Viral Marketing: 5 Tips For Spreading an Online Marketing Virus
By Anna Johnson on July 26th, 2010No Internet marketer can create a viral marketing campaign. By definition, you can’t design a marketing campaign to ‘go viral’ since, like a real-life virus, true virility is out of your hands. It depends on the extent to which there are ‘hosts’ spreading your message.
As in real life, however, you can create the conditions likely to maximize the spread of a marketing virus. Here are 5 tips for doing so:
1. Ensure the content of your virus i.e. report, game, video, etc is something your target market is likely to appreciate and share with others.
2. Generate publicity about the content – contact bloggers, journalists, etc and issue a press release.
3. Harness social media by not only Tweeting, posting or issuing updates about your campaign, but also make it easy for your target market to Tweet, post and spread the virus. For example, include social sharing and ‘refer a friend’ buttons along with your content so people need only click a button to disseminate a message about the content to their online social circle.
4. Email your list about the campaign – if you have an email list it goes without saying that you’ll want to let them know about the content of your campaign. Again, include social sharing mechanisms and ‘refer a friend’ functionality to enable email recipients to spread the message.
5. Use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to optimize your campaign for the search engines. This may range from optimizing the URLs and title tags of web pages associated with the campaign, to issuing a search engine optimized press release on an online press release distribution service such as PR Web.
