The most successful and cost-effective strategy to promote your product
With the revolutionary changes in the business scenario and cutting-edge technology in recent times, many marketing techniques have evolved which are cost-efficient and focus mainly on obtaining more attention from the customers. Viral marketing is one such technique, which is trending these days. It is a “Digital Word of Mouth Marketing”. In today’s world, with the advent of digital media, many new marketing possibilities have come up for businesses to spread messages faster and more efficiently like viruses. It is a very productive technique to enhance the organization’s brand name. It helps the consumers to share their experiences about brands, products, and services with the help of social networking sites.
Different types of Viral Marketing
- Incentivized Viral Marketing
It is a type of Viral Marketing technique used by most organizations in which users are offered rewards for either spreading a message along or providing someone else’s address. It is the most powerful way to increase company referrals as people are rewarded for their actions taken.
- Pass along Content
It is the most standard and crudest type of viral marketing used mostly by religious communities and commercial organizations. These types of strategies design a chain letter in the form of messages, placed at the bottom of the email. It encourages the readers to forward the messages to others. It uses short catchy messages and funny video clips that people want to pass along or share with others.
- Edgy Gossip/ Buzz Marketing
This type of marketing generally has ads and messages that generate controversies, thus leading to gossip or topic of discussion. It indirectly helps businesses get the attention of the public.
- Undercover Marketing
It is a Buzz or Stealth Marketing. It is marketing techniques that concentrate on hidden marketing activities. It involves advertising a product to consumers without making them realize that they marketed. The main objective of undercover marketing is not to produce instant sales, but to initiate interest and eagerness that will make consumers more responsive to direct advertising later. Companies generally place their products in movies and television shows, and signs agreement deals with celebrities to promote products. It is the most effective strategy as it creates awareness about a new product that has not been extensively advertised yet.
- User-Managed Database
This is an organized form of viral marketing where an online service provider provides a database through which users create and manage their own lists of contacts. They invite other members to join their communities, thus creating a viral, self-propagating chain of contacts that extends naturally and motivates others to sign up also.
Elements of Viral Marketing
Some Viral Marketing Strategies work better than others do. Below are six elements, which must be included in your viral marketing strategy to make it more effective and get powerful results.
- Gives away valuable products or services
Nowadays companies are figuring the best and most beneficial way to boost sales of their product is to give them away for free. Getting a gift related to the product provoked people to talk about it 20% more than coupons and rebates. People recognize getting something free as a gain while coupons and rebates did not make much difference. Consumers evaluate luxury goods with gifts as a higher quality product and are ready to pay more for the goods on their own. While heavily, discounted goods are considered to be of low value.
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
One of the best ways to enhance customer loyalty is to give people a real feel for the product through plenty of high-quality visuals that include a 360-degree view, with concise and clear instructions, complete descriptions, and details. Create digital instructions videos for your product. The messages for communication purposes should transfer easily without any degradation. All these initiatives can make the customer experience as hassle-free as possible and can increase the percentage of pass-along rate from person to person.
3. Scales easily from small to very large
In order to make your viral campaign more successful, the media you choose to use for your viral marketing must be scalable and it should include both small and large campaigns. This will help you spread your company’s message more effectively with more variety of options to your audience.
4. Exploit common motivations and behaviors
Everyone wants to feel important, loved, popular, and understood. This greed will drive people to communicate with more and more people thus generating web traffic. The marketing strategy designed which draws upon these common motivations and behaviors is a definite plus for raising the viral marketing campaign.
5. Utilize every possible communication networks
With the advancement in internet technology, social networking sites are gaining popularity and consider the most successful way to make your company brand reach millions of people with just the click of a button. It will yield more visitors quickly and will develop a strong network of relationships.
6. Take advantage of other resources
It is essential to use other resources to get the word out to make your viral marketing campaign on the top. Posting free articles and blogs, and placing text or graphic links on other websites will make them seen by hundreds of thousands of readers thus creating exponential growth in your message communications and forming a superior strategy to pitch your products with less effort and costs than those required by the traditional marketing techniques.
Viral Marketing tactics that work
Here are key Viral marketing tactics that have worked before, and will work for you.
- Think outside of traditional Marketing
In today’s digital world, traditional marketing has taken a backseat as more and more companies are trying to develop innovative methods to place their product in front of their target audience. This type of modern business marketing plan generates a lot more consumer attention. These days’ people want interaction and social media permit interaction and have a global reach where everyone can see how well you retort to customers. Traditional marketing has very less or no interaction with your customers.
2. Bring your marketing into the real world
In this age of the digital era, real-world consumers desire to have products and services that suit their needs, with a relevant and hassle-free buying experience. Brands should keep each person’s need and buying process in mind in order to engage these consumers. With the origin of social media, there is a continuous bombardment of emails, messages, blog posts, etc. Marketers need to plan their activities according to a person’s interests and behavior and offer tailored and seamless messages and content to drive optimal results for their business.
3. Take your product to extremes
Consumers want a very durable and reliable product. Taking your product to extreme testing will figure out the problems the product. It will create awareness about how to deal with system failures and protect users. You can have an idea of the expected life of your product. The main purpose of all of this is to build and deliver useful products that people want to buy and it should contribute to profits somewhere in the company.
4. Team up with unlikely Partners
When two unlikely partners teamed up, they can leverage each other resources, skills, and abilities, which leads to the increased value of products and services. A robust partnership allows the business to expand and hold each other responsible and explore business avenues much more than they could have achieved alone. Collaborating with a corporation offered increased visibility of their brand and services.
5. There should be a brand message in the content
To succeed in today’s digital world, marketers rely on written and visual content to educate, entertain, inform and cater to the needs of their target audience. Well-developed content has become an important marketing tool to convey a company’s brand message that attracts the right customers to your business.
6. Go for the emotional connect
It is desirable to connect with people on an emotional level to establish a network of relationships for personal as well as professional growth. When you share your personal narratives and show your emotions you build a profound and lasting impact on a product’s relationship and lay the foundation of strength, trust, and security with its audience. It enhances your brand’s marketing communication skills as you learn how to communicate and reciprocate with each other. Personal bonding with the brands is an essential aspect from an emotional, as well as a practical perspective as 50% of an audience’s belief about a product-driven by emotion. Listening is an important factor to connect with customers as it builds trust with customers. Try to use their language while marketing the product, which implies that we have listened, heard, and is ready to respond to them.
7. Video Marketing
A video is an effective tool for improving website traffic and keeping visitors engaged on a site longer. A brand uses video marketing to promote its products on social media and other content platforms to win sales and educate users and 76 percent of marketers say that it works. Video is more compelling than email campaigns and digital ads as it allows brands to tell a better story and viewers can explore each product more through the links given. Video has more power than is convincing to show and pitch products and convert visitors into leads.
A successful Viral marketing campaign must use alternative marketing tactics that are genuine, community-driven, authentic, and transparent. Focus on innovative techniques, provide necessary tools, and involve consumers in the brand conversation.
