The New Marketplace
Increase the sales of your website by taking advantage of the Internet’s most powerful marketing strategy “viral marketing”.
Word-of-mouth is the most popular way new patrons discover new websites everyday as they move about the internet marketplace. Effective word-of-mouth marketing, known as “viral marketing,” is one of the internet’s greatest success stories in recent history. Viral marketing takes advantage of a fact of humankind, the basic human need to socialize, intermingle in a network of personal friends and business associates. No matter the size of the social network in beginning, viral marketing is responsible for turning unheard of small start-ups with no marketing budget into rock stars of the online universe. Even the biggest names on the internet continue to use viral marketing as their number one marketing tool.
Msn’s Hotmail grew exponentially simply by having satisfied customers spread the word around the world about their services. By giving away free email service Hotmail was able to have their marketing message attached to every out going email their service provided, one customer talked to two, who talked to four and so on.
Your small business can set up a similar e-mail marketing strategy without a lot of costs or having to climb a steep learning curve with new technology. If you have a small employee pool, you can simply set up an e-mail signature with a marketing message that will automatically be attached to every company e-mail. It is easy and simple to set up this on popular e-mail programs like Eudora and Outlook, look under the “Options” or “Preferences” tab for a signature option. You can take this a step further by having your hosting company or Information Technology department attach a marketing message to all outgoing mail through a process called “mail routing”. With more sophisticated mail routing, you can track the results, but assure that every outbound message will have the same look and consistent feel – and your employees won’t be able to alter that. Full service Internet hosting companies can provide very sophisticated outgoing mail rerouting services that let you place entire graphic commercials in your out-going mail.
The main point of the idea of viral marketing is to utilize the thousands of e-mails a company will send out every day to its most important audience; shareholders, customers, clients, suppliers, journalists or anybody who might be looking for the service or product a company is marketing. These messages get passed on forwarded free of charge about the marketplace, stored for future use… and the company or product branding is prominent in each case and will continue to be so.
Hotmail’s branding message was short and sweet: “Get free e-mail at Hotmail.com” This simple message was attached to hundreds of thousands of people who used their web-based e-mail daily, essentially spreading the message for free around the internet universe. Besides this, Hotmail’s second primary factor leading to their success is that they offered something free: free is the most searched word on the Internet. Everyone wants to receive something for free, give away something and the word will spread like a wildfire, bringing traffic to a site. But most small businesses can’t afford to be giving away to many free products or services, so get creative and offer something free to the first ten customers to buy a product. The point is to increase the amount a customer thinks they are receiving for the same service or product, without actually spending all the company savings.
Start a message board or forum on your site, viral marketing techniques flourish on message boards and chat rooms, where the customers looking for a particular service talk and compare experiences. This is especially true for the under 25 crowd who will want to discover something on their own, but will listen to those who have walked-the-path. Remember how you felt to be the first one to buy the album of that upcoming band? Or hear about the new movie featuring everyone’s favourite actor? The new internet generation hates to be over-marketed to, which is probably why guerrilla marketing works so well.
Think about the types of e-mails that get forwarded across the entire world and back each day, all the pictures, jokes, urban legends, funny movie clips, popular music, great flash animations and much more. E-mail makes it very simple for us to share with family, friends, business associates and the world the message we maybe trying to get across to prospective customers. If your business can somehow attach a marketing message to one of these infectious e-mails, you can create energy about your product, company or service and increase your visibility to potential customers.
One final point to remember before you run out the front door and spread your company’s information through word-of-mouth across the internet universe though. Make sure you pick a memorable domain name that will stick in the potential customers mind, is easy to spell and remember and relates directly to your product, this way people can easily tell others about your product or service.
Once people find your website, it will be the quality of your site’s content that keeps them returning, and continuing to turn word-of-mouth into your number one marketing tool.
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