October 14th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Are you one of those millions out there hooked on the viral video craze? This article describes the opportunities that viral videos offer to internet marketers.
It’s actually just like a disease. It’s already more of an epidemic rapidly spreading over the cyberspace. Despite the many worries of this world, people just can’t seem to stay away from video clips of people doing typically nonsensical things. People can’t seem to keep their fascinated eyes off the wildest and oddest videos available. People certainly can’t resist passing on these ‘nonsensical’ videos to other people by posting these videos in their personal homepages, other websites and emailing them to their friends.
You may have noticed, even night shows and morning news shows feature some of these viral videos. Usually they put on air the most watched viral video online, particularly videos that were most rated and viewed at YouTube. These videos’ main value comes from being truly odd and wild that people just can’t help but laugh when they see them. Some people just get carried away by the hype and even if they didn’t think the video was as funny as some people think they are, they keep their opinions to themselves, laugh with the rest and pass on the video to others.
Viral videos are truly catching, and internet marketers have definitely seen the potential of these viral videos in spreading their marketing message around. It so happens that web sites hosting these viral videos have grown much in popularity. Thus, internet marketers are now using videos extensively in their marketing strategies. You, too, can take advantage of the viral video craze. Just follow these simple steps.
— Using Viral Videos in Internet Marketing
1. Make Your Own Viral Video
You have to make your own video to post at YouTube, at your website, at your online blog, and anywhere else in the internet. However, you must remember that viral videos have certain factor that makes them irresistible. This is what you should keep in mind when you make your viral video.
For instance, you can make a commercial concerning your product. The video clip must be short so that they’re easy to download and view. However, the commercial has to be distinctly funny and unique so it can go the rounds of effective viral videos. Just look around at YouTube and find the most-viewed clips there. Those are the types of videos that make the viral rounds. You must therefore pattern your video clip after these videos.
Do not post a perfectly normal video commercial online if you wish these videos to have some viral effect. Do not wax lyrical about your product in your video. In other words, don’t make it look like a perfectly typical infomercial. Perfectly normal video clips just don’t spread and they’re not going to be effective in marketing your products or increasing traffic to your site.
2. Become a member of video blogging networks
Uppermost in your list of sites to join is, of course, YouTube. However, there are other video blogging sites in the internet. Look around. You must also make it a point to post some of these videos in your site and blogs.
3. Post your viral video and make some more
After you have posted your initial viral video and people seem to have picked it up, then you should immediately follow up with more such videos. Do not let your followers’ attention wane from you, keep them entertained and keep them supplied with more viral videos. This way, you are going to have a loyal following of persons who will eagerly wait for your videos.
September 15th, 2009 at 9:38 am
In this day of YouTube, My Space, and Face Book viral web video has become an important marketing tool. The point is not to actually advertise the product you are selling, but to intrigue your audience and tempt them to watch your video, slipping the advertisement in on them without warning. Often such ads are also shown on TV, but with the increasing cost of prime ad time, companies are looking for more cost effective and novel methods to introduce their products or services to you.
A successful viral web video will take on a life of its own, as everyone will want to see it – and when they see it, they revel in sharing it with their friends. It can spread like a virus and have much more impact than what you might expect from traditional advertisements. Viral videos offer greater retention since people talk about it, thus increasing exposure and hopefully your sales. This viral marketing trend is expected to grow in years to come since online video in general plays an increasingly important role in online content delivery.
How to do it:
You must first determine if your brand is right for online video. Is your brand compelling and simple? If so it is perfect for viral web video. If your brand is a more complex, regulated industry it’s going to require more thought… You must be able to entertain your audience and advertise subtly. It is the entertainment that is the key to the viral propagation. Comedy is often the entertainment style of choice. Content driven only by an advertising objective is at risk of being a flop. If you want people to share your video, it must be entertaining, funny, provocative, outrageous or very interesting and target the interest of your market audience.
If you decide that viral web video is appropriate for your brand, first you need to develop a brief of your idea, and then you must find a creator for your web video. There are several ways to do this; hire your agency, a professional video production company, or contract with a third party that represents a variety of proven creators. Each of these options has its advantages and disadvantages.
Research shows that successful viral web video initiatives increase the awareness of your brand and changes the preference of your target audience. How to create and convey that message and how to use social media to do this successfully is an art. Done correctly, you can pull in the viewers you want to your website, without spending a fortune on ad placement. To get the most out of the video, it should be integrated with the company’s web site to steer viewers to “home base”.
You can’t make a video viral, but your viewers can. Viral web video often has a TV approach: attract the most eyes possible first and promote brand attributes second. The reason these videos work is this, the product isn’t the star…a person or the story is, and people are entertained by it. They watch it, share it with their friends, who share it with their friends; this is how the viral effect is achieved.
Target audiences must be made aware of the company’s existence and must be made to comprehend its relevance to their needs. Audiences must be made aware of how to interact with the company. The process of moving potential customers easily and conveniently from awareness to the sale must be smooth and transparent.
RESOURCE
In this age of the Internet, even the smallest companies have the opportunity to advertise via viral web video. Horizon Film and Video, www.horizonvideo.com, is a professional Austin video production and video production Austin, post production and multimedia company located in Austin, Texas whose staff is ready to help you with all your video branding needs. Horizon is experienced in branding and selling products and services through the power of video. Horizon can help give your company the edge in this competitive global economy
July 20th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Imagine a world without television. Can you do it? Chances are if you were born in the last 40 years or so, you can’t. Everywhere we turn we are bombarded with video images, first on television, but now on everything from desktop computers to cell phones. In fact, videos are so popular online they sometimes are passed around and create a viral marketing effect; that is what makes them interesting to marketers. This article will share a few ways you can jump on the band wagon and use these viral video techniques to bring traffic to your site.
A popular way to get into the world of viral video marketing is to build a blog and frequently add videos. Use amusing video clips, interactive Flash games and moving images since these are most likely to catch your visitor’s attention and be shared with others. The Dancing Bush 2001 interactive game brought massive attention to what eventually became the largest private entertainment site on the internet. Sunsilk hair products gained attention when a YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) video “Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out” went viral. Companies the likes of Halo, Blair Witch Project, Xbox 360, The Ring Movie, Sony, Playstation and FX Networks have all benefited from viral videos.
On effective way to make sure your video draws attention to your web site or brand is to include the site name (and URL) within a video as part of the entertainment. The more integrated the inclusion, the less your video is going to look like an advertising ploy. Of course, you might want to refer to your site or brand more than once, but don’t go overboard. On the other hand some successful viral campaigns, like Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” didn’t mention a web site or brand anywhere; but people knew where the video came from and it attracted massive attention on the web.
Another way to make sure your viral video drives traffic to your site is to include a link close to the video on YouTube and Google Video. This will allow viewers to easily identify the source of the video and find their way to your site.
So once you have all this traffic on your site, what are you going to do with them? Well first off, be sure to encourage visitors to pass your video to friends. Then if at all possible add some means for the video to be emailed or added to a social bookmarking site. If you have built your site on a blog like WordPress, there are plugins to add that functionality to your site for you.
So get out there and start spreading a virus, a video virus that is.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Viral Video Marketing is all about creating videos that induce people to pass them on to others or encourage them to tell others about the video or videos, and is the next phenomenon in internet marketing.
Viral video marketing is a marketing event that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a video marketing message voluntarily.
It is dependent on the word-of-mouth creation system, which lets other people cut through the information, sort it, process it, and then pass on the benefit of their experience.
Viral video marketing is a science because there are ways to scientifically increase your chances of making your video go viral. Viral video marketing is the process of getting instant and immediate popularity and is a super way to build your online brand visibility.
It is often used as a way to promote a site because it’s fairly simple to accomplish when compared to other methods such as direct mail, pay per click ads, or search engine marketing.
The goal of the home based business person is to create viral marketing videos that spread over the web like a virus and create massive amounts of traffic to your website. This is why it’s sometimes compared to a virus.
Viral Video Marketing is a great way to put your face with your product and is a great strategy to get the word out about your product or service. It is the next stage in interactive word of mouth advertising and has the potential to drive a massive amount of targeted traffic to your website.
Viral video marketing is a growing trend in the online marketing industry and is less expensive than the traditional media. The most complicated part of viral video marketing is the creation of the video itself.
Once the viral video is finished and ready to be launched it should be placed on several websites which specialize in online video marketing.
Viral Video Marketing is changing the way we do business because with nearly 70% of home Internet users now surfing using a broadband connection online video viewing has exploded.
There are several factors which determine the success of your viral video with two of the most important being your distribution or placement of the finished product and having an innovative idea for your video to become viral in the first place. Without the innovative idea, of course, distribution becomes a moot point.
Your video can be combined with several other Social Media Marketing techniques to help it go Viral. For example you can share your video on Facebook with your entire list. You can also embed the video on MySpace in the comments section of different pages.
Email the video to your friends to make sure as many people as possible know about it. You can also promote the video on your Blog and perhaps create a build up to it in terms of being a coming attraction.
These techniques in addition to having a unique idea for the video to help it along its viral path and having it distributed by a website specializing in online video marketing should help establish it as Viral in no time at all.
Video Marketing is a relatively unexplored form of Internet Marketing that can be used to rank in the top 10 results for almost any term. Now, video marketing is a driving force within the Social Media online marketing industry.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Wikipedia defines viral marketing as a technique that uses pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in awareness through self-replicating viral processes. Basically it is marketing that appears to work much the same as a cold virus, spreading from person to person explosively.
The best part is that you can take advantage of this marketing technique without expensive software or technological expertise. Here are 6 techniques that will start a viral storm of traffic to your site, if you use them properly.
1.Give away information to your customers and include back links to your site. You can post these books or special reports on ebook directories, give away sites and use JV partners to give to their list. Encourage people to pass the information along to their friends who have an interest in the topic. If your information is accurate and helpful you’ll find many people be passing the book to friends.
2.You can use a Tell-A-Friend script on your site. Essentially you give your customer and visitors a way to easily share your website. Depending upon your market you may find that offering an incentive to tell a friend or two will encourage more traffic. Incentives can be free information that is delivered directly after the tell-a-friend script has been executed. Assure your readers that you do not collect email addresses when they enter their friend’s address. They are not opting their friend into your ezine.
3.Do you get funny video clips from friends and family? This is viral marketing. Although the clip may not be selling anything the concept of passing from person to person is viral. Now, putting your imagination to work, can you create an idea around your niche that would be interesting? Something that would be passed from person to person? All you need is a digital camera. Videos without the professional ‘feel’ lend themselves to authenticity. You only have to look at the popularity of reality TV to realize how much people like ‘peeking’ in on the lives of others.
4.Are you trying to get your information out to your public quickly? You can generate an Internet Press Release to draw in your readers. This is a method that can have far reaching effects when done with creativity and panache. Bring your readers to your page and send them out with a video or ebook to share with their friends.
5.Undercover marketing, done well, can be fun and intriguing. You create a mystery surrounding your niche. There are questions, mystique, a potential for danger and people keep coming back for more. It becomes fun and interesting. Your readers keep coming back for more and sending their friends to figure out the mystery. Yanik Silver has been doing this for sometime with his Underground Marketing Seminar. He doesn’t release the name of several of the speakers, the attendees are undercover agents and the information is highly confidential. The whole event is cloaked in mystery.
6.Social network sites are here to stay. They often evolve around a particular topic. MySpace, the most popular network site, is a general forum where people discuss anything from monkeys to marriage. The information on these sites is searchable. You can easily develop a list of people interested in your topic or niche and release funny exciting information that they are encouraged to pass along to their friends.
7.Buzz marketing is creating a ‘buzz’ about a particular subject, video, website or writing. In 2001 Morgan Westerman discovered a poem in the public domain that he published to the Internet. It was a feel good poem that people started passing from friend to friend. Then the Twin Towers collapsed and people in the U.S. started searching for answers and encouragement. An Interview With God blossomed into a mega-hit. As he realized how much more traffic his site was receiving Mr. Westerman redesigned, added music and graphics. Later he sold screen savers, cards and inspirational books. This was a matter of pure chance. Mr. Westerman did not anticipate 9/11 but he was able to rethink his use of that public domain poem and has created an industry unique unto itself.
These were seven of the low technology techniques you can use to start a viral storm of traffic. They are easy to learn and to develop. Use them to your advantage!
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
Usually the best viral marketing ideas are also the simplest.
Hotmail got where it got to today by offering a free email account and including a brief message at the end of each email that got sent saying “Get your free email account here”. Very simple viral marketing. Very effective as well.
Anything that people actually want to give away works well for viral marketing. Of course, it has to offer value to the person who gets the free item. Generally speaking, nNo-one wants to pass on something that shouts out “I’m an advert”.
Of course, there are exceptions even to this rule. They’re usually exploited by large companies with impressive budgets – Burger King’s subservient chicken advert springs to mind here.
So how do you, the little guy, come up with a great viral marketing idea?
If you’re a video wiz then you could submit a video to YouTube. At least one guy has managed to get his record released this way. Plenty of people have used viral video marketing to promote their sites. Ideally, you need something memorable or funny.
If you’re not up to creating a video, don’t despair. That’s not the only great viral marketing idea you can use.
Audio tracks can also go viral. One site I know of created a set of 6 hypnosis CDs. These were sold with master resell rights. The start and end of their CD mentions their website. You can trip over these CDs all the time on eBay and other sites. Which is very nice viral work on their part – getting other people to distribute their name and website.
Articles like this one can go viral. If you produce a top quality article, other sites will use it and the links at the end of your article will point to your site or product.
Ebooks and reports are also a great way to use viral marketing. They fall into the “added value” area and are quick and easy to produce.
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
To understand viral marketing you need to be familiar with social memetics – the idea of viral marketing is to create a product or advert that encourages the end user and potential customer to also become your promoter.
Like an epidemic, a clever viral advert is passed on from one user to another and so on and so forth. The advert/product is distributed exponentially to an ever-increasing mass audience.
A most notable and unfortunate example of this viral effect happened over two centuries ago with a wave of suicides that swept across Europe – just like an infectious disease.
Interestingly though, the catalyst is strongly suspected to be German author Johann Van Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”; a tragic tale in which unlucky in love hero Werther commits suicide; the resultant actual suicides had many similarities to Werther’s. The thesis is known as social contagion and suggests that opinion and belief can spread like the plague; almost inhibiting the recipients choice on the matter.
This is the potential goldmine that we as marketers sit on; now remove the romantic novel and introduce the internet…
More recently and possibly easier for us to relate to is the “star wars kid” – a short video clip of a student pretending to be a Jedi knight; which has to date had nearly 900 million views – if ever there was need for validation that Google’s $1.6bn spurge on YouTube was no waste of money.
Now the problem is that viral marketing is hard to track, and thus hard to determine what works and what doesn’t. Even 900m views doesn’t necessarily mean a huge boost in sales; it would have been nice if the video maker were selling something.
A commercial example is John Wests Salmon advert – the one where the fisherman fights the bear – You would buy the salmon in the supermarket so there is yet again no way of directly relating any increase in sales back to this hugely popular viral video.
It won’t be too long before technology saves the day here, but for the meantime it’s still a bit hit or miss. Of course it will be neither if you don’t go out nor try for yourself.
Article marketing is probably the easiest and most accessible way of producing something with viral potential so why not start there. The idea is to write a good quality article on your chosen niche and submit to article directories.
Dependant on quality, your article may be picked up by website and/or newsletter owners who will distribute the article for you.
Within the copyright clause you can include a link back to your website and hey presto – your first viral campaign; not to mention you’ll be building backlinks.
If you feel more creative then why not have a look into producing mini video clips for posting on YouTube and Myspace; accrediting a website URL in the title sequence and end credits.
“They” say it’s “The future of entertainment”. Make no mistake viral marketing is very much the future of advertising too; learn as much about it as you can.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
One of the most vital aspects of this recent marketing concept which every business owner should be aware of is that it’s completely free. With the right idea, intuition and planning; viral marketing on social networking websites can return thousands of client prospects to any business website.
Social networking website, as the name suggests, are networks of people and friends who use the Internet to communicate, socialise and share, all through one website. Common websites of this nature are Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and many others.
These websites can be utilized through viral marketing methods; that is the concept of providing marketing material which propagates itself to many other people by giving an incentive for this to occur. For today’s Internet audience this incentive is usually interesting, entertaining and more commonly, not related to the business involved.
This may sound confusing but it’s the system of these networking websites which allows this technique to become effective. For example if a business finds a video which could become popular. If this video is interesting, entertaining or both, it will entice viewers to pass it onto their friends to share it. By adding your website link or marketing message into that video as a footer, or maybe adding your URL to the video description, your business details are being passed wherever the video is sent. This is what makes viral marketing on social networking websites so powerful for businesses of any size.
One important factor must always be taken into account for successful viral marketing and that’s to not flood the media with your material. Journalists, the media and members of the public will value your contributions much more if every one of them has a sense of strong content and a good angle. Distributing viral releases or PR as much as you can will result in people devaluing your presence if the content isn’t worthwhile.
Some websites such as Myspace also offer profiles which can be used to the same effect. Making a profile for your business allows you to add people all over the world as friends, who can see your profile and therefore any marketing message you choose to present. However an interesting, unique angle is often required to make the most effective use of this method. For example using an interesting, make-believe character as the profile owner or offering another, more attention-grabbing incentive for visiting your website.
Should you get professional assistance with social networking campaigns? That’s the question many businesses will ask. Managing director of SCD Marketing Scott Chapman explains:
“One of the great benefits of viral marketing on social networks and anywhere else is that it’s 100% free and can provide fantastic results. Good marketing agencies do have the Public Relations and marketing knowledge to get the right angle for your material, which will result in the most publicity. Whether a person chooses management for their viral campaigns depends on the situation they are in but if the budget is there then I’d certainly recommend looking into it.”
April 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am
With mass communication being achievable with just the click of a mouse, the internet has become the world’s biggest marketplace. That is why most advertisers believe that viral marketing is the most effective way to get customers to buy your product. As Tom Kinnear, executive director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan tells Forbes.com, “It [viral marketing] can be referred to as word-of-mouth on steroids.”
The movie “Snakes on a Plane’ is a good example. While the film didn’t do so hot at the box office it got a huge amount of buzz when people started writing songs and creating videos based on the title. When the media picked up on it, word of mouth for Snakes on a Plane took off like wildfire. This required no effort from the filmmakers after their initial advertising push. That’s the essence of good viral marketing.
You may not have a movie studio or Samuel L. Jackson to help you out but there are ways you can adapt viral marketing to your internet business.
The Fun Page
If you are a serious marketer, and you don’t have enough funding for a major advertisement, this is one of the best techniques that you can use. Make a page on your site with funny or interesting videos or images, or even create a mini-game that is focused on your product. Be sure to include a ‘tell a friend’ link to ensure that your ‘fun page’ gets circulated. Creativity is the key. If your ‘fun’ page is cool enough, you can be sure that you’ll get more hits for to your website.
Kind of Weird
Remember the Subservient Chicken? Burger King created a webpage that contained a ‘video camera’ with a command line below it. On the site, you just typed what you wanted the subservient chicken to do, and voila, the chicken did it. People were born curious. If you have some idea in your head, do it. The Subservient Chicken became so popular that people forwarded the links to their friends, and all Burger King had to do was to maintain the website. The downside is this strategy might create ‘bad’ publicity but as the old saying goes, bad publicity is still publicity.
Email Forward
Create a message with funny pictures or a video, and then send it to your friends or list of subscribers. If it is funny enough, you can be sure that this little message will reach a lot of people. Remember that the images or video should contain at least a brand logo or a website address. The best thing that you can do here is to include your ‘name’ on the video itself, like for example a guy wearing a t-shirt with your brand name on it, or a bunch of funny pictures dealing with your products. Most forwarded e-mails are viral marketing strategies. In this technique, you can always be sure that your e-mails are going to be opened, because they came from the friends of the e-mail owner.
Free is Good
Most people search the internet with ‘free’ as one of their keywords. Free stuff can boost your website’s popularity. There are a lot of items out there that you can give out for free. Creating a downloadable Flash game is one of the most used today. But of course, you should make it interesting, and make the people think that without this free stuff on their desktop, they’re missing out a lot.
Viral marketing may not answer all of your promotional needs, but it will surely help you in creating a buzz. It’s cheap, easy and very effective. What viral marketing does so brilliantly is fuel our irresistible urge to tell somebody about a good experience. It’s hard to find any advertising better than that.
