire?
Also, if you’ve made a video the impact will be better if you send the clip as an attachment rather than stream it. It’s cheaper and, if you’re not hosting it, it’s more viral, too.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
More and more advertisers are adopting video as broadband continues to rise and ad-serving technologies become more sophisticated. Online video advertising is really taking off. Users’ attention can be captured and ads stand out from the crowd in an increasingly ad-cluttered online environment. It is true that video formats cost five to ten times more to serve than standard banners and they involve a lot more production and implementation work but they may well be worth all of that if they achieve greater response rates.
Where to use online video if wishing to maximize its effect, is what advertisers must carefully consider. Video to be used on the Internet should be information and communication focused while video to be used on television should be focused on entertainment.
Like everything else, there are good ways and bad ways to use video advertising. Right now most marketers are incorporating their audio-visual content into existing embedded ad formats like banners or over-content formats like pop-ups. Though this could reach a potentially large audience, viewers are likely to be less captivated and more annoyed by these disruptive and distracting placements.
Cached or streaming video on a specific destination site offers the best chance of interesting consumers in brand messages, but it is not likely to reach a large audience unless it generates a viral outcome.
Whatever you come up with, don’t forget to make it easy to open and distribute. File size is important, as is the media format. If your viral video has been created for a particular type of software that not many people use, how will you get people to spread it like wildfire?
Also, if you’ve made a video the impact will be better if you send the clip as an attachment rather than stream it. It’s cheaper and, if you’re not hosting it, it’s more viral, too.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Online video marketing and promotion is positively one of the most effective routes independent publishers can take up nowadays if they want to significantly increase their Web traffic, visibility and exposure. But what are the key ingredients to make video marketing effective?
According to a BurstMedia survey, 7 out of 10 adult internet users viewed online video content and more than half of respondent’s age 65 and older are watching online video clips. Marketing managers should embrace online video now or get left behind for good.
Who do you think would know best this stuff outside of those who actually posted some of those popular clips? Well, whoever has tabs and precise data on the whole video publishing situation, can tell a lot more than anyone single user, as looking at the forest rather than that at the individual trees can make a huge difference in building an effective video marketing strategy.
The truth is, the use of video for marketing till now, has been amateurish and many are downright boring. Marketers who can learn how to use videos the right way will have a great advantage over their competitors.
You already know that successfully marketed website videos will increase your sales and build your business up faster than any other marketing method.
Like the small report, try to keep your video brief and to the point. While people would rather watch than read, you still don’t want to overload them. The point of a using a viral video (like reports) for your business is to give visitors useful information but just enough.
As an example let’s say you join Technorati. You then make a video, tag it with the keyword phrase “funny online video” and upload it to your account. Now all individuals within the Technorati community will be able to access your video when they type in that particular keyword. This is very powerful. Tag viral and bookmarking social can put you in front of a large audience immediately.
Online video is one of the best venues to engage an audience – don’t even think about excluding it! This new medium allows the video creator to communicate a message on multiple levels – via visual imagery, the spoken word, music and visual text. It may sound like a commercial for a Montessori school – but this is the way people learn, and consequently, the way legendary brands are created. As a case in point, think of traditional internet marketing; when was the last time that a paid search listing or banner ad raised your blood pressure or induced you to forward something to a friend?
The internet has in many ways leveled the playing field. Just stay alert to any new innovations and be ready to incorporate them into your internet web site marketing strategy. A smart viral marketing campaign can make any small business successful.
Video Marketing Success is to-the-point and easy to understand. There’s no extraneous or irrelevant information. Only what you need to know to be successful as fast as possible.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Viral marketing strategies are becoming implemented more as we’ve come to know more about it’s power to propel a business faster. Viral marketing has really taken off in the last couple of years and with it, so have many of the viral marketing examples and strategies in which people are utilizing. In the course of just the last year we have seen some amazing software products and several programs in which to spread your viral marketing campaign farther.
In any viral marketing campaign, there are certain things that a person or company has to keep in mind. For one thing, behind every campaign there has to be some type of gain or incentive for the person to want to pass the message on. Campaigns that don’t really give back to the sending party, most likely won’t benefit from viral marketing advantages.
For example, if we are speaking of cases of viral marketing for list building, many viral marketers have taken to using tell-a-friend forms. But, regular tell-a-friend forms are not usually enough to give a person the needed incentive to push a campaign along. It’s for this reason we started seeing products such as Viral Friend Generator come into play. With Viral Friend Generator, we seen that by adding a third step to the process, we could add a bonus of some type to the sending party. Prior to this, regular tell-a-friend forms weren’t really hitting the mark.
In some cases of viral marketing it doesn’t always need an incentive such as material goods to be effective though. In fact, the most successful viral campaigns are the ones that are created with emotion being involved. People that have been touched either by compassion, laughter, or shock are usually the most effective. If a person can have some type of profound experience by receiving a message this can spark a huge viral campaign. We don’t have to look very far to find campaigns of this type online. With the advent of video being used so much in marketing these days, it has completely impacted the way in which viral campaigns are developing.
Blogs are becoming much more viral friendly as well. Some of the WordPress plug-ins that have been developed for boosting people’s posts in many of the Social Bookmarking sites, or RSS submission services are really getting amazing. It’s so great to see some of the technology that’s coming out with helping in viral marketing. But, remember to use some of these plug-ins you do need to have a WordPress blog hosted on your own hosting account. Otherwise, most aren’t created for use with such blogs created on Blogger or on WordPress’s own servers.
There are a few very good products and strategies that have come to very good use for marketing viral. Definitely one of my favorite outlets these days for re-branding and creating my own versions of viral marketing software came with a membership I got with the guys at IMBuzz softwares. Each month I get a brand new one, and each of these has always been of very good quality. It’s one of the best memberships I think I’ve ever been a part of. Since I’m in the viral marketing niche, these softwares suited my business like a glove with some key advantages for viral marketing! I’m also a huge fan of Viral Spiral. It’s helped a very good friend of mine and myself to create a good sized mailing list, and also provided a place to help people along with their online marketing careers. It’s great to be able to do this virally, plus help people at the same time.
If you have ever been interested in implementing what is now available to you with viral marketing, there really couldn’t be a better time than now. We are living in a perfect time with access to some very powerful platforms and programs to help with your viral marketing campaigns.
